[lug] The deal with applets / notifications / panels / indicators / systray.....

[Davide Del Vento]

> Why doesn't the star
> show up in the first browser.  Even if you hit the refresh in the
> Gmail app

I'll bet you know, but for folks who don't, that's because gmail does
not use a single server to serve your account. In fact, it uses
hundreds, possibly thousands (or even more) of servers located
everywhere worldwide. So there is a inherent latency (by design, I
believe they call it "eventual coherence") in the way those servers
synchronize. They need those numbers of servers, since a single one
won't scale to the number of users they have. They need that high
latency, because the resources (bandwidth, cpu time, etc) needed to
synch with a  smaller latency would be prohibitive, if not impossible.

If you think this is a problem, you might even design a system that
would solve this problem, at the expense of something else (for
example: your phone and laptop would be always up-to-date, but you
accept much slower or not-up-to-date connections when you go oversea
or use a friend's machine).

Now, why this should matter for proteus/slipstream, I don't know :-)
Proteus and slipstream do not aim to solve this "problem" and would
work fine in the with the same "eventual coherence" that gmail has. Or
Bruce could code a "solution" like the one mentioned above.

Bye,
Davide