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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)

#41

Post by agumonkey »

joncrane wrote: 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.

Analog TV were real time at the speed of electrons minus some layers of inertia (capacitance say).

Nowadays there's many layers of various quality, and software reactivity is a factor of so many things.

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

#42

Post by wolco »

acheron wrote: post #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 ma…

Still hasn't caught up to a c64. A flick, loaded.

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

#43

Post by jaywalk »

seanalltogether wrote: post #28
wolfgke wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Unless I'm very mistaken about modern digital transmissions, cable coming into the house is still based on a broadcast system, which means you're getting everything all the time. The frames are all there for every channel, they're just not being read. I don't know how much processing or memory it would take to read and store frames for surrounding channels to the one you're on, but I imagine its possible.

While everything is usually on the cable (there are exceptions) the STB only has a limited number of tuners, which means it can't "see" everything at once. The channels that are nearby in number may or may not be on the same physical channel, which would mean the STB is effectively blind to them.

But even in boxes with multiple tuners (DVRs) your solution would require tying up at least three tuners (current channel plus one up and down) which would cut down the number of simultaneous recordings that are possible. I doubt many people would like that tradeoff.

However, the biggest issue is that most boxes simply don't have more than one MPEG decoder in them.

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

#44

Post by PostPost »

sonofaplum wrote: post #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 a…

The example for maps is not a "hyper specific use case": "The process you WANT: pick your start and end. now start searching for places in between. Your start and end are saved. When you find someplace interesting, add it to your list. Keep doing that, keep searching and adding."

That's a common use case. The problem with Google maps (and the problem with a lot of modern software) is, as you say, it makes a lot of guesses.

The definition of a good user interface is "to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother"*

Google Maps is great for finding directions to a very specific place. But after mapping those directions, doing almost anything else destroys that route. If I have to (and I do) open multiple map tabs, or repeatedly enter the same route info after making a search (if I'm on a phone) it is not a good UI.

*https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/

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

#46

Post by seriesf »

phonon wrote: post #40
seanalltogether wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm very mistaken about modern digital transmissions, cable coming into the house is still based on a broadcast system, which means you're getting everything all the time. The frames are all there for every channel, they're just not being read. I don't know how much processing or memory it would take to read and store frames for surrounding channels to the one you're on, but I imagine its possible.

Feel free to find a chipset on the market that can decode hundreds of channels of Full HD H.264 simultaneously...

You wouldn’t have to actually decode it, just receive it all and buffer everything after the last key frame. That eliminates waiting for the next key frame.

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

#47

Post by Isamu »

Well, in 1983 I was waiting all day for my program to load from floppy. Then maybe I had to swap disks out and wait again. But yeah, if you had one of those awesome 10 Meg drives, things would load fast!

Then you would run out of memory if you were doing anything ambitious.

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

#48

Post by mrlala »

joncrane wrote: 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.

This I do agree with. I haven't had cable for years and years, but when I'm at someone elses house I am baffled how insanely slow it is. That would drive me NUTS on a day-to-day basis.

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

#49

Post by duxup »

wolco wrote: post #45
duxup wrote: post #19

I distinctly remember watching the Netscape Navigator logo for long periods of time waiting for a page to load.

You should have turned images off.

I wonder if there was a "images are ruining the internet" panic like the the modern day "Look my blog is just html, why can't everything be that way?" rants?

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

#50

Post by doctor_m »

joncrane wrote: 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.

Modern cable systems are more akin to satellite broadcast systems than they are to the terrestrial broadcast systems of yore. There's an order of magnitude more content on cable these days. When you tune a channel now, instead of simply tuning to a frequency and demodulating the signal, content is spread across many frequencies, each of which carries a QAM-modulated MPEG transport stream that carries many programs. It takes longer to tune QAM than baseband analog or even PSK. So the physical frequency change takes longer than it used to do. Once frequency is tuned, decoder may need to check provisioning in order to be able to decrypt whatever program you've requested, so that adds to the time it takes.
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