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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

#91

Post by cableshaft »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #27
sunseb wrote: post #17

The 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…

Hit counters, guestbooks, web rings, autoplay midi files, under construction gif animations, cursor animations, HTML frames, etc. We've been adding unnecessary garbage to webpages since almost the very beginning of WWW.

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

#92

Post by gilbetron »

No? Getting on a BBS in 1983 at 300 baud means text files "downloaded" at the same speed you can read. Word processors were crazy painful to use, and incredibly slow. A text editor was just a line-by-line replacement. My TRS-80 would slow to a crawl even making the most basic (ha!) of programs.

Over the years, I've often thought about why computers never seem to get faster - mostly it is because people have a tolerance for response speeds, and that is unchanging. So software sits somewhere inside that tolerance range, because why be ultra fast when most people don't really care that much?

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

#96

Post by danaliv »

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 :)

Only 250M. ONLY 250M.

Gives up and dies

I don't mean to be dramatic but this is a huge part of the problem. How is it that the exact same application (email) ran perfectly well on systems with 1M of RAM (and no virtual memory!) and now it takes two-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-megs?

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

#97

Post by the_cat_kittles »

peterlk wrote: post #58

This lends itself to supporting functional physical design. I'm getting tired of the screenification of everything. I don't want a touchscreen in my car. I want a bunch of knobs that I can reach for, feel, and use without looking at them. I cannot do this with a touch screen.

i strongly agree. a physical thing is just more expressive, and when designed right, that can be leveraged. cars are the example ne plus ultra of how touchscreens arent always a great idea

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

#98

Post by drzaiusapelord »

graphitezepp wrote: post #42
ambrosite wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not for left handed people. My primary hand is better/closer to the top row. My non-primary handle struggles with the keypad, especially if I don't use it very often - which I don't.

Worse, if you're on a laptop a lot then this habit is kicked out the door. Enabling a numpad on the keyboard is less efficient than just using the top row.

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

#99

Post by debaserab2 »

samstave wrote: post #78
sp332 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Turns out building a standards compliant DOM rendering and JavaScript is actually pretty complex.

When you throw in the heaps and heaps of different features that must follow volumes of specs, backwards compatibility with previous implementations, and cross platform compatibility I think it’s pretty safe to say that your average modern browser is one of the most, if not the most complex program installed on your machine.

It’s job isn’t small at all.

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

#100

Post by skizm »

glial wrote: post #2

Given 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…

Software engineers optimize for human scale time.
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