everything seams a bit much. There are so many things you just could not do at all in 1983, like HD videos or 3D engines or even rendering Mandelbrot fractals
Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
41–50 of 349 posts
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#42This! I once took over programming a point of sale system that our (internal to the company) users were complaining about. Turns out there was no concept of tab sequence, you had to use the mouse for everything. I asked the previous programmer to show me how to use the form he created, and he started typing a phone number using the top row of the keyboard instead of the numpad. But hey, it had lots of javascript!
I've always found it easier to type long strings of numbers on the number pad. I don't know why, it's not as though I ever deliberately trained myself to use it, but for me the number pad is much faster than using the top row.
Everything is much closer together, you don't have to move your hand only your fingers. It is clearly the better input device for pure digit sequences.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#43This! I once took over programming a point of sale system that our (internal to the company) users were complaining about. Turns out there was no concept of tab sequence, you had to use the mouse for everything. I asked the previous programmer to show me how to use the form he created, and he started typing a phone number using the top row of the keyboard instead of the numpad. But hey, it had lots of javascript!
I don't get your point about typing phone numbers. When I was being taught to touch-type in first and second grade, my teachers told me that I should type on the top row, not the numeric keypad. Not sure why. Maybe because it takes less time to move to the top row and back? Anyway, to me, typing numbers on the top row is not an obvious problem.
It depends on the length of the number you're typing and the context.
In PoS, you're not likely to be typing many letters most of the time, so left hand for function keys, right hand for numbers is pretty good. You can move your hands if you move to a search.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#44This! I once took over programming a point of sale system that our (internal to the company) users were complaining about. Turns out there was no concept of tab sequence, you had to use the mouse for everything. I asked the previous programmer to show me how to use the form he created, and he started typing a phone number using the top row of the keyboard instead of the numpad. But hey, it had lots of javascript!
To be fair, I only started using the numpad after I had a temp job in data entry. I hate laptops that don't have them now, but seeing as a lot of laptops cut them off, most people can't think num pads are that important. Not paying attention to tab order in an enterprise app is a cardinal sin though.
When we bought MacBooks I bought a bunch of USB numeric keypads to plug in to their desktop monitor. Made a lot of folks doing data entry very happy.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get your point about typing phone numbers. When I was being taught to touch-type in first and second grade, my teachers told me that I should type on the top row, not the numeric keypad. Not sure why. Maybe because it takes less time to move to the top row and back? Anyway, to me, typing numbers on the top row is not an obvious problem.
I mentioned that because I thought it showed how he'd never really watched one of the users in their job- once you get used to the numpad it's a lot faster. You can type in a long number very quickly without taking your eyes off the screen.
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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#46I wonder how much of this is a result of UI designers deliberately putting tiny delays/animations into their UIs to make them more "usable"? For example, it was a common piece of advice that if clicking a button opens up a dialog box, there should be a brief animation showing the box expanding from the direction of the button, so the user would associate the clicking of the button with the appearance of the box and u…
Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.
!!!!!
That is a amazing!!! I had no idea developer meant "interested user".
> Make sure developer options are enabled. If they're not, go to Settings > About phone, then tap on Build number several times to enable it
> Go to Settings > Developer options, and scroll down to Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale.
> Tap on each of the animation options and turn them off.
https://lifehacker.com/disable-animations-on-android-to-impr...
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#47Given the speed of modern computers, I'm fascinated by the fact that so many processes complete in human-scale time (seconds-minutes), rather than milliseconds or years+, depending on problem complexity. If times for compute tasks have some power law distribution (a big if...), I'd expect a very small part of that distribution to overlap with the 'seconds' range. Then again, computers do so many things in the millise…
It's pretty much an availability heuristic / complexity (or cost) constraint.
If the operation cannot be done quickly -- in a few seconds at most for reasonably interactive work, in a few minutes to, perhaps, a few days for batch -- then it's very, very very rarely done.
It it occurs in less than about 1/10 second, there's not much incentive to try to speed it up, and inefficiencies that bump process time up to even a few seconds tend to creep in. That despite the fact that there are psychologically and outcomes-measurable differences between interfaces with even 1/10s vs. 1/1000s delays or responses.
The Jevons Paradox plays into this, balancing against Gresham's. Stuff that's cheap (clock time) happens, stuff that's non-discernable (under perceptible / outcomes limits) tends not to get constrained.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#48Given the speed of modern computers, I'm fascinated by the fact that so many processes complete in human-scale time (seconds-minutes), rather than milliseconds or years+, depending on problem complexity. If times for compute tasks have some power law distribution (a big if...), I'd expect a very small part of that distribution to overlap with the 'seconds' range. Then again, computers do so many things in the millise…
It's a relief to do a bit of Go from time to time, render a complete html template in 40 ms (with almost 2 MB of JSON data) instead of spending forever figuring out the JS framework du jour to do the same thing, only with it feeling a lot more involved, heavyweight, and slow - even if said framework claims to be faster than all the other JS frameworks. I think I want to do back-end or terminal-based interfaces again.…
I've had a similar experience on a current project.
Even after disabling any and all caching and minification (read: basically parsing all templates per request, a bit like PHP), the entire render process take less than 20ms of time to the point that I've simply left out caching during some production runs.
I also keep the interface free of any expensive rendering precisely because I don't really need all of the niceties of JS frameworks.
Surely, the page could be more fancy but vanilla HTML5/CSS3/JS can do the job too. (And document.querySelector has replaced jQuery for me)
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#49This! I once took over programming a point of sale system that our (internal to the company) users were complaining about. Turns out there was no concept of tab sequence, you had to use the mouse for everything. I asked the previous programmer to show me how to use the form he created, and he started typing a phone number using the top row of the keyboard instead of the numpad. But hey, it had lots of javascript!
To be fair, I only started using the numpad after I had a temp job in data entry. I hate laptops that don't have them now, but seeing as a lot of laptops cut them off, most people can't think num pads are that important. Not paying attention to tab order in an enterprise app is a cardinal sin though.
Not paying attention to tab order is also bad for accessibility, e.g. for blind users.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983
#50The web feels slower than it was 10 years ago too. It's fascinating how we tend to over-engineer and bloat things.
The web is hundreds of times more feature-rich than 10 years ago too though. But, sites like HN are some of the few that are still built like they were 10 years ago. The rest all adds rich JS frameworks (for supposed faster interaction after the first load), a few billion social links, ads, cookie banners, "sign up for our newsletter" or "pay our subscription pls" popups when you first land on them, rich fonts, anima…
I'll add another thing to your list - segment! It's so weird to me to see a homepage load, look into my dev tools and find that my browser is talking to Facebook.