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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)

#371
post #49
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should have turned images off.

I wonder if there was a "images are ruining the internet" panic like the the modern day "Look my blog is just html, why can't everything be that way?" rants?

I just remember wishing it was faster. Now that it's faster I still wish it was faster.

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

#372
post #115

This seems to be conflating several separate problems 1) I can't manipulate data in my resultset well enough in google map. 2) Searches are too slow. 3) Mousing is bad. Now, you can argue that those are related. The first two are an argument for moving away from full-page post/response applications to SPA-style applications where the data is all in browser memory and as you manipulate it you're doing stuff on the cli…

The begging of his rant was was very much all over the place but towards the end he very much honed in on the loss of keyboard efficiency. I'm sure everyone who has experienced keyboard efficiency can agree.

I think the part you quoted is an interesting problem. I agree with his statement that UIs are not necessarily intuitive, however I do believe they are easier to pick up than keyboard inputs. Seeing older people try to navigate websites shows me how much "intuitiveness" I take for granted and is actually just experience. I think the focus though was that the "intuitiveness of a GUIs" is not worth the loss in efficiency, especially when we have the capabilities to combine the two interfaces into one system.

One thing he said stood out to me, which was that including a mouse interface on a primarily keyboard-based system is much better than trying to add keyboard functionality in a primarily mouse-based based interface.

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

#373
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.

Minutes? That sounds exaggerated.

How powerful was your Atari ST compared to other machines at the time versus the machines you work with these days compared to other machines available?

Because I'm not even on a particularly new machine and from a powered off state I'm logged into Windows and starting applications within 5 seconds. And for example that's at 7680x2880 resolution, not 640x400.

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

#374

After reading this headline I felt like I was having Deja Vu. I wasn't, it was posted 11 hours ago [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663 (posted two years ago)

Seems everyone commenting on the post from earlier today totally missed the ultimate point of his post, which was UI bloat and failing to take advantage of keyboard efficiencies. It's almost like the large majority of them only read the title...

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

#375
post #373
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. Minutes? That sounds exaggerated. How powerful was your Atari ST compared to other machines at the time versus the machines you work with these days compared to other machines available? Because I'm not even on a particularly new machine and from a powered off state I'm logged into Windows and starting applications within 5 seconds. And for example t…

Doesn't windows do a type of hibernate rather than a full shutdown.

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

#376
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.

I just put a Ryzen 5 3400G in a B450 board and it hits the login screen from cold start in like 3 seconds (and no there's not still a bunch of stuff churning in the background - it's all but done loading at that point).

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tuning chip costs maybe 50 cents or something. Just have 3 or 4 of them and pretune the next few channels. That's 50 cents the shareholders can pocket, and everyone has already inured themselves to the slower experience. Isn't progress great?

50 cents per unit times several hundreds of millions of units adds up to real money in a hurry. BOM costs make or break mass market hardware products. You don't just add 50 cents of BOM to a mass market item without a real good reason.

> BOM costs make or break mass market hardware products. You don't just add 50 cents of BOM to a mass market item without a real good reason.

I guess the question is, why is that so?

IMHO, a valid "real good reason" is fixing a product/technological UX regression. However, it seems American business practices have settled on shamelessly selling the cheapest acceptable product for the highest acceptable price. If cheaper means a little crappier and enough customers will put up with it, cheaper it is. I'm dissatisfied with it because it usually means the stuff I buy is less durable or lacking on some fit-and-finish area.

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

#378

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...

pretty much any server in existence (vendor hw) takes minutes to boot, it's painful having to test bios options on most servers.

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

#379
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Things are possible if one puts one's mind to it. five seconds, year 2008: https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ two seconds, year 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUUtZjd6UA4&t=17

And that 5 second boot time was on an Asus EEE 701, which had Intel Celeron M 630 MHz, and just 512 MB ram.

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

#380

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…

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).

What does self-testing cover? RAM? That's something the OS could do as a background task, incrementally making memory available during boot after a chunk has been scanned.
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