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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)

#441

Post by m463 »

joncrane wrote: post #2

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 problem is that (mpeg video frames, mpeg audio frames, streaming latency, hdmi decoding, etc...) all introduce a delay for reasons.

The answer: put an ad in there.

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

#442

Post by mirekrusin »

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 same way that switching to a channel does it. But instead of waiting for next one to arrive you first scan your 0.5s buffer.

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

#443

Post by tomaskafka »

wolfgke wrote: post #13
joncrane wrote: post #2

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…

Or, the TV UX designers can realize this, and make the TV respond instantly by switching eg. to channel logo plus a name of current programme (it is available from EPG) and then replacing it with video 0.5 later.

This would allow a rapid channel surfing, something I haven't been able to do on any recent TV.

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

#444

Post by tomaskafka »

ddingus wrote: post #70
wolfgke wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

joncrane was complaining about the time to change channels. This approach does nothing to decrease this time.

Exactly. It does placate users with some indication of activity. This can impact how someone feels about the change, but does nothing to solve the time to change problem. One thing it does do is confirm the change is in progress. That is a subset of the time to change problem. Many current UX on this do not give a very good, or any indicator of successful input. Quite a few people may see their feelings about the tim…

You can show the program name and what's on on that black screen, this info is already available from EPG.

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

#445

Post by faissaloo »

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.

KolibriOS has a ~5 second boot time https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=84&v=XnlA4ijrTBo

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

#446

Post by papito »

basscomm wrote: post #317
papito wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hotel remotes. You all triple-sanitize them, right? And then burn them....

I don't generally bother. I like to challenge my immune system once in a while to keep it in fighting condition.

Uhhh.

"In fact, we found semen on 30% of the remote controls we tested."

http://m.cnn.com/en/article/h_990ff64f90f909f55b916692ee340d...

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

#447

Post by [deleted] »

papito wrote: post #446
basscomm wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't generally bother. I like to challenge my immune system once in a while to keep it in fighting condition.

Uhhh. "In fact, we found semen on 30% of the remote controls we tested." http://m.cnn.com/en/article/h_990ff64f90f909f55b916692ee340d...

[deleted]

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

#448

Post by msla »

I don't know, I can compile code perceptually instantly and get optimizations which perceptually instant compilers didn't do in 1983. I know that Turbo Pascal was very fast when it came to compiling Pascal, and I certainly appreciate the effort which went into making that happen, but Turbo Pascal didn't turn string handling code into SIMD operations after turning a recursive function into an unrolled loop.

Partly, this was due to the fact the IBM PC did not have SIMD operations in 1983, but the rest is because modern compilers run complex optimization passes in tiny fractions of a second.

Also, I'd like to see this person say that operations on computers were perceptually instant while logged into a PDP-11/70 or (let's be a tad generous) a VAX-11/780 with a half-dozen other people all trying to use it at the same time. Yes, faster computers existed in 1983. Didn't mean the likes of you got to use them.

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

#449

Post by ultrarunner »

folmar wrote: post #436
ultrarunner wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would not have a big deal to measure/guess your reaction time and wind back changes you had not chance to see.

In fact I’m pretty sure Safari does this in its Omni-bar. Why it can’t be system wide I don’t know.

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

#450

Post by Piskvorrr »

Retric wrote: post #330
Piskvorrr wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like a server is expected to spend approximately 0,000% of its lifetime doing POST.

In normal operations sure, but in downtime that’s another story.

In that case, you shouldn't be looking for an answer to "how can I make a faster (rebooting) horse," but rather "is there a way to make this redundant, so that a single node offline won't critically endanger the system?"
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