Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by gugagore » Tue, Nov 07, 2017, 6:46 PM UTC

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…

I enjoy that this applies pretty directly (almost aesthetically) to deeply-pipelined CPU architectures. Though for general computing, I am pretty sure it's still a win.

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

#222

Post by tomc1985 » Tue, Nov 07, 2017, 6:48 PM UTC

dwild wrote: post #208

tomc1985 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"but being able to keep running your old apps is not the norm"

Only for the cloud cohort. Not all of us drink the kool-aid! Try living in a computing environment where the technology-rug isn't pulled out from under you every three months.

Both Windows and Linux have not had core changes to their API. The fundamentals of application programming haven't changed in decades. Why shouldn't we allow old apps to run?

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

#223

Post by tomc1985 » Tue, Nov 07, 2017, 6:49 PM UTC

ravitation wrote: post #201

tomc1985 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Citation: myself and the other power users I have talked with. WTF is this, wikipedia?? Robot.

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

#224

Post by digi_owl » Tue, Nov 07, 2017, 6:49 PM UTC

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #103

> one of the things that makes me steaming mad is how the entire field of web apps ignores 100% of learned lessons from desktop apps Burns me up too but I think this is by design. Meaning, web app developers generally don't want to listen, even when their bringing that to the desktop in the form of "native" apps.

Feels like this is the cycle of computing.

First came the big irons.

Then came the desktop.

Then came mobile.

then came the web.

And none of the later ones seems particularly interested in learning from those that came before.

Maybe it is willful ignorance, maybe it is youthful hubris...

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

#225

Post by erikbye » Tue, Nov 07, 2017, 6:50 PM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #195

softawre wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Kate, Sublime, Vim, Emacs, 4coder, UltraEdit, BBEdit, Bluefish...

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

#226

Post by bitwize » Tue, Nov 07, 2017, 6:50 PM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #202

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 d…

Everything is faster when you build it into ROM. The cost is flexibility. Should you wish to run another OS on that ST, ypu would have to bootstrap it through TOS.

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

#227

Post by s73ver_ » Tue, Nov 07, 2017, 6:52 PM UTC

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 was doing much, much, much less.

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

#228

Post by kuon » Tue, Nov 07, 2017, 6:53 PM UTC

About the google maps things. Anybody knows an alternative where I can measure things (like the length of a named road or the width of a building) and count things (for example, I draw a polygon, and I want to know the number of houses within it).

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

#229

Post by rpeden » Tue, Nov 07, 2017, 6:54 PM UTC

sunseb wrote: post #110

sunseb wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree modern websites look a lot nicer... Or do they? They all look the same: big images, not much text, the top bar, yeah this newsletter thing to upsell with these crappy (but effective) marketing techniques... Somehow I feel old school websites (HN, Reddit, and so) are more sticky, more addictive, more unique. They focus on what we really want: contents and communication with others.

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…

It depends on what kind of development you're doing.

For most web and business programming I've done, at the end of the day I'm mostly just taking data and transforming it into other data. Most of the time, looking at these programs as a series of functions through which data gets piped to obtain the result works well. As a result I think that functional programming is a good fit a ton of code that is written using OOP. For fun, I tried converting some old side projects to F#. Once I'd gotten used to the language, I ended up being able to express the same ideas more clearly, and with fewer lines of code. Functional programming isn't magic, but it can be very effective when used in the right places.

Lately, I've been getting into game development as a hobby. And when I'm simulating a miniature world with hundreds or thousands of stateful actors, I find that OOP works really well - in that the way to code models the game world aligns well with my mental model of the game world. You absolutely can program games using a functional style - I've just found OOP to be a better fit here for my uses. It's still useful to use a functional approach where you can, though, even inside an OOP game code base. John Carmack has written and spoken about this.

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

#230

Post by pizza234 » Tue, Nov 07, 2017, 6:55 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #141

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…

> 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…

> 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:

Libreoffice is monolithically designed, as shouldn't be representative of the generic performance of modern software.

The reason is that StarOffice was envisioned as desktop environment, therefore, all the components of the suite are loaded on the first startup.

  $ libreoffice --writer &
  $ time libreoffice --calc --terminate_after_init
  
  real	0m0.104s
  user	0m0.016s
  sys	0m0.008s

If anything should be compared, then Microsoft Office should be used, as it always had a very fast startup (AFAIK, due to components preloading).

I think the article is very misguided; the problem is in the expectation that anything should be faster, even in contexts that are implicitly slower (networks, i.e. internet), or with features that will inevitably slow down the experience (e.g. browser plugins).

Using as reference the slowest software - Libreoffice, Atom, Firefox - is nothing else than cherry-picking.

In this perspective, a sibling article is correct - if you want faster alternatives, you have them.