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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

#312
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ancient,yes. Still actively developed and maintained. Maybe if contributing into projects was more of a thing, then trying to reinvent, we had better sofware.

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

#313
post #208

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…

I've got a good-sized collection of vintage hardware and software. Microsoft stops supporting something? All well, I've got my older versions still available. They don't get updates, but for the most part, I didn't expect them to when I bought them.

> you pay only to keep support over the product you actually use and need.

And you pay it over and over again. Until you don't need it (which might be because they removed some feature you were relying on, with no recourse).

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

Losing access to my old apps isn't the norm, unless I choose to let go of control over my own computer's software.

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

#314

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…

Yes I get the rosy-nostalgia bias but ... these apps run demonstrably faster. That's not nostalgia.

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

#315
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> re 1: Slow - compared to google docs? Are you serious? Slow compared to decent standards of what a word processor needs. For reference, WordPad perceptually opens instantly for me, and has felt like it opened instantly since Windows 95, I'm pretty sure. I am saying that both LibreOffice and Google Docs are examples of software that take way too long to do simple things because they're busy doing complicated things…

If your word processing requirements are very lax you should probably just be using Markdown + an editor.

And if they're not, LaTeX is great.

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

#316
The computer store I used to work at switched from an dedicated cash register to a PC based QuickBooks POS system and it was a POS (piece of sh).

Windows based GUI app. You couldn't ring up anything without looking at the screen, taking your hand off the keyboard to move to the right input box constantly.

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

#317

The front end developer at one of the companies I was working for nearly fainted when I told him I like Craigslist's web interface. The only criticism he could muster was "But it looks like the 90s". And then he proceeded to tell me off "because you don't want to learn how to use a new interface". Of course I don't want to, it is a skill with zero transferability. Learning how to be productive with an interface that…

Craigslist UI/UX is great. The problem is that simple/super clean interfaces don't require designers. So pretty much every designer will be against it out of principal.

Of course, every site can't be craigslist.

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

#318

> And it's worth noting that HYPERTEXT, specifically, is best with a mouse in a lot of cases. Wikipedia would suck on keyboard. A decade ago I would navigate web pages quicker than now. I was using Opera, which had keys for navigating from hyperlink to hyperlink (spatially, using shift+arrow keys). It also keys for navigating to the logical previous and next page--that is, not navigating history, but following "link…

It's possible that the vimium extension for chrome will give you what you want. The 'f' shortcut gives something similar to what you want.

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

#319

Ehhh? * I remember spending hours, sitting on my new 2GB hard drive, formatting it to FAT32. Or defragmenting every week... because that disk format was rather subpar compared to modern file systems. * I remember the 10+ Floppy Disks that needed to be manually swapped in and out to install... something. I think Microsoft Word. Or maybe it was Windows. In any case, Floppies were slow as all heck, and when CDs came out…

Do you also remember that the Word that you installed from 10 floppies was a lot more responsive than the Word you subscribe to now? You are saying hardware is a lot faster now. And you are correct. What he is saying is that applications are a lot slower, in spite of the faster hardware. And he is also correct.

Word hasn't gotten much slower or faster in my experience. Honest.

Word has a bunch of additional features that are nice to have. We have spell-check and grammar check today, layouts that don't explode, decent "styles system" (kinda like LaTeX's tagging: you can change a style throughout your document pretty easily under modern Word)

I'd take Word 2016 any day over Word 97. Granted, I'm one of those "strange" people who see absolutely nothing wrong with the modern Ribbon (way better than menus inside of menus, that change from system to system. My school's toolbars for Word 97 looked completely different than my home computer's toolbar... it was kind of ridiculous)

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your word processing requirements are very lax you should probably just be using Markdown + an editor.

And if they're not, LaTeX is great.

> And if they're not, LaTeX is great.

And you can use pandoc to get the best of both worlds.

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