371–380 of 447 posts
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)
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…
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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).
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…
POST on a Dell M640 is about three minutes. Other Dell systems are similar. POST on the workstations that I use are in the range of 1-2 minutes. This is before the OS gets control (once that happens, it's usually 15-20 seconds to a usable system).
The ST was a pretty decent performer at the time (arguably a little faster than the original Macintosh, for instance). Both the ST and the Macintosh took about the same amount of time to boot from floppy disk (though the OS was in ROM for the vast majority of STs that were built).
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…
I agree that a lot of the use cases back then were hyperspecific and the software were drag racers. However, much of what he talks about is productivity tools. I believe those fit the same description. I occasionally work with many different screens using a TN3270, some of which look very different and have very different purposes, however they have a common interface with similar keystrokes. This makes navigating ev…
In light of that, I think it's less that we've "lost" keyboard-driven efficiency as much as knowingly sacrificed it in favor of spending UI/UX dev time on more generally desired/useful features. The nice thing about being the type of power user who wants more keyboard functionality is that you can often code/macro it yourself.