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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)

#321

Post by romwell »

AStellersSeaCow wrote: post #257

To call this rose-tinted glasses when considering how things worked in 1983 is a massive understatement. A counterexample: in 1983, enter two search terms, one of them slightly misspelled or misremembered, hit f3: "no results", spend 10 minutes trying to find the needle in the haystack, give up and physically search for the thing yourself. Enter two search terms slightly incorrectly now: no of the time it will know e…

All of this is absolutely no excuse for the ridiculously high latency everywhere now.

Want to give me fancy autocorrect? Fine. But first:

* Make a UI with instant feedback, which doesn't wait on your autocorrect

* Give me exact results instantly before your autocorrect kicks in

* Run your fancy slow stuff in the background if resources are available

* Update results when you get them... if I didn't hit "enter" and got away from you before that.

It's not that complicated. We've got the technology.

And also, there's still no fucking reason a USB keyboard/mouse should be more laggy than their counterparts back in the day.

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

#322

Post by Multicomp »

sangnoir wrote: post #290
BurningFrog wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Google Maps since it launched, and had no idea this is how it works! One important factor in a good UI is that it is discoverable ! If you build an amazing feature but forget to inform the user about it, you've wasted the work.

I discovered this by myself - I mean, the search button is right there! I must have been in the middle of a trip & searched for something, which pops up an "Add Stop" button. I think it's pretty discoverable.

I'm glad you discovered this, but let's look at a strawman grandma: "the search bar is where you type where you want to go, therefore if I search, it will turn off my current navigation / reroute my destination to whatever I am searching for".

The above is not a foregone conclusion, but it was how I thought until I read your and parent's postings about it, and I'm a techie. For every 1 techie that doesn't know about a feature, there are 1,000 users (or something like that).

I would posit that the discover-ability difficulties are present whether someone is in a TUI or a GUI.

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

#323

Post by Retric »

maccard wrote: post #205
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…

> Most machines I work with these days take minutes to get rolling. My current Windows 10 machine boots faster than my monitor turns on (<5 seconds from power on to login screen).

Login screen is hardly the end of the boot up process. I have had work laptops where I would login then go get a water because it’s going to take several minutes to finish loading.

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

#324

Post by Piskvorrr »

athenot wrote: post #292
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.

The slowness can also be because the channel you are trying to watch is not even there. I'm not sure who all is using it now but I used to work on the setup for Switched Digital Video. If nobody in your neighborhood was watching a certain channel, it would stop getting broadcast. That freed up bandwith for other things like internet. Once you would tune to a channel, a request would go to the head-end, it would quick…

And that's one of the reasons things seem worse: there are massive, clever efforts to provide an infinity of options, but they're not completely seamless. Compared to the do-one-thing-and-one-thing-only appliances of yesteryear, it necessarily looks bad, especially when looking through the memory's rose-tinted glasses.

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

#325

Post by notyourday »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #301
notyourday wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

You are thinking about it as a synchronous workflow. Study map->create a plan->execute a plan. This workflow was the only workflow because it was impossible to execute a search when needed.

Google maps is optimized for a modern workflow. "I'm here. I need X. How do I get there?" With pins that workflow is asynchronous.

For example, I use pins for restaurants. I find/read something about a place I want to try at some point. I drop pins. Next time when I happened to be in the area I see the pins that I dropped. It may happened to tomorrow or three months from now. My alternative is yelp with its sync workflow - search and analyze results of a search or rely on my memory of what place should be around where.

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

#326

Post by 333c »

As I scrolled through this, using my mouse to click the heart on a number of the tweets, I really understood the point he makes about actions that don't need to use a mouse. When I program in vim and run things on the command line, I don't use my mouse. Even when I browse Reddit, I don't (often) use my mouse because of the RES extension, which lets me browse with keyboard shortcuts. I haven't really thought about how much easier things generally are when I'm not using my mouse, and I wish there were a similar extension for other websites. Does such an extension exist for Twitter, or for HN?

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

#327

Post by ineedasername »

normalnorm wrote: post #196
ineedasername wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting directions is simple. Even the author doesn't take issue with that specific functionality. And I've never had an issue with Google maps hiding street names when there was ample room to show them, but if you're more than a little zoomed out, there isn't that room. Showing only major roads is a decent trade off, as is the mouse scroll wheel for zoom in/out. Or maybe it's my own failure of imagination: how would…

> Getting directions is simple. Even the author doesn't take issue with that specific functionality. Yes he does. You touch anything and state is erased. Don't know exactly which one of the search results you want to go to? Tough shit, the interface works against you. And still, getting directions used to be simpler. Now you have to decipher unlabeled hieroglyphs, and the interface keeps changing. You can't even get…

Granted, some good ideas.

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

#328

Post by beckingz »

bobcostas55 wrote: post #206
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…

The latest AMD CPUs are particularly bad at this, I got a 3600 and for half a year now there are known problems with extremely slow booting. The latest BIOS update made them a bit better but it's still at completely unacceptable levels.

No issue with my 3700. Boots in a second or two.

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

#329

Post by ineedasername »

simias wrote: post #190
ineedasername wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting directions is simple. Even the author doesn't take issue with that specific functionality. And I've never had an issue with Google maps hiding street names when there was ample room to show them, but if you're more than a little zoomed out, there isn't that room. Showing only major roads is a decent trade off, as is the mouse scroll wheel for zoom in/out. Or maybe it's my own failure of imagination: how would…

It's really not about not having enough room. An example that I found immediately zooming at some random location on Google Maps: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20191219-174804_map.png Note that none of the larger roads leading to the roundabout at the top-left is named, while some (but not all) smaller streets names are here. Instead you have the "D509" label copy/pasted haphazardly but that's not the actual name of th…

I think the D509 type of issue is just a trade off. At least when in happens in the US: It is the "official" designation and can be used on Post, while the local name changes from town to town. That is less of an issue when navigating within the same town, more of an issue when navigating through towns: Go 30 miles along a "CR" county road and it might change names 4 times. Rather confusing for directions to make it look like you have to travel down 4 different roads for that one leg of the journey. I suppose Google could show both though, depending on zoom level.

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

#330

Post by Retric »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #309
kabdib wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In normal operations sure, but in downtime that’s another story.
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