Rip tapcis

[John O'Shaughnessy [FCM]]

Look what I found!

[Mase Taylor]

Wow. I used wincim.

[Russell Holton]

I don't recall if I ever played with Wincim. I did try out DOSCim and most thought it was a way to get us to spend more time on-line.

[Scott Dyer HPN/NY]

Wow. I used wincim.

I used that for a few weeks, until I got involved with TapCIS. IIRC, wincim was pretty much heavy on the connect time.

[Russell Holton]

IIRC, the downside of TapCIS is that it was (gasp) payware.

[Ray Tackett]

I must have been the only one using CISComm. I didn't use TapCIS until Bob Dubner's version.

[Stephanie Belser]

IIRC, the downside of TapCIS is that it was (gasp) payware.

Back in the day, when Compuserve was known as CI$ and it cost $6/hr to do crap at 300 baud, TAPCIS cost $79 and it paid for itself in connectivity savings in a month or so. Somewhere I have a stash of 1.44 program floppies; I'll check to see if I still have it.

[Bruce Gorrell]

Wow. I used wincim.

Me too

[Robert Dubner]

I knew a woman, once upon a long time ago. Got her set up with TapCIS. She never could figure it out. Constantly found herself going up dead ends, getting confused and frustrated. So I worked with her to install WinCIM. She took to it like a duck to water.

Go figure. Just goes to show: Different strokes for different folks. Always true.

This alternative access thing I've given up on... I may give up on giving up on it. I simply can't *stand* the web access. It so obviously was designed and developed by people who spend all day poking around on the Web and think that I have nothing to do all day except poke around inside their application.

And I have other things to do.

I guess I'll see if I can come up with something minimal that serves my particular needs, which mainly is hard list of messages that I haven't seen before. I don't need to minimize connect time; I have no need to select threads, or flag them as permanently uninteresting, I don't need need clever navigation, I don't need to be able to skip threads or sections, I don't need to be able to do much of anything except quickly blip through messages. Emphasis on quickly.

Humana, humana. Because I really don't like the web interface for this. Never have. Still don't. It's the wrong tool for the job.

[Ward Miller]

Amen, Bob! My time is limited, as are my needs.

[Larry sreyoB]

Bob,

Do you not visit other web forums? I visit nine forums daily, and a few more occasionally, so I've been using this, ans similar, formats for many years.

[Robert Dubner]

Larry,

I don't visit any other forums. Most of my time on-line is reading newspapers, or Wikipedia, or other sites that are more information dense. When I'm on the Web, I almost always end up downloading PDF files and spending some time absorbing them. My experience with forums is that the signal-to-noise ratio is low.

AVSIG is a special case for me; I've got friends here that I've known for thirty years. I don't want to give that up.

Maybe I'm too hidebound. Your testimony suggests that if I spent some time with Web interfaces, I'd figure out how to manage them. But, dang it, your message to me was 159 bytes. The Web page that contained it was 122,199 bytes. As a user, I dislike wading through all that extraneous information. As an engineer, I'm offended. That's a payload of about 0.13%

The smart move is to acknowledge that King Canuck was right: There will be other costs to me if I continue to struggle against the tide.

[Ralph Jones]

Canute...;-)

[Mike Overly]

Larry,

I don't visit any other forums. Most of my time on-line is reading newspapers, or Wikipedia, or other sites that are more information dense. When I'm on the Web, I almost always end up downloading PDF files and spending some time absorbing them. My experience with forums is that the signal-to-noise ratio is low.

AVSIG is a special case for me; I've got friends here that I've known for thirty years. I don't want to give that up.

Maybe I'm too hidebound. Your testimony suggests that if I spent some time with Web interfaces, I'd figure out how to manage them. But, dang it, your message to me was 159 bytes. The Web page that contained it was 122,199 bytes. As a user, I dislike wading through all that extraneous information. As an engineer, I'm offended. That's a payload of about 0.13%

The smart move is to acknowledge that King Canuck was right: There will be other costs to me if I continue to struggle against the tide.

Future generations will read the fable of you and Larry:

A man who has read the entire internet will walk into a bar and meet a man who has expertly absorbed just the subjects that mattered to him using every resource available to him. They will get into a $50 bet over some silliness about zyzzyvas, but there will be no immediate resolution because the bar will be a cellular dead zone with no wifi, and no one else there, drunk or sober, will have any idea what a zyzzyva is.

The Cleveland Browns will be up on the big screen, however, and their football talents will periodically be interrupted by black and white ads of Jennifer Aniston pouring a colorized bottle of Smartwater at a dinner party while making eye contact with some entity out of the camera shot … and failing to position the about-to-be-poured Smartwater bottle near any glass at the table.

The guy who represents Larry and the guy who represents you will forget all about all the world’s knowledge and zyzzyvas and spend the rest of the afternoon drinking while the Browns go down 42-3.

(This fable needs a lot of work. I think fables are supposed to have morals. And not have Jennifer Aniston. But I am curious how many bytes this thing ate up in html).

[Scott Dyer HPN/NY]

Emphasis on quickly.

Bob -- This morning, using the process that Russell outlined the other day, I was on Avsig for 3 mins. total time to read the messages since sometime last evening. And write a response or two. For me, anyway, that's plenty quick. Yes, TapCIS could have reduced it by a minute I guess but being a retired guy I'm not so closely scheduled any more.