Re: Don't waste time on offline newsreaders...

[Michael Alan Dorman <mdorman boxster law miami edu>]

Gianluca Montecchi <gm518464@silab.dsi.unimi.it> writes:
> True. But perhaps (in my opinion) write a front-end for this (or for
> skim etc. etc.) is a good idea.  I prefer a single program to read
> the mail, a program to read the news and so on.  Another idea can be
> to have a single program with two or more window to read the news,
> read the mail, etc.

But that model gains you *nothing*, and has two easy-to-discern costs:

1) You end up with a fat client, and everyone who wants to use the
software in another way must carry the burden of your reading habits.

2) It's not an efficient use of net resources for the same reason
Netscape's cache is when compared to squid---it means each person
using a machine must downloading a copy of gnu.emacs.bugs instead of
using a shared cached copy.  Disks are cheap, but bandwidth rarely is.

Mike.
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