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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

#241

Post by Chaebixi »

kgwxd wrote: post #21
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…

Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.

> Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.

Are you talking about this: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/speed-up-your-android-by-adjusti... ?

I set mine to "0.5", and everything's much snappier, but they still play so I still get some feedback.

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

#242

Post by ziotom78 »

mrob wrote: post #128
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?

Full Unicode support, including input methods for languages that can't be typed directly on a QWERTY keyboard, takes a lot more than 1MB. Seeing as most of the world's population doesn't speak English, this is a very important improvement.

Well said.

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

#243

Post by r00fus »

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...

Is it all the corporate mandated spyware? Because it's really fun when your work computer goes into a CPU spinup because of this.

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

#244

Post by tomc1985 »

s73ver_ wrote: post #234
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…

"Options? Less." How so, given that more people are able to write software, and it's easier to create something than ever before? "And when the business dies now? Now you're fucked." How is that any different than before?

You've answered your own question... more people are learning to program, from fewer and more professionally run sources, which preach a gospel that prizes engagement, conversions and ease-of-use, over empowerment, functionality, or choice. Plus, with this larger and more mainstream community, where 'coders' are pulled in off the street with little technical knowledge (let alone passion) who never grokked complex apps anyway, produce what they know. The end result is a sea of gimped, appliance-like 'apps' that do little more than funnel users towards business objectives.

And when the business died, their software still ran. Hard-won expertise kept it running. No stupid CEO or developer could stop you, and neither could they pull the rug out from under your feet with a sunset or some other shitty move. You bought your software and that, mercifully, could be the end of your relationship with that publisher.

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

#245

Post by Chaebixi »

skizm wrote: post #100
glial wrote: post #2

Given the speed of modern computers, I'm fascinated by the fact that so many processes complete in human-scale time (seconds-minutes), rather than milliseconds or years+, depending on problem complexity. If times for compute tasks have some power law distribution (a big if...), I'd expect a very small part of that distribution to overlap with the 'seconds' range. Then again, computers do so many things in the millise…

Software engineers optimize for human scale time.

I kinda feel that UI developers should work with crappy, old PCs. Then they could optimize to the point where things are barely usable to them, but then they'd be snappy for everyone else.

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

#246

Post by tomc1985 »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #240
tomc1985 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You worded your initial response like you were referencing actual stats about software. I'm sure you think you and your colleagues are reliable sources, but to the rest of the world, they aren't.

Every single one of those statements was subjective. Don't be fooled by my use of the word 'metric'. It is, frankly, amazing that people here expect one to have facts and citations for every little nitty point.

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

#247

Post by Bartweiss »

pmlnr wrote: post #163
slaman wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This argument generalizes to everything, though.

Do you not like owning a car/tractor/printer running proprietary software that you're not permitted to modify? I guess you should have bought a 20 year old version and upgraded it yourself.

Do you want a choice of food that you trust won't make you sick? Then you probably should have worked for that lettuce from planting to harvest, not just complained about safety standards.

Total independence from the actions of others isn't impossible, but no one posting comments online is practicing it. And if "working for it" can include learning to use solutions other people have built, then it can also include writing this article on what's change and what's missing.

If you live in a society, talking about your preferences isn't an alternative to working for them, it's part of that work.

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

#248

Post by squarefoot »

The corporate culture to release a product in time rather than having it perform fast ruined the IT world and is infecting the FOSS ecosystem too. Just throw away all VM-constrained or interpreted languages (or use them only for prototyping) and the problem is almost solved. Then make everything work offline unless it is absolutely necessary to do the opposite (backups, updates etc). Rediscovering the lost art of optimization would also help a lot.

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

#249

Post by s73ver_ »

owenversteeg wrote: post #63

It's a tragedy of the commons. It's very rare for one piece of software to be solely responsible for slowness, but each individual piece contributes just ever so slightly. I happen to know quite a bit about front-end technologies, so I'll speak to those. Bootstrap is around 100 kilobytes. One hundred thousand bytes - after gzip and minification. By itself, is it slow? Not very. Bootstrap fans will point you to endles…

"but I think that if everyone spent time optimizing the size of things to be 100x faster we could get back to snappy UIs."

Quite possibly. Who's going to pay for it, though? And who's going to make sure the frameworks are still easy to use and not buggy?

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

#250

Post by kabdib »

bitwize wrote: post #226
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.

I've since built systems based on flash that boot in tenths of a second, with over a thousand times the memory of that ST. I'll point out that the PC BIOS the ST was competing with was also in ROM, and only spent the last couple seconds of its execution loading stuff from disk -- I think the test was more than fair.
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