Re: attatched photos

On Sep 3, 2007, at 2:10 PM, Ellis Cory wrote:

> Katharine wrote........but my brand new mail program (the Mac Mail
> program that came with my G5) takes
> 15-20 minutes to download the smallest attachment to a mail
> message. I don't know why it is, but that's how it is.......
>
> I am sorry to hear that, all my friends with Macs gloat over how
> good they are !!! maybe you need to ask a 9 year old to put it
> right for you LOL

Why ask a question if you're going to be rude to the people who
answer? It will only ensure that no one will ever answer a question
from you again.

I don't know how old you are; I assume you're young, since IME it's
usually very young (or very immature) people who make these kinds of
derisive comments toward their fellows. If you're young, it's
entirely possible I was using computers before you were born. I
started out programming on mainframes using the Cobol, Pascal and C
languages. Then when the first personal computers were developed, I
wrote a program in BASIC for one of the early personal computers to
run a lab in a hospital that collected physiological measurements
from patients automatically and did statistical analyses on them.
This is routine now, but 25 years ago it was all new. I also set up
a program for a large school district whereby individual teachers
entered data on Apple II-e's, sent the floppies in to me and I
uploaded them into a database that I streamed to a mainframe and did
statistical analysis on there. When Macs were introduced (1984 or
1985?) I kept all the databases for the school district (with 50,000
students) and did all the statistical analyses on a Mac SE with 1 MB
of RAM, and what's amazing is that I could keep open on my desktop at
the same time, an Excel spreadsheet with the database I was working
with AND the statistical program that I was using for the analyses,
AND the Word program I was using to write the report. In those days
they really knew how to write an elegant and lean program, that could
run on tiny amounts of RAM. I've never been without a Mac since, and
your friends are right; it's a good machine.

My point was that in my experience, the older the program, the leaner
and more efficient, the faster and more elegant. The newer the
program, the more disk space it takes up, the more bloated, the more
RAM it uses, the slower it runs, the less elegantly it is designed.
So I'm not at all surprised that my new mail program takes longer to
download mail than the one I had before that was more than ten years
old (I liked it so well that I transferred it from Mac to Mac over
the years, but finally it wouldn't run on system X.)

The original question here was whether the mailing list should bow
out in deference to a web forum, f295. The consensus seemed to be
that there are enough people who like the mailing list that the two
can coexist. Those who like the web format can use f295, those who
prefer the mailing list will keep on with the mailing list, some
people will continue with both. You've chosen to say you want to
keep the mailing list, but you want the mailing list to operate like
a web forum. No, not like a web forum, because with a web forum you
can choose whether and when to go there, and which pictures you want
to look at, but with a mailing list, you'd have to download whatever
pictures came in at the time they come in. This would be crazy. If
you like the web format and not the mailing list format, subscribe to
the web forum but not the mailing list forum. It's simple.

The question of whether my machine is infected with something is an
interesting question, but I doubt it, unless it came from the factory
infected, because the slow downloading even of a simple text message
has been constant from the day I got it out of the box, and as I say,
that's been my experience of "progress" in computer programming. At
any rate, I like the mailing list format and if it changes to accept
attached photos, I would not continue to subscribe.

Katharine Thayer
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Received on Thu Sep 6 04:22:51 2007