401–410 of 451 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also, ECC failures usually cause a machine check. Not sure if you can control this on modern machines, it might be all or nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not implying that it's bad software, I'm just curious because it sounds unusual.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 chea…
50 cents x 4, along with the other increase likely $5+ of BOM cost increase could make or break a consumer product. But your reason is also true as it improves UX.
This is where innovation and Apple comes in, you need to market the product with a features that masses of consumer believes in it and are willing to pay for it. ( Lots of people, including those on HN often mistaken innovation as invention )
There is nothing "American" about this business practices, it is the same as any European, Chinese or Korean Manufacturers. They could have very well put this feature in but I am willing to bet $100 it wouldn't make a difference to consumer's purchase decision. So why continue to add $5 or more for a feature they cant sell.
But Apple has the ability to move consumers, and to charge higher ( as a package along to this feature ) to demand a premium. And if Apple successfully market this feature, say with some sort of brandname like "QuickSwitch", it is only a matter of time before other manufacturers copy it.
Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.
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…
This is a bad comment/reply - upstream wasn't complaining about the codec but about the usability (of the devices).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I upvoted it, but I have mixed feelings about it. I agree with the overall sentiment that it's ludicrous how much slower everything feels on computers these days: we're able to do more complex things than ever, which is great, but it's hard to rationalize why even the simple things that we've been doing forever have become so sluggish. My first job out of college was to migrate an internal inventory management system…
I feel like a large part of the unintuitiveness of keyboard interfaces is not actually an intrinsic quality of keyboard interfaces since they're so often conflated with command-line or TUI interfaces. There might be an alternative but yet undiscovered paradigm which combines the best of both worlds: keyboard control and intuitive, beautiful, graphical widgets. To motivate this with a somewhat blunt example, what if w…
The trend lately seems to be to hide the underscore until you hold down alt for a while, which makes the feature much more difficult to use when you don't know every shortcut by heart.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/inter...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like a large part of the unintuitiveness of keyboard interfaces is not actually an intrinsic quality of keyboard interfaces since they're so often conflated with command-line or TUI interfaces. There might be an alternative but yet undiscovered paradigm which combines the best of both worlds: keyboard control and intuitive, beautiful, graphical widgets. To motivate this with a somewhat blunt example, what if w…
>To motivate this with a somewhat blunt example, what if we had a typical GUI but named each control (button, field, etc) with a short code (1-2 letters), in the style of Vimperator/Tridactyl/Vimium? Excel basically does this. If you hold down alt it hovers the companion hotkey above each function on the ribbon. It is very handy for learning your way around. I think this is actually the big challenge with keyboard in…
This is a very hard rant to read. The examples either aren't factually true or are poorly explained and the "solution" is largely nebulous. I feel like this topic has merit and with a well written article with real examples (both 2019 and 83) it could be something special, but this isn't that. I'd be interested to know how many upvoted based on the title/what they expected this to be, rather than after having tried t…
I upvoted it because I wrote and spoke this last 20 years. Keyboard buffer. You know what is keyboard buffer?
Of course, this doesn't work anymore in Windows 10. Now you have to wait for each bit of mysterious UI to load before you can click on to the next step.
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 have been arguing about this since may be 2016 or earlier, on HN it was the echo chamber of how much faster VSCode is compared to Atom! I cant believe this is built on Electron etc. And with every VSCode update I tried and while it was definitely faster than Atom, it was no way near as fast as Sublime. And every time this was brought up the answer was they felt no different between VSCode and Sublime or VSCode is fast enough it didn't matter.
The biggest problem of all problems is not seeing it as a problem.
I hope VSCode will continue to push the boundary of Electron Apps, they had a WebGL Render if I remember correctly that was way faster, not sure if there are anymore things in the pipeline.