Comment by eru
4 days ago
> I don't know, I think you're conflating content streaming with central compute.
Would you classify eg gmail as 'content streaming'?
4 days ago
> I don't know, I think you're conflating content streaming with central compute.
Would you classify eg gmail as 'content streaming'?
But gmail is also a relatively complicated app, much of which runs locally on the client device.
It is true that browsers do much more computation than "dumb" terminals, but there are still non-trivial parallels. Terminals do contain a processor and memory in order to handle settings menus, handle keyboard input and convert incoming sequences into a character array that is then displayed on the screen. A terminal is mostly useless without something attached to the other side, but not _completely_ useless. You can browse the menus, enable local echo, and use device as something like a scratchpad. I once drew up a schematic as ascii art this way. The contents are ephemeral and you have to take a photo of the screen or something in order to retain the data.
Web browsers aren't quite that useless with no internet connection, some sites do offer offline capabilities (for example gmail). but even then, the vast majority of offline experiences exist to tide the user over until network can be re-established, instead of truly offering something useful to do locally. Probably the only mainstream counter-examples would be games.
It's still a SAAS, with components that couldn't be replicated client-side, such as AI.
Google's own Gemma models are runnable locally on a Pixel 9 Max so some lev of AI is replicatable client side. As far as Gmail running locally, it wouldn't be impossible for Gmail to be locally hosted and hit a local cache which syncs with a server only periodically over IMAP/JMAP/whatever if Google actually wanted to do it.
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Right. But does it matter whether computation happens on the client or server? Probabaly on both in the end.
But yes I am looking forward to having my own LMS on my PC which only I have access to.
Well, app code is streamed, content is streamed. The app code is run locally. Content is pulled periodically.
The mail server is the mail server even for Outlook.
Outlook gives you a way to look through email offline. Gmail apps and even Gmail in Chrome have an offline mode that let you look through email.
It's not easy to call it fully offline, nor a dumb terminal.
Oh, GMail is definitely a cloud offering---even if they have some offline functionality.
I was just probing the 'content _streaming_' term. As you demonstrate, you'd have to squint really hard to describe GMail as content streaming.
'Offline' vs 'content streaming' is a false dichotomy. There's more different types of products and services.
(Which reminds me a bit of crypto-folks calling everything software that's not in crypto "web2", as if working on stodgy backends in a bank or making Nintendo Switch games has anything to do with the web at all.)
Ok sure but there's plenty of simple video streaming in total screen time, which was the context I was replying to. I never claimed it was a dichotomy, simply a large part of screen time that clearly skews the analysis.
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