I wasn't arguing against the merits of your email scheme (though more on that later).. I was arguing that you missed the point of what Ross was saying. His argument was that polling is not a viable option for decentralised messaging. And he's right. Its not that it takes a enormous time to poll a machine using TCP/IP, its that you can't have every medical service enumerating through every medical service on the internet looking for results.. to say it doesn't scale well is an understatement..
As a replacement you've suggested that we look to email as a perfect example of decentralised messaging.. which it is, except it has nothing to do with polling. The only reason your system works is that you've punted the endpoint of communication up to your ISP (or whoever runs your mail server) and you poll that... but your mail server certainly isn't sitting their polling other machines on the internet for emails, it sits their waiting for them to push emails onto it.. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with your proposed system - its just that it only works because the main bit of it doesn't involve polling (as per Ross' point) Andrew _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
