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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)

#71

Post by brentonator »

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…

I can do that today. What app are you using?

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

#72

Post by kabdib »

I had an Atari ST in a closet, and decided to get rid of it a while back. I pulled it out to test it. The boot sequence, all the way to a desktop with a mouse that moves, takes less than one second. If you boot from a hard drive, maybe another second. For a while I just kept hitting the reset button, marveling at the speed at which the ST came up.

Most machines I work with these days take minutes to get rolling.

Okay, I know that systems are bigger and more complicated now; buses have to be probed and trained, RAM has to be checked, network stuff needs to happen, etc., etc., but minutes? This is just industry laziness, a distributed abdication of respect for users, a simple piling-on of paranoia and "one or two more seconds won't matter, will it?"

Story time.

A cow-orker of mine use to work at a certain very large credit card company. They were using IBM systems to do their processing, and downtime was very, very, very important to them. One thing that irked them was the boot time for the systems, again measured in minutes; the card company's engineers were pretty sure the delays were unecessary, and asked IBM to remove them. Nope. "Okay, give us the source code to the OS and we'll do that work." Answer: "No!"

So the CC company talked to seven very large banks, the seven very large banks talked to IBM, and IBM humbly delivered the source code to the OS a few days later. The CC company ripped out a bunch of useless gorp in the boot path and got the reboot time down to a few tens of seconds.

When every second is worth money, you can get results.

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

#74

Post by mirekrusin »

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.

probably not much because you don't need to decompress them, just keep in volatile memory

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

#75

Post by feanaro »

sonofaplum wrote: post #53
PostPost wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How would not erasing information when you move the map compromise the current use case, though?

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

#77

Post by thrower123 »

eitland wrote: post #60
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 me…

Performance has also degraded disastrously. My phone is kind of a dinosaur at this point (Galaxy 7), but the lag when scrolling around the map is seconds, and elements delay-load so that misclicks are constant.

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

#78

Post by papito »

ryanianian wrote: post #9
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.

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…

Hotel remotes. You all triple-sanitize them, right? And then burn them....

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

#79

Post by criddell »

jaywalk wrote: post #51
criddell wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I unplug my internet connection, my box won't let me do much at all. If I press pause or fast forward it just tells me the operation isn't authorized.

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

#80

Post by sonofaplum »

feanaro wrote: post #75
sonofaplum wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How would not erasing information when you move the map compromise the current use case, though?

Because especially on mobile, screen space is insanely valuable, and if you want to show new information from the new area the map has been moved to you often need to remove "stale" information.
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