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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#71

Post by dkersten »

mwcampbell wrote: post #12
fallingfrog wrote: post #3

This! 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.

> Maybe because it takes less time to move to the top row and back?

Presumably this is it. I find typing on numpad is much faster and simpler, but 1) laptops typically don't have one and 2) on normal keyboards it takes my hands away from the main keyboard. Then I switched to a Kinesis Advantage2 and now the numpad is integrated into the main keyboard, using a foot pedal to toggle between main keys and integrated keys.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#72

Post by samstave »

megaman22 wrote: post #7

Was originally a tweet-storm -> https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 , if anyone is confused by the stream-of-consciousness style. It is frustrating that I've got a machine on my desk more powerful than supercomputers a generation ago, and it locks up and can't refresh the screen as fast as my relatively slow typing on a regular basis...

Yeah, but now you can buy an SGI onyx or some other model of cray and turn them into a super-computing-kegerator

When we built out Lucas arts presidio complex, ILM had several of these husks of rendering past on the loading dock waiting for the scrap heap.

I still regret to this day I didn’t take one.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#73

Post by jgh »

pjc50 wrote: post #68
jgh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Google Maps became completely awful when they made that new version of it, and they've been doing everything in their power to continue making it worse. Sure the scrolling is a lot smoother, but it's missing just a ton of features that the old version had. Plus the problems mentioned in the tweet storm, everything disappearing as soon as you change one item. PLUS that stupid side-bar that takes up half the screen…

I suspect most of gmaps' problems are there because it's an advertising company. They don't want you to plan a route, they want you to click on local search ads: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3246303?hl=en Note that if they clear your pins so you have to re-search for something, that's potentially another CPC payment to them... You can sign into multiple Gmail accounts ? How on earth does that work, does…

I'm not really sure how it works under the hood, not being terribly familiar with how these login systems work, but you can basically (in your browser) click "add an account" and it will open a new tab and you can sign into the account. So right now I have 3 tabs open for gmail with 3 different accounts.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#74

Post by sp332 »

samstave wrote: post #67
megaman22 wrote: post #7

Was originally a tweet-storm -> https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 , if anyone is confused by the stream-of-consciousness style. It is frustrating that I've got a machine on my desk more powerful than supercomputers a generation ago, and it locks up and can't refresh the screen as fast as my relatively slow typing on a regular basis...

I’m constantly stunned by the fact that chrome basically allocated a gig of men to each open tab... Can anyone eli5 why this is? I typically have thirty tabs open at any given time.

Are you counting shared memory multiple times? Try hitting shift-esc in Chrome and checking the memory usage there. My heaviest tab (Gmail) is only around 250M.

Edit: I mean most computers don't even have 30 GB of RAM, but if you do there's an easy way to check. Open a bunch of tabs and note your system's total RAM usage. Then close Chrome and see how much gets freed up. If it's 30GB then you have a problem :)

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#75

Post by bramjans »

kgwxd wrote: post #21
ambrosite wrote: post #15

I 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.

Wow! Didn't know this existed, thanks for the tip!

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#77

Post by megaman22 »

jgh wrote: post #31
zaarn wrote: post #4

The core point of the entire thread can be summed up by one of the tweets; "I believe well designed keyboard interfaces and well designed GUI interfaces have exactly the same learning curve." I agree with this. A properly and well designed keyboard interface is faster than any mouse. On the other hand, a properly designed mouse interface can be fast too. Both need to be applied when it makes sense. I can also resonat…

IMO Google Maps became completely awful when they made that new version of it, and they've been doing everything in their power to continue making it worse. Sure the scrolling is a lot smoother, but it's missing just a ton of features that the old version had. Plus the problems mentioned in the tweet storm, everything disappearing as soon as you change one item. PLUS that stupid side-bar that takes up half the screen…

> Edit: Here's another good one I just ran into -- I can't sign out of just one Gmail account. I have to sign out of all my Gmail accounts, and sign back into the ones I didn't intend to sign out of.

This seems like it is a shitty behavior inherent with OAuth. I have half a dozen Microsoft accounts for various things, and you just can't sign out of one and sign into another, unlinked account - things go all sideways and the auth providers that are trying to read your cookies get really confused and go into 401 redirect loops. It's better to burn it down and open a new set of incognito tabs instead.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#78

Post by samstave »

sp332 wrote: post #74
samstave wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m constantly stunned by the fact that chrome basically allocated a gig of men to each open tab... Can anyone eli5 why this is? I typically have thirty tabs open at any given time.

Are you counting shared memory multiple times? Try hitting shift-esc in Chrome and checking the memory usage there. My heaviest tab (Gmail) is only around 250M. Edit: I mean most computers don't even have 30 GB of RAM, but if you do there's an easy way to check. Open a bunch of tabs and note your system's total RAM usage. Then close Chrome and see how much gets freed up. If it's 30GB then you have a problem :)

Hmm... I may be - I’ll check when I get to work, I maybe have made a mindflake as I was pissed that chrome had so much allocated when it should be small given its job...

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#79

Post by mattlondon »

I think a lot of the perceived slowness is now the fact that so much more is reliant on the network now - and more often than not requires several hops over the public internet to some data centre somewhere.

As a reminder - network is really really slow compared to pretty much anything else: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_l...

I'd not be surprised if the author's library search terminal from the 80s had a local copy of the index, or at least the index was stored on a server on the same lightly-loaded LAN as the terminal.

My home laptop is hugely, hugely faster than ones I've had a decade ago for local workloads, but my network connection's latency and bandwidth have not improved nearly as fast.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#80

Post by jbb67 »

kgwxd wrote: post #21
ambrosite wrote: post #15

I 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.

Wow that makes an huge difference to usability. My phone feels like it's several times as fast now. Who knew that it felt slow and laggy on purpose!

It's really good!

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