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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

#201

Post by ravitation »

tomc1985 wrote: post #196
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, wh…

> On nearly every metric that matters to power users software is worse.

Citation needed.

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

#202

Post by kabdib »

The day I sold my Atari ST, I pulled it out of the stack of old computers, connected it to a monitor, hooked up a disk drive and turned it on.

Poof: Desktop with a working mouse cursor in under one second.

I booted a nearby PC, and then hit reset until it booted. In the time that the "hot shit" 386 box took to get to a DOS prompt, the ST booted about fifty times. To something with graphics.

Modern system boot times depress me. We have database servers that take 15 minutes to POST. Doing updates or diagnosing hardware-level issues with these things is g l a c i a l l y slow. I work with message queueing systems that are not shy about several seconds of latency -- what are these stupid things doing? The datacenter they're running in is less than a hundred microseconds wide, and everything is high-end XEON CPUs with SSD and more cache than the first 30 computers I used, put together.

Sigh.

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

#203

Post by tomc1985 »

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…

I think animations, as most program them, slow down the UI exactly as you say.

But when their timing is tight, and the whole thing happens in under, say, half a second, you get the benefits of that context association and it still feels really cool and high-tech. People jsut set their animations too slow. (Seriously, nothing should ever take longer than 500ms)

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

#205

Post by digi_owl »

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.

Over-design perhaps, but i would say that the web is under-engineered, as engineers would find the inefficiencies and get around them.

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

#206

Post by lolsal »

falcolas wrote: post #121
LordHumungous wrote: post #105

Gmaps is so far ahead of anything available in 1983 that a comparison is almost silly.

Except for actual, physical maps, with indices for finding locations, and all kinds of markings to denote things of interest (such as restaraunts, museums, etc.)

Physical maps don't necessarily have:

- satellite imagery

- reviews for destinations

- automatic re-routing

- traffic congestion

- toll/public-transit information

- On a mobile/gps enabled device you get your location as well

- etc.

Comparing physical maps to Google Maps is one-dimensional: you can see a specific area (if you had the foresight to buy it before hand!) with roads and mile markers.

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

#207

Post by gugagore »

marbletiles wrote: post #183
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…

We've even managed to slow down things like Excel 97. I played with a 486 laptop recently, and was completely amazed at how fast things like Word felt (once they'd loaded off the ancient hard disk). The most immediately notable part was the typing, which felt completely instantaneous. I haven't found out exactly why, but the switch from serial to USB keyboard interfaces (and the lag therein) as well as the various wi…

on PCs, keyboards were never "serial" as in "the serial port"(mice were), but they were always "serial" in the same way that the USB port is "serial". Perhaps it's better said that the switch from a special-purpose interface to USB is what introduced lag.

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

#208

Post by dwild »

tomc1985 wrote: post #194
dwild wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Their products are not under active maintenance nor development.

Isn't it the same? Someone that directly update the app to newer API or someone that update an API to make sure the older apps are still running is pretty much the same at the end. Someone has to do that work.

There's someone that pay for it, whether it's nerds by their time, or Microsoft by their backward compatibility support.

Even for Microsoft, at the end of the day, you pay that price through your next Windows license, and still, they may decide not to keep supporting some of it (16 bits programs are no longer supported over 64 bits for example).

It's not different from a subscription model, except that instead of paying a fortune to support most things (which may not include what you actually need), you pay only to keep support over the product you actually use and need.

I'm not saying subscription models or cloud application are amazing, but being able to keep running your old apps is not the norm and is mostly made possible because there's someone that pay for it for you. At least in a subscription model, that relation is pretty direct, you pay for the software to keep working, unlike hoping that Windows invest into that old techs to make sure they keep running.

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

#209

Post by almonj »

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…

Computers are about control and wanting to return to the old days of aiding the power user has nothing to do with nostalgia.

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

#210

Post by digi_owl »

ams6110 wrote: post #137
sunseb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing I realized it's nonsense lately: object oriented programming. It's often an over-engineered bloat that only works for trivial Programming 101 courses (yeah the famous Employee or Bike class). But in 10+ years of programming, I found that OOP is just a complete mess (you end up with awful classes in your code like Service, Manager, AbstractFactory, and so). I wish we could just use variables and function…

> I wish we could just use variables and functions, that's all we need really. You still can. You need decent data structures too, but I never in over 20 years really "got" OOP. It seemed needlessly complicated. Functions and data always seemed to do the job for me.

OOP as most people get to know it seems to be a bleak application of the original concept.

And the original was not aimed at dealing with the internals of a single program sitting on a single CPU, but grand simulations running on massive clusters. There each "object" would could very well be a process of its own, running on its own dedicated hardware.

Effectively OOP became another one of those buzzwords on the bingo board...

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