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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)

#341

Post by NoGravitas »

efdee wrote: post #333
mtm7 wrote: post #315

Related: I was bored last Sunday, so I decided to install Sublime Text. I'm normally a VS Code user, but VS Code is built on Electron and it felt a little sluggish for certain files, so I wanted to give something else a try. I've been using Sublime all week and it feels like an engineering masterpiece. Everything is instantly responsive. It jumps between files without skipping a beat. My battery lasts longer. (I don'…

Weird to compare an IDE and a text editor, though.

VS Code and Sublime Text are comparable, though: they're both extensible text editors, not real IDEs.

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

#343

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

WaltPurvis wrote: post #187

"There's no reason for Twitter to use a mouse. There's nothing mousey about this website, not a damn thing twitter: i need to navigate through a linear list and perform one of four actions on discrete items, almost all text-based" He's apparently never bothered to learn Twitter's built-in keyboard shortcuts. You can do almost everything on Twitter without touching a mouse.

Any reference? Closest I can find on Twitter's site itself is this [1] but the second shortcut (l to like) doesn't work for me.

[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/how-to-tweet

Edit: OK, it works, when you use default keyboard controls (e.g. tab) to select the tweet first. I'd assumed it would work from a 'single tweet' page without having to do anything else first. Overall, looks promising, but not as nice as the keyboard controls in gmail, for example.

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

#344

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

efdee wrote: post #333
mtm7 wrote: post #315

Related: I was bored last Sunday, so I decided to install Sublime Text. I'm normally a VS Code user, but VS Code is built on Electron and it felt a little sluggish for certain files, so I wanted to give something else a try. I've been using Sublime all week and it feels like an engineering masterpiece. Everything is instantly responsive. It jumps between files without skipping a beat. My battery lasts longer. (I don'…

Weird to compare an IDE and a text editor, though.

VS Code ~= VS. It's a text editor, not an IDE (unless you consider things like VIM to be IDEs because you can use plugins to do IDE-like stuff with them.)

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

#345

Post by wnevets »

throwGuardian wrote: post #191
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…

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

SSD + Windows 10 + Fast Boot = seconds of boot time

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

#346

Post by anon73044 »

floatboth wrote: post #276
bobcostas55 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's very board specific I think, some boards from the first Zen generation also had that problem, but my MSI board boots very quickly

This. MSI B450 + 3600 and I'm still on bios 7B85v19 SSD is and older 850 EVO and boots to desktop in under 30 seconds

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

#347

Post by PaulKeeble »

mtm7 wrote: post #315

Related: I was bored last Sunday, so I decided to install Sublime Text. I'm normally a VS Code user, but VS Code is built on Electron and it felt a little sluggish for certain files, so I wanted to give something else a try. I've been using Sublime all week and it feels like an engineering masterpiece. Everything is instantly responsive. It jumps between files without skipping a beat. My battery lasts longer. (I don'…

I used to choose Eclipse over IntelliJ for similar reasons years ago. When it came to refactoring and other integrated features IntelliJ won, but Eclipse could do partial compilation on save and the run of a unit test automatically within moments, something which on IntelliJ invoked a Maven build that often took minutes.

The performance of feedback and the speed with which you can go through the basic cycle of coding and testing it works as expected is the speed at which you can develop code and the editor is a pretty critical part of that.

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

#348

Post by kabdib »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #298
kabdib wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when the OS was loaded off of a hard drive, the boot time was still about 2-3 seconds (I did measure this). Not really exceptional. It took maybe a minute to load off floppy disk. That is STILL shorter than the POST time for every machine I work with these days, with the possible exception of the Raspberry Pi in the closet.

All of Atari ST TOS is 192KB. On a floppy that would take a while to load. Off a hard drive, sure, not too bad.

About 60-70 seconds, IRRC. It's been a while since I measured it. We did some optimizations, other folks did a better job (e.g., optimally skewing physical sectors so that they'd be hit nearly immediately after a head seek).

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

#349

Post by Uhhrrr »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #319
Uhhrrr wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on my recent interview with a company that does a huge amount of livestreaming, the really smart people at least have a few ideas about this.

Sure. The answer is then, probably, "it's not cost-effective to do that in COTS consumer equipment."

Remember, decoding is much cheaper. And if you own or have some control over the client, there is flexibility about how you get things.

That said, it's true that there still may not be a practical solution which is better for the user than letting them wait a second.

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

#350

Post by Aloha »

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…

I've used 4.3BSD on a VAX 11/780 - and its remarkable to me how similar the experience is, even vi startup times are close. It's weird. I guess some things only go so fast. Similarly, my OS X 10.4 (or 10.5 desktop) laptop boots only marginally slower than my OS X 10.14 laptop.
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