Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 451 posts

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

#301

Post by TeMPOraL »

notyourday wrote: post #287
TeMPOraL wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a map . That's what you do with maps. You browse them, you study them, you mark them up. I use Google Maps almost daily and this is also my complaint. It's not a hyper-specific use case. Google Maps are good for navigating from point A to point B when you are sure of both , but they suck at being a map . For instance, lack of always-on street names and weird POI handling makes them problematic to use whe…

I disagree. That's what we used to do with a map because we did not have information available at our fingertips . We would study the map ahead of time, based on the map figure out our plan of action by either making mental notes or notes in notepad, or notes on a map and eventually execute our plan based on the information we have selected. We no longer need to do that. We can decide "I want to do something around X…

Repeatedly searching and dropping pins in Google Maps is like eating your dinner by pulping it and drinking through a straw.

Studying a map ahead of time and marking it up (on the map itself, as we did with paper maps and dry-erase or permanent markers) is a more efficient interface. There's this forgotten principle in UI that users can mentally filter out noise and focus on relevant parts very good; that's what our sense of sight is optimized for. Having to actively search whenever you need to know something is an inferior experience, both in terms of efficiency and because of missing context.

(Also, dropping permanent pins is AFAIK impossible in the Google Maps proper; it's a feature of "my maps", which is hidden somewhere and has weird interactions with Google Maps.)

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

#303

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

I used to know a computer music academic who used to attempt to run FFT convolution and other DSP processes on an Atari ST.

One time he started a process, went away on holiday for two weeks, and it was still running when he got back.

These days it would be much faster than real time - not just native, but in a web browser.

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

#304

Post by diamondo25 »

the8472 wrote: post #170
kabdib wrote: post #72

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…

Corporate windows installations are unnecessarily slow because they run antivirus and all kinds of domain membership stuff in the boot and logon path. A clean install with fast boot and without that gunk takes seconds. A headless linux can come up in seconds (UEFI fast boot + EFI stub) or even less than a second if you're in a VM and don't have to deal with the firmware startup. Booting to a lightweight window manage…

If your host machine is a real server (eg poweredge), itll do a selftest. This already takes tens of seconds. If you want fast bootup times, you need to be the BIOS. The example in the top post is stuff that either loads data off a flash chip (like a bios works) or a disk (requires some bootstrapping).

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

#305

Post by Piskvorrr »

the8472 wrote: post #170
kabdib wrote: post #72

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…

Corporate windows installations are unnecessarily slow because they run antivirus and all kinds of domain membership stuff in the boot and logon path. A clean install with fast boot and without that gunk takes seconds. A headless linux can come up in seconds (UEFI fast boot + EFI stub) or even less than a second if you're in a VM and don't have to deal with the firmware startup. Booting to a lightweight window manage…

Headless, schmeadless: a RPi with the Slowest Disk In The Universe come up to a functional GUI under a minute. Slower boot (and correlated, slow work) on far beefier hardware is down to pure crud. Sure, you need a bazillion updaters, two for each program, and three antiviruses checking each other - in other words, "users have fast computers, SHIP IT!"

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

#306

Post by gwbas1c »

kabdib wrote: post #72

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…

My Pixel 3 boots rather fast compared to my Macbook pro, or my Windows desktop that I hardly ever use.

I guess it just comes down to priorities. I'm sure if PC specs included "boot time (lower is better,)" we'd see boot times drop quickly.

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

#307

Post by glitchc »

arpa wrote: post #199

So you hate the mouse. Mouse is an benevolent dictator. It tries to help. You want to know who Stalin is? Fucking touchscreens. You're blind? Fuck you. You have Parkinsons? Off to the death camp you go. You want to type in your pocket while paying zero attention to the poison screen which is taken up by half by an idiotic keyboard on which you will continuously mistype and be moronically autocorrected to a point wher…

Do you need a hug?

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

#308

Post by pedrocr »

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…

No need to reinvent video encoding. At least my local provider seems to fix this by having all the channels streamed as multicast continuously and then having the TV box request a small bit of video over normal TCP to do the channel switch immediately and only later syncing to the multicast. That allows you to change channels quickly at any time and starting to watch at whatever the latest I-frame was.

I notice this happening when IGMP forwarding is broken in my router and channels will only play for a second or two after being switched to and then stopping. Switch times are pretty good.

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

#309

Post by Piskvorrr »

kabdib wrote: post #233
throwGuardian wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An SSD can make a world of difference. Most of the time spent during boot up is in executing random reads (of about 4Kb size) from storage, and SSDs are a factor of magnitude faster there

Sorry, most of a box's boot time is the BIOS and other stuff. The servers I run at work take 3-4 minutes to boot, the last twenty seconds or so is the OS coming up. The consumer PCs I use have a similar ratio. POST time is crazy bad. It's almost like the engineers working on it don't care.

It's almost like a server is expected to spend approximately 0,000% of its lifetime doing POST.

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

#310

Post by ajmurmann »

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.

It's not only switching channels, even just turning the thing on. Also switching between inputs takes a long time, a large part of which is spend in the menu. The only thing I ever do is switch between AppleTV and PS4 and adjust volume because the PS4 is orders of magnitude louder than the AppleTV, yet so of that always feels super clunky if I have to use the TV remote.
Post reply on HN