Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by jaywalk » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #37

athenot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 els…

These days they should be able to guess what 20 channels you might change to and start recording those in the background. I've always suspected the reason it's slow is because you press the remote button, the DVR sends that to the provider, the provider has to verify that you can do what you are asking it to do, then a response comes, then the change can start.

Nope, the STB has everything it needs to decrypt the channels you have access to. Tuning live TV channels happens 100% on the box. The only exception (a technology called Switched Digital Video) is just a way to save bandwidth on the cable, nothing to do with conditional access.

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

#52

Post by black_puppydog » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

brosinante wrote: post #21

Has anyone ever also noticed how cars are always heavier than the bikes we used when we were children. And how much more air you need and how much longer it takes to fill a car tire with a hand pump. Also, remember when none of us was a portuguese author and we used paragraphs rationally and wrote things down without splitting them into 200 letter long strings because we used mediums made for rants and did not need a…

The point of the rant was that in IT, and from a user perspective, they keep changing for the worse rather than the better.

Calling this sort of thing out, when the entire industry keeps professing they're "making the world a better place", is valuable IMHO. I happen to agree with a lot of the examples.

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

#53

Post by sonofaplum » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

PostPost wrote: post #44

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 gu…

Why do you think that use case is that common? And why do you think google maps should elevate that particular use case above other competing use cases?

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

#54

Post by gsich » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #13

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.

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…

I think what parent also meant is input delay from the remote.

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

#55

Post by gsich » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

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...

Only your current transponder.

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

#56

Post by java-man » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #15

java-man wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"they" usually write requirements for set top middleware and control the broadcast. the problem, i think, is not that it is difficult (Musk launched a massive electric car company and spacecraft to ISS in the relevant time frame), but that "they" don't care about the users.

pretty much anything cable and satellite tv companies do is against the user. there is very little (if any) innovation in the industry, and that's why they will eventually die.

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

#57

Post by ryanianian » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

brosinante wrote: post #21

Has anyone ever also noticed how cars are always heavier than the bikes we used when we were children. And how much more air you need and how much longer it takes to fill a car tire with a hand pump. Also, remember when none of us was a portuguese author and we used paragraphs rationally and wrote things down without splitting them into 200 letter long strings because we used mediums made for rants and did not need a…

Your comment is ad-hominem (dismissive) and does not contribute to the conversation. You can dislike with the style/syntax of the article but the point it's making isn't "things change" it's that "things change for the worse" complete with several examples which other commenters here either support or disagree with, but helpful comments mention central points in the article in good-faith conversation.

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

#58

Post by jaywalk » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

java-man wrote: post #11

wbl wrote: 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)

The Ericsson MediaRoom IPTV platform (used by AT&T Uverse in the US) does something similar to this, but it's only used to show a small window to preview the highlighted channel while you're scanning the guide.

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

#59

Post by kibwen » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #10

This is a very hard rant to read. The examples either aren't factually true or are poorly explained and the "solution" is largely nebulous. I feel like this topic has merit and with a well written article with real examples (both 2019 and 83) it could be something special, but this isn't that. I'd be interested to know how many upvoted based on the title/what they expected this to be, rather than after having tried t…

I upvoted it, but I have mixed feelings about it. I agree with the overall sentiment that it's ludicrous how much slower everything feels on computers these days: we're able to do more complex things than ever, which is great, but it's hard to rationalize why even the simple things that we've been doing forever have become so sluggish.

My first job out of college was to migrate an internal inventory management system from a in-terminal keyboard-based application (which nobody could be hired to maintain, as they stopped teaching IBM-RPG to college grads twenty years before) to a webapp. As part of gathering requirements I learned how to use it, and god damn was it fast. I watched salespeople and warehouse stockers alike fly through the menus so fast that they didn't even need to wait for screens to draw before advancing (and the screens were snap-quick to draw!), they just conjured the paths they needed from muscle memory and batched up a dozen keypresses and boom, done. I felt awful imposing this new laggy webapp on them, though I did make sure to at least leave the familiar keyboard shortcuts.

But at the same time I think the author is somewhat overselling the idea that keyboard interfaces are just as intuitive as mouse interfaces. To use the application above as an example, when we showed the new webapp to people who only had cause to use this system occasionally, they were able to navigate it more easily and professed to prefer it over the old one. Contrast this with people who used the system all day, who grumbled at the loss of productivity and need to re-learn things.

Keyboard shortcuts are great for power users who have cause to master an application thoroughly. For occasional users who don't need to master it and don't want to learn anything, a mouse will get them up and running faster. And, of course, there's still no excuse for how much lag and slowness we willingly endure in our modern UIs.

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

#60

Post by eitland » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

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…

Edit: yes. Rewrote half of it.

The thing with Google Maps was that it was actually reasonably good and intuitive on mobile until sometime 5 or 7 years ago when someone decided it had to be "simplified".

The old version was easy: you enter "to" and "from", and it gives you a route.

I think it also had multiple entry points so you could choose "navigate", "browse" and "timeline" or something directly from the system menu.

The "simplified" version removed all that + the timeline feature I think and replaced it with one search box.

The timeline came back after a while as did a number of other features they removed but it still isn't as easy or intuitive as the early versions and it still annoys me every time I want to get a route from A to B (as opposed to from where I am now to B).

Compare this to Windows 95 that I disliked for a few months until I got used to system wide drag and drop and realized it was in fact better than Windows 3.1.