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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)

#351

Post by nwallin »

sudosysgen wrote: post #217
the8472 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm actually relatively confident that you could get it down to 8-9 seconds to the basic X environment with an NVMe SSD and maybe even less if you were to cache some application states.

A few years ago I went about trying to get my laptop to boot as fast as possible. Got it down to 9 seconds from POST completion to X with Chromium running.

The only differences between the system I used for benchmarking and my regular desktop was autologin, chromium in the startup script, and the enablement of the benchmarking thing. I'll probably poke around with it tonight and see if it's any different on my new laptop. This one had a proper NVMe as opposed to the m.2 SSD in my old laptop.

My Windows desktop at work takes forever to get running. Even after you log in and the desktop is visible it's another minute until it's usable.

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

#352

Post by Proziam »

maemilius wrote: post #312
Avamander wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UEFI Fast boot improves it significantly on modern hardware.

In all 25 years I've used computers, I can't recall having a PC that took more than a minute to POST. Ever. My current PC's fast boot is fast enough that it looks like the computer turns on and goes straight to Windows. Maybe I've just gotten really lucky...

All of my machines are the same. From the time I plug in the power cable and hit the go button I can expect to see my desktop in around 10 seconds. It's fast enough that when I'm in discord with coworkers and need to switch OS it doesn't really affect the workflow at all.

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

#353

Post by 01100011 »

jaywalk wrote: post #32
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…

That's a big part of it. But the other part, which can actually contribute more time than the decoding, is simply slow software on the STB.

There are some terrible middleware implementations out there. I remember hearing about some early attempts from DirecTV at building a DVR. They were encoding everything in xml and sending it through IPC spaghetti. IME, the level of talent in the consumer electronics space is much less than, say, a big N company. You have a lot of EE turned sw guy types, or java-trained CS grads who don't understand performance. Now that the industry is slowly dying, it's losing even more talent.

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

#354

Post by sneak »

ehnto wrote: post #132
Narishma wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the first thing I disable after ever Windows 10 update (it keeps getting reset for some reason). If you have a dual-boot setup, it can result in a corrupted partition if you try to access your Windows 10 partition from another OS when fast start is enabled.

I run separate partitions for OS and storage on dual boot machines, so I can avoid the risk of one OS corrupting the other.

Nope; if the hibernated OS has the storage volume mounted, and you edit that volume in another OS, separate or not you will end up with corruption, just as if two machines had mounted it simultaneously.

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

#355

Post by nwallin »

wolfgke wrote: post #118
mirekrusin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> probably not much because you don't need to decompress them, just keep in volatile memory How do you plan to obtain I-frames without decompressing them?

The decompression could be done lazily when you switch to that channel.

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

#356

Post by lez »

Reading through the comments it would seem that the article is a false alarm. The count of upvotes dictates the opposite.

My opinion is that the baseline for what we achieve as good (and quick) service has been slowly lift up by the industry. At the same time specific design practices were implemented to ease our frustration about slow service, and "feel" at least that the service is quick.

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

#357

Post by dwild »

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 took a look at a recording of the Atari ST GUI on Youtube, it didn't seems that fast to resize a basic folder view windows.

Who care about boot time when you do it once in a while versus actually using that interface?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1b9kUP0WtI

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

#358

Post by temac »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #344
efdee wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

That's kind of a marketing distinction. VS is not a kind of monolithic spaghetti monster system: internally, it is made of components, which provide a text editor, indexing for various languages, etc.

You can do likewise with VS Code or other environments, except maybe some plugins are not installed by default.

In the end it boils down to: how do we define an IDE? And even if it is about bundled capabilities, I would still be able to create a "dedicated" (would not need much modification) Linux distro and declare it to be an IDE.

It was easier to distinguish IDE from other things in the MS-DOS era.

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

#359

Post by wmf »

jasonjayr wrote: post #25
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…

Cache the most recent iframe on the network and have the STB pull + display the cached iframe till it catches up? This would enable fast channel scanning/flipping at the very least ...

IIRC Microsoft did this in their IPTV platform.

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

#360

Post by ultrarunner »

romwell wrote: post #321
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 go…

Windows 10 search and macOS's spotlight do something like this. It's irritating when results reorder themselves milliseconds before I hit enter.

Either way I'm not sure it rises to the level of indignation shown here.

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