Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tttthreads.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 349 posts

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

#151

Post by nottorp »

dragontamer wrote: post #102

Ehhh? * I remember spending hours, sitting on my new 2GB hard drive, formatting it to FAT32. Or defragmenting every week... because that disk format was rather subpar compared to modern file systems. * I remember the 10+ Floppy Disks that needed to be manually swapped in and out to install... something. I think Microsoft Word. Or maybe it was Windows. In any case, Floppies were slow as all heck, and when CDs came out…

Do you also remember that the Word that you installed from 10 floppies was a lot more responsive than the Word you subscribe to now?

You are saying hardware is a lot faster now. And you are correct. What he is saying is that applications are a lot slower, in spite of the faster hardware. And he is also correct.

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

#152

Post by tome »

owenversteeg wrote: post #126
tome wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I spent years of my life working on a CSS framework 100x smaller than Bootstrap Interesting! Can you share that?

http://mincss.com (and yeah, homepage needs some work, my friends say it sounds like too much of a corporate product and not a FOSS CSS framework)

Thanks! I will investigate it in the future where I would normally have considered Bootstrap.

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

#153

Post by sp332 »

samstave wrote: post #143
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 :)

OK checked. htop report that system idle with nothing running consumes 996MB mem -- one tab open in chrome jumps to 1.77GB (out of 16GB) now I have 6 open tabs... cnn, HN, reddit, reddit, reddit, netflix - and just to display these tabs its allocated 2.5 gigs... I just cant understand how displaying 6 websites requires 2.5GB of ram? Ill admit to being stupid on this topic - but I can maths, and that just doesnt appea…

Sometimes being fast means using lots of RAM. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...

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

#155

Post by snerbles »

romaniv wrote: post #134

The thing that horrifies me about all of this is that instead of criticizing or fixing issues most people adapt what they do and even how they think to match all the deficiencies in software. Often, users simply can't imagine systems that work fundamentally differently and better. Often, when deficiencies are pointed out people start defending the mess and pointing out all the clever (half-assed, really) workaround a…

People get used to doing things a certain way. When they have to overcome a terrible interface, an attachment forms. It's no different than the pride of those that live in physically harsh environments.

Habituation is a powerful thing.

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

#156

Post by dwild »

Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

> I can still install Excel 97 if I want to

That's the survivor bias. There's plenty of things that you can no longer install and the things you can still install, it's mostly because there's someone that maintains their API and whatnot (thus, the company hasn't gone out of business or haven't decided not to maintains it). Look at games, GOG has an R&D department to make sure you can run the games on their platform.

I'm pretty sure there's a ton of people here that can talk about some old computer or VM that they have to keep up because of old legacy stuff.

> I mean, there is perceptible lag in character entry that never used to happen. Sure, my computer used to freeze inexplicably, but Atom crashes often enough that I don't consider that a win, and text has a noticeable delay before it appears on the screen when using Atom. Text entry is something I can implement flawlessly on a microcontroller and the majority of applications I use on a daily basis get it wrong.

Who forced you to use Atom? That's your decision to use something still heavily in development using some new technologies (not meant to be faster or more stable, just easier to develop into). It's like buying a bicycle and complaining it doesn't go as fast as the car you had before.

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

#157

Post by slaman »

pmlnr wrote: post #120
Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

You do, in fact, have a choice, you always did, everyone does. There are decent, completely offline solutions (Libreoffice vs GDocs), you can self-host a lot of things and do a private "cloud" on a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop ( https://yunohost.org/#/ ; https://cloudron.io/ ; etc). The tradeoff is compatibility and not being trendy. However, that has always been a problem both the 80s and the 90s. Mac vs PC? Amiga…

Not everyone it prepared to host, maintain and secure a server cluster of OSS.

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

#159

Post by AlexandrB »

fusiongyro wrote: post #39

In the name of usability, we have practically neutered these computing machines. I think optimizing for user experience is partly to blame for this. You don't want users to have a confusing experience the first time they use the application, and you want the application to look good and be inviting. But that may be at cross purposes with making applications that allow open-ended exploration. Exploration implies that…

> In the name of usability, we have practically neutered these computing machines.

Except usability is getting worse too. There is now less and less content on the average screen and more and more whitespace and "design chrome". Buttons no longer look like buttons, hamburger menus are legion, and many new features are found behind undiscoverable gestures that must be mastered.

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

#160

Post by varjag »

jononor wrote: post #129
danaliv wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

250MB is around 100'000 pages of text. Or some 150 full HD images. Why such amounts of data needs to be in memory at all times to read/reply to emails, I have no idea.

Especially when all heavy lifting is done on the server.
Post reply on HN