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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

#191

Post by digi_owl »

katastic wrote: post #64
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...

Not only that but due to an existing bug/oversight in Windows, you can actually freeze your mouse pointer with a machine... even with 24 cores sitting idle. (Great read.) https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and... We have gigantic, steamrolling, bullet train machines capable of going nearly infinite miles-per-hour. And everyone's "design" solution... is to add their own stops along the way so the…

Similarly, with Gnome on top of Wayland the mouse is hitched to the main refresh loop...

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

#192

Post by digi_owl »

Santosh83 wrote: post #161
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?

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.

A OS in a sandbox on top of an OS on top of an CPU...

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

#194

Post by tomc1985 »

dwild wrote: post #156
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.…

GOG only makes easy what the community and nerds have been doing for years. GOG made a business out of it because they pay people to "maintain" the "API". Their products are not under active maintenance nor development.

Now, if there WAS a company paying for all that maintenance it would be Microsoft, with their almost religious commitment to backwards compatibility.

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

#195

Post by tomc1985 »

softawre wrote: post #184
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…

Atom is pretty terrible, but you have options. VSCode is also based on the web stack and is very fast (though Sublime is even faster).

Ugh. Guys think bigger than just web stacks. Pluma/Gedit, notepad++, TextMate... stop sucking off JS

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

#196

Post by tomc1985 »

finchisko wrote: post #182

I think what guy is actually experiencing strong feeling of nostalgia for older times. And I understand that. I see it on myself more and more with coming years too. We were simply born in some era, which holds strong memories in us. We hold sentiment to old things (programs), because somehow they're connected with best memories from time we were much younger. And the best memories are usually bounded to age around 2…

But maybe it is. On nearly every metric that matters to power users software is worse.

Control? We have less.

Options? Less.

Ownership? Not that we ever had it, but now you don't even get a disc. Licenses are even more restrictive.

The pace of 'upgrades'? Way, unnecessarily faster

And when the business dies now? Now you're fucked.

There are stories of mechanics running their shops today with 40-year-old dinosaurs, where their biggest logistical issue is getting old parts to repair when it breaks. It was sad that the magazine article I read that story in laughed at the "backwards" proprietor, when in fact he is a hero for standing up to the current trend of users-as-serfs cloud everything.

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

#197

Post by digi_owl »

bjterry wrote: post #90
bo1024 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the opposite direction is actually more telling. Developers tolerate bloat and BS up to the level of seconds. So there is plenty of computation being done that only requires milli or microseconds, but due to development practices now stretches just out into the annoying time frame. (Prime example: the growth of web pages to match increases in processing, RAM, and internet speeds, means that the web is actuall…

When the web was young and most people were on dialup, having access to a T1 meant that everything happened nearly instantaneously. All the sites were optimized for dialup levels of complexity. Now that everyone has broadband there is no equivalent. The slowness is either because the page is so heavyweight in terms of memory or processing power (note that more money does not buy much single-threaded performance), or…

All programs grow to outstrip available computing resources?

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

#198

Post by almonj »

I agree with this guy that having to use a mouse is often a chore and inefficient. Google search used to have a feature where you could hit tab after a search and it would auto select the results in order, but that seems to be gone. We need more features like that. Keyboard control supremacy will come back, it is inevitable.

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

#199

Post by zokier »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #119
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…

> I think pretty much everything in computing is like this. But then there's Dwarf Fortress, Blender, Vim, Emacs, ... Accounting for Sturgeon's Law, things aren't quite so bleak.

But vim/emacs are ancient, and even Blender is from the nineties. I would say the situation is pretty bleak if we need to rely forever on these ancient beasts because we can't make good software anymore.

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

#200

Post by antod »

gilbetron wrote: post #92

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 toleran…

Yeah. For me in 1983 loading something meant 5 mins waiting for the cassette to play through. Switching to a different program meant repeating the process again.
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