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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

#261

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

Fortunately we still have a choice. That's also one of the main reason I'm always using command line if it makes sense. In most cases you get instant or near-instant results. Our lives are too precious to waste them on sitting by the computer and waiting for the results - only because some people decided we should do it this way, and other people followed, and still other people had to implement it, dealing with mediocre infrastructure and additional complexity, usually with mixed results.

Nobody will steal this freedom of choice from me.

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

#262

Post by mnm1 »

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…

A lot. Just take a look at the desktop switching animation in OS X that's been there now for years. I bring that up anytime anyone tries to suggest Apple has decent design sense. No sane UI designer would put something like that in without the possibility of disabling it (like their other shitty animations). To be clear, any UI designer who hasn't understood the absolute fact that after a hundred or a thousand times, any animation becomes despised by a large fraction of one's user base shouldn't be working in this field. A lot of these unqualified people also apparently make a lot of videogames with un-skippable cut scenes. Same idea. Same stupidity and lack of any forethought whatsoever about the user's experience. It's almost like they're making this software with only the manufacturer's goals of looking 'shiny', 'sleek', or whatever dumb adjective of the day people who don't understand tech use to describe it. Oh, wait a second ...

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

#263

Post by 15charlimit »

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…

> Even the fastest computer and the highest-end Internet access can't get you such a huge advantage in performance that it can make the web feel snappy again.

Until you install an adblocker and disable javascript. An enormous amount of modern-web overhead is adtech and user tracking cancer.

If you don't believe me, install privacy badger/ghostery and ublock origin, visit any popular news/entertainment website, and look at the number of blocked elements/requests as you load a few articles. All of those take time and suck up resources.

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

#264

Post by vikramkrishnan »

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…

You can: try FP languages. My personal recommendations (from opposite ends of the FP spectrum) would be Clojure and Haskell. F# is pretty nice too.

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

#265

Post by danaliv »

s73ver_ wrote: post #227
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 was doing much, much, much less.

Was it though? Gmail is just a frontend to a system of services running in a data center. All Gmail does on our computers is display data, accept commands, and relay those commands to a server.

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

#266

Post by dfox »

zokier wrote: post #218
dfox wrote: post #106

Recently I discovered how well sapGUI works from the UX perspective. It is essentially an glorified graphical 3270 terminal emulator which runs applications that very often rely on user entering cryptic but human readable IDs (there is lookup functionality integrated in essentially all such fields, but frequent users typically do not use it that much). Another interesting fact is that the 3270/sapGUI/dynpro model is…

3270 is really fascinating evolutionary dead end. I don't have first-hand knowledge (wish I had!), but as far as I can tell it is bit like high-level ncurses/dialog(1)/forms built in directly to the terminal layer. Of course being very proprietary very enterpricy tech, there isn't that much information about how it worked in practice, but it certainly feels like a very different path for UIs.

3270 allows user to edit screen contents without interaction with host computer and allows host computer to mark screen regions as user editable or not. Interaction with host mostly consists of sending (text) framebuffer contents back and forth.

SAP's dynpro is abstraction layer on top of that which presents somewhat higher level view of that (forms and fields, not framebuffers and characters) and also allows 3270's behavior to be emulated on normal character-oriented terminals (obviously by ncurses-like software running on host). This abstraction is sufficiently high-level that sapGUI can look like somewhat modern desktop application instead of obvious 3270 emulator. (Windows version of sapGUI allows you to render parts of UI as embedded HTML or ActiveX components, but that capability does not seem to be used that much outside of SAP's development tools)

From programmer's point view it is not that different from web 1.0 application built on semi-modern form handling library (eg. WTForms or whatever your all-in-one webapp framework provides). Probably only difference is that for web frameworks you will have if(form_submitted_and_valid()) somewhere, while in SAP body of that conditional and rest of the controller implementation are always two distinct procedures.

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

#267

Post by s73ver_ »

tomc1985 wrote: post #244
s73ver_ wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 app…

This doesn't really address my point. You still haven't explained anything regarding choice, or any of your other points.

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

#268

Post by s73ver_ »

danaliv wrote: post #265
s73ver_ wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was doing much, much, much less.

Was it though? Gmail is just a frontend to a system of services running in a data center. All Gmail does on our computers is display data, accept commands, and relay those commands to a server.

That's a pretty gross oversimplification of things. One of the sibling comments has a pretty good comparison of what Gmail is doing that most 80s email clients weren't.

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

#269

Post by matt4077 »

anjakefala wrote: post #180
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 feel like this is the core of how "Open Software" is aiming to combat this. By removing the consumer-driven model away from software and putting users in closer touch with developers, we are supposedly developing tools together that better fit our needs. Though, OSS arguably is struggling to meet this theoretical ideal, especially with the current lack of support most OSS devs have. My life improved considerably wh…

There's no difference between OSS and proprietary software for the users, except price and the (most often theoretical) ability to modify the software and redistribute it.

Don't get me wrong: I use OSS wherever possible, contribute where I can, and love the freedom to tinker with the software's innards. But UI just isn't OSS' strong suit. Mainstream Linux desktops are no faster than MacOS, and quality as perceived by end users is far lower.

Some of that is due to missing hardware support, and some of it is a result of the OSS' "bazaar model" of development simply not being as good a fit for UIs as it is for CLI applications. But in any case, the forces at play in the market are the same for OSS and proprietary software.

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

#270

Post by siddharthdeswal »

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 think marketing has ruined pretty much everything.

Actually, in this case, it was technological advancement coupled with those companies' desire to make profits that 'ruined pretty much everything'. Marketing had nothing to do with it.

In fact, do us a favour and re-read your post, then tell us what parts were ruined by marketing?

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