Gmail goes offline with Google Gears • Hacker News Board

Re: Gmail goes offline with Google Gears

#51

Post by mhartl » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 8:26 PM UTC

icey wrote: post #27

mhartl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One error is a nit, but five in one article title? That's just sloppy. Proper punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are de rigueur here at Hacker News, and as one of its more wizened denizens I was doing my part to enforce the local culture. (It was also an implicit message to the editors to fix it---which they did.) N.B. This is a record number of downmods for me (five as of this writing), and I find it alarming…

I'm sorry, but it isn't "de rigueur" here to play grammar and spelling nazi to headlines. Yes, people who post while abiding by the standard rules of English are generally better regarded here than people who do not. If you really feel you must point out the failings of someone's grammar or capitalization, then perhaps you should find another avenue to point it out than overplayed vim-isms. Palish has set a good exam…

Ordinarily, I'm careful about how I give feedback, especially in sensitive situations. This didn't seem like one of those times, so I opted for brevity instead of subtlety.

Given the reaction, it appears that I misjudged. Your comments are particularly notable; you are also one of the more experienced inhabitants of these parts, and I take your feedback seriously. There are aspects of the tone that give me pause (the parent comment strikes me as somewhat supercilious), but the content is much appreciated, and I'll be more circumspect in the future.

Re: Gmail goes offline with Google Gears

#52

Post by mhartl » Wed, Jan 28, 2009, 8:37 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #41

mooism2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to nitpick over something, nitpick over the link being to the front page of the blog, not to the blog post. (Maybe by the time people reading this tomorrow follow the link, Google will have posted something else.)

And get your nickpick right! It should be "s/gmail/Gmail/" with a trailing slash.

You need the trailing slash when using sed at the command line, but it's optional when doing a replacement in vi(m). You're right, though; the version with the trailing slash is probably the canonical form.

Re: Gmail goes offline with Google Gears

#53

Post by peregrine » Thu, Jan 29, 2009, 4:13 AM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #46

peregrine wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You understood my point :) But gmail vastly outnumbers docs and reader in both security and scale. Thousands of emails and contacts with personal information. Docs and Reader doesn't need to store the contacts or emails of the user. Docs stores data and reader stores stores. You can understand the security complications.

While I agree with you about Reader, I doubt the security implications for Gmail are much more severe than for Docs, because so many businesses are using Docs through Google Apps, and you know they're storing sensitive info on there. One breach and it's over.

Well I doubt the enterprise service is available with ofline quite yet.

Re: Gmail goes offline with Google Gears

#54

Post by eggnet » Thu, Jan 29, 2009, 7:33 AM UTC

litewulf wrote: post #10

peregrine wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to release gears to a application like reader or docs is easy cause your userbase is small. Gmail is a HUGE product with thousands of users and to even release something like that to labs you need complete protection of not only the data but also security for your DBs. Reader and Docs were simply there to ensure the safety, if they went down due to security issues not that many people would be concerned.

Also, I think with Gmail its a bit harder to decide how much to store on your local drive. I believe Reader just stores your unread stuff, but with email you often want to search or reference old messages, so its a substantially more complicated thing to deal with UI-wise.

I just tried that with Reader. I have no unread items but gears wanted to download 2000 items and it took a while.

Then, I switched back to online mode, works as you expect.

Switched back to offline mode, and it wants to download 2000 items again.

I decided offline mode for reader wasn't very good.

Re: Gmail goes offline with Google Gears

#55

Post by srw » Fri, Jan 30, 2009, 1:23 AM UTC

sarvesh wrote: post #39

srw wrote: post #38

Amazing! If only Knuth could appreciate this progress in computer science and software engineering! May be in volume 7 he can write about Web Browsers, DOM and AJAX… he can even drop its MMIX and rewrote all his books using Javascript, the real assembler of the Web! That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

Knuth doesn't write about a particular programming language for one and what relevance does it have to this story here? What Knuth has written is relevant to programming in general. He has reasons for using MMIX http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/mmix.html . Really you should try reading at least a few chapters from his book.

It's called irony.

Everybody is talking about an offline version of gmail, as if such thing is a progress... I had being using offline mailers from the old Internet times.

And about reading a few chapters from his book... don't make me cry, my life was spent on computer science research and I don't need to show any "credential" to you.