CompuServe Messages

Why do I say this? I just spent a whole day getting AmiTCP–which, incidentally, is still not working completely right–and AMosaic set up, and I'm halfway wondering whether it was worth the effort. But while AmiTCP shouldn't be such a pain, that's not the Web's problem. The problem with the Web is that it's SLOW!!! Slow as molasses! And that's an insult to molasses! Connecting to hosts takes forever, during which eternity I'm just sitting at my computer basically doing nothing, because AMosaic's use of the ZGIF datatype chews up extraordinary amounts of chip RAM–so much that I basically can use no other apps. Then the connection will *finally* be made, seemingly after I've died and been reborn as an insect a few times, and whatever in-line graphic I've requested or page I've moved to will be sent to my Amiga–a process that can also, mysteriously, take forever and a day. Why mysteriously? Because I've selected the delayed loading of inline images, so all that's coming is text and some markups. But the little transmission status bar will freeze at various times during transmission, then restart, then freeze, then restart, then wait for no apparent reason at what seems to be the end of transmission before displaying the page or inlined graphic that I selected. The same goes for ftp–transfer rates aren't particularly fast as far as I can tell, though there's only that little graphic status bar to give me any indication of what's going on, and transmission periodically pauses. I suppose that when I register PPP I'll get some performance increase, but I assume that will only affect performance *when something's actually being transferred*, not during those annoying pauses. And then there's another problem–once I decide to look at a graphic or move to another page or whatever, there's no way to abort if the request is taking too long to process! Once I let a request go for awhile just to see how long it could take, and it was over an hour before the darn thing went through! Also, why don't Web pages indicate how large a graphic is? Ftp files have their sizes listed, so why shouldn't in-lined graphics? It's plain foolish! I tried downloading a page to local disk, and sometime after the transmission of the page appeared to have concluded, a save requester popped up, but upon clicking Save my computer crashed! In fact, as Steve warned me, I crashed a dozen times today alone, although I was on the Web for several hours, checking it to the extent that I could. At least the seperately available AMHotlist program works as advertised, and that saves a lot of time, but for any of you who have read my rant this far I *highly* recommend that you set the default start page of AMosaic to some local html document on your own computer–that way you avoid all the time and connect charges that are otherwise wasted while AMosaic waits for its connection request to the AMosaic home page, or whatever, to be processed. Then I tried telnet-ing to Compuserve, just to see how it worked–and performance is *beyond* awful!! I hit a key, and some seconds later the letter appeared on screen. Backspace did not work. Is this an artifact of telnet-ing to compuserve.com from compuserve.com? There's another phenomenally annoying feature of the Web–the display of each in-lined graphic is processed as a *seperate request* even if I don't have the display of inlined images delayed!!! Why is this!!? Why can't the whole page be transmitted at once? This would almost make it worthwhile to get inlined images without delay, because each seperate request can take seconds, minutes, or, apparently, hours, to process!!!! Is this just the way AMosaic works, or is every single Web surfer stuck with this assinine limitation? And there's often little or no indication of what a particular in-lined image is, so there's hardly ever a way to tell whether it's worth getting. A couple times they're essential, and some are utilitarian enough but could easily be replaced by text, but mostly they're frivolous at best, and more likely ill-conceived! Now I'm sure there's plenty of really good stuff out there on the Web. I already did some ftp-ing, and that's useful enough by itself. But the cost to figure out where there's good stuff is staggering! And the net just doesn't seem to be even close to up to the demands placed on it. As I mentioned I visited several places that had ENORMOUS waits, caused I assume by high demand, but even a request to connect to the AMosaic home page took a very long time most times, and I can't imagin there are all that many people going there, at least compared to the overall net traffic. Why is this? I'm sure there are more preposterous things that I didn't notice, or that I did and forgot by now–I was continually amazed at how poor the interface really is. The single worst thing is that you can't abort a request that's taking too long, but it's closely followed by the processing of in-lined images as individual requests. Now I don't know which of these problems are due to the nature of the net, which to AMosaic, which to the Amiga, and so on. Certainly the chip RAM thing is Amiga specific, and it's ridiculous–I have a RetinaZ3, and even when Cybergraphics supports its blitter the darn datatype is still going to suck up chip RAM, although hopefully then I'll have much more to spare. And I don't know much about the internet and tcp/ip and so on, so I'm sure some of the terms I used in this post are wrong. But regardless, I's *really* appreciate any explanations anyone might have–and any tips to improve things. AMosaic itself seems to perform mostly very well when it's working. When there are no outstanding connection requests, my 1024x768x256 AMosaic screen will scroll basically in real time. But real time, a term which I've seen bandied about plenty of times in describing the Web–"a real time kiosk", etc–most definitely does *NOT* describe the Web. Also, could anyone tip me as to where to find Archie and Veronica and gopher and so on for use from my Amiga? I'd understood that most internet service providers have them on their machines, and you run them remotely, but is that true for CIS Internet access? The Web is nice enough in some ways–if it would only SPEED UP!!! and if AMosaic would only allow me to cancel requests if they're taking too long–but I'm sure that text-only interfaces are a lot faster. Well, that's the end of my rant for now. TIA Mr. Zombie