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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#11
post #5
post #2

Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.

It takes time to pick up the MPEG2 scheme and start decoding.

all they need is to create to a low rate channel with slowly updating snapshots of all the programs being transmitted.

i don't know anyone who does that, but it is damn trivial.

(former middleware engineer)

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#12
One that got worse and then better again at least in my experience is boot up time. Old computers running MS-DOS I remember booting up very quickly (unless you waited for the full memory self test), then for quite a long time it took forever to get into Windows no matter what you did to try to speed it up. More recently things start up pretty quickly again; I think it's mainly hardware (solid-state disks being the major improvement), but I do think Windows seems to do a little better software-wise too. (Linux and BSD I haven't used as a desktop in a very long time so I'm not sure where those are now. OSX I don't have much of a sense of, partly because it just doesn't need to fully reboot as often as Windows.)

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#13
post #2

Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.

The central reason is that modern video codecs use I-frames and P-frames (sometimes also B-frames; even though as far as I am aware, these are not used for TV broadcasts); see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Video_compression...

I-frames are only sent, say, once or twice a second.

When a channel is switched, the TV has to wait for the next I-frame, since P-frames (and B-frames) only encode the difference to the previous I-frame (or to the previous and next I-frame in the case of B-frames).

If you are aware of a possibility for efficient video compression that avoids this problem, tell the HN audience; the really smart people who developed the video codecs apparently have not found a solution for this. ;-)

Otherwise complain to your cable provider that they do not send more I-frames to decrease the time to switch between channels (which would increase the necessary bandwidth).

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#14
post #8

What is this? Are these tweets? It's like reading a programming language where vast amounts of syntax is optional. This style of blogging is making the world worse.

This is a website that 'rolls up' tweets. Here's the original tweets: https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#15
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes time to pick up the MPEG2 scheme and start decoding.

all they need is to create to a low rate channel with slowly updating snapshots of all the programs being transmitted. i don't know anyone who does that, but it is damn trivial. (former middleware engineer)

> all they need is to create to a low rate channel with slowly updating snapshots of all the programs being transmitted.

> i don't know anyone who does that, but it is damn trivial.

Getting this standardized in an international standard is far from trivial.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#16
post #2

Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.

My favorite "the world is terrible" curmudgeon observation is how awful hotel TVs (and hotel TV remotes) are. Every single hotel room TV I've had the displeasure of using in the last N years takes more than 20 seconds to turn on after multiple button-presses, starts out on a terrible in-house channel at high volume regardless of the last-watched channel+volume, takes multiple seconds to change channels, and has no re…

Careful what you wish for - many years ago I worked for an interactive TV company that focused on the hospitality market. One large chain of hotels seriously asked if we could do a remote control with three additional large buttons at the top for "Beer", "Burger" and "Porn".

Turns out getting like that manufactured in the quantities we were looking at is a nightmare - so it didn't happen.

Edit: Clearly it would have been easier to have one button for "Beer, burger and porn" - but that has only occurred to me now.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#17
post #8

What is this? Are these tweets? It's like reading a programming language where vast amounts of syntax is optional. This style of blogging is making the world worse.

Yeah. It is a tweet thread, which is such a bad idea that 3rd party apps have appeared to make reading them easier (threadreader for example). Unfortunately threadreader and its ilk can't make the content any better formatted or grammatically correct..er.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#18
post #2

Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.

When working on digital settop boxes a decade or 2 ago, channel change latency was one of the toughest problems. Eventually we (collectively, the whole industry) gave up and settled for 1 second as acceptable. Channel surfing quietly went away. When your i-frame only comes so often, there's not a whole lot you can do.

Nowadays, that problem is solved by reducing actual live content to a strict minimum; everything else can be on-demand.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#20
There are some good points here, but of course I am going to ignore those to talk instead about the stuff I disagree with!

The section about google maps follows a form of criticism that is widespread and particularly annoys me, namely => popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless.

There is always room for improvement, but all software requires tradeoffs. One of the things that makes a product like google maps so powerful is that it makes a lot of guesses about what you are actually trying to do in order to greatly reduce the complexity and inputs required in order to do these incredibly complicated tasks.

So yes, sometimes when you move the map some piece of data will be removed from the screen without your explicit consent, and yeah, in that moment that feels incredibly annoying. But balance that against the 100s or 1000s of times you used google maps and it just worked, perfectly, because it reduced the number of inputs needed to use it to the bare minimum.

Google maps doesn't need to fit every use case perfectly, and while its fine to talk through how your hyper specific use case could and should work, remember all the times that it seamlessly routed you around traffic from your office to your house in one touch while you were already hurtling down the highway at 70 mph.

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