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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

#161

Post by Santosh83 »

danaliv wrote: post #96
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 :)

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?

It's only the same functionality but not the same application. Mail clients of old were standalone compiled programs that only did one thing. A Chrome process is almost a mini operating system and API layer on top.

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

#163

Post by pmlnr »

slaman wrote: post #157
pmlnr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having a choice is not a thing for granted. You need to work for it. You need to maintain the right to it. Those who are not prepared, learn it, or live with whatever is provided by others.

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

#164

Post by acdha »

jkoll wrote: post #113
debaserab2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mach…

250 megabytes for a simple email client.

Versus, say, 1GB for Outlook and variable amounts for Mail.app depending on usage. It's not 1993 — these days email includes a full text search engine, rendering complex content, etc. Since even a phone comes with considerably more than 250MB of RAM, if you don't want to use the resources you paid for to make things faster or better, wouldn't that be an argument for using pine or mutt in a terminal window?

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

#165

Post by naasking »

pmlnr wrote: post #142
geofft wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are decent, completely offline solutions (Libreoffice vs GDocs) LibreOffice is slow . On a ~2010 business-class Dell laptop that still is in perfectly good physical condition, running Debian 9, with a handful of tabs in Firefox and a mosh running: adamantoise:~ geofft$ time libreoffice --terminate_after_init real 0m8.103s user 0m1.696s sys 0m0.520s The rant here isn't about cloud vs. local, it's about perform…

re 1: Slow - compared to google docs? Are you serious? EDIT: not startup time, who cares about startup time? When you load a few hundred pages doc, or a massive excel. re 2: I only wanted to give examples, but you're right, my wording is off. I wanted to say there are fast and good interfaces: there's vim for the terminal, there's Rainloop for webmail, miniflux for RSS reading - these are all keyboard-oriented ones,…

> When you load a few hundred pages doc, or a massive excel.

LibreOffice on even midsized spreadsheets is quite slow. Slower than opening it Google Docs in fact, which borders on shameful.

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

#166

Post by dep_b »

SN76477 wrote: post #86

Software fatigue for sure It is so bad on iOS with and iPhone I am trying to figure out how to live without one. Doing anything productive on iOS takes 12 clicks, 6 button pushes and takes 9 minutes.

As an app developer I have been guilty of this in the past as well. I really try to make interfaces instantaneous nowadays so you can keep hammering away while in the background things like fetching and saving happen.

Things like naive saving (always continue immediately assuming inserting or updating really happened), command queues and aggressive preloading can make applications really quick again despite they're just an interface for an API.

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

#167

Post by acdha »

epistasis wrote: post #20
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…

That's a huge frustration with current web pages for me, and for iOS. Animations that stall interaction rather then enable it do exactly the opposite funtction. And if you're ever in a situation where interactions get chained from user requests, like the bug in the iOS calculator, you're gone way off the path on your UI

Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion on iOS is a really nice way to improve the subjective interface speed.

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

#168

Post by jseliger »

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…

You inspired me to look up how to turn off animations in MacOS; this has some answers: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14001/how-to-turn-... although I can't vouch for their accuracy.

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

#169

Post by fusiongyro »

AlexandrB wrote: post #159
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.

There is a big dose of fashion and fad-following in usability. The things you mention are manifestations of poor decisions made in the name of usability, but actually in the interest of being pretty.

I think even making the right decisions in terms of usability, tethered to a few short-sighted user stories, will result in this situation. Usability should be in service of a higher purpose, which should be enabling the user to understand how to use something powerful and flexible that does not constrain them only to what is envisioned by the developer or the UI architect. That's what has happened here with Maps. You can perform User Story #1 or #2 with zero friction. But there is no way to do what @gravislizard wants to do, which wasn't anticipated by Google or specifically designed for.

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

#170

Post by CyberDildonics »

samstave wrote: post #72
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.

I wouldn't sweat it too much. I had a working Octane workstation complete with sgi monitor and sgi keyboard. It's not easy to figure out a good use for it unless you can use the tanky case for something (ceramic grills over the case fans!). I even got shake to work on it, but it ran about the same speed as a 1ghz PIII.
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