The web is lightning fast when I turn off javascript.
True. I get wicked fast blank pages.
Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
51–60 of 388 posts
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#52I remember programming culture in the 2000s and it was so stupid. Every programmer whining 24/7 about 'bloat', they were complaining about Java though not electron. Thank God the whiners never got anything they wanted.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#53Almost everything on computers is perceptually more rich, useful, and intuitive than it was in 1983.
Almost everything on computers is more deceptive, user-hostile, and tracked than in 1983.
And increasingly, everything _with_ a computer too. I literally cannot use the laundry machines in my apartment building without an app I need to get from Google/Apple app store.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#54It boggles my mind how terrible the web is becoming on lower end connections. I have about 200ms of delay to most servers and about 5Mbit of bandwidth, and many major web pages take over 30 seconds to load if I don't block most of the assets. It's insane that webpages are now loading megabytes of data across hundreds of http requests before the images even start downloading. I've completely given up on the mobile web…
> I've completely given up on the mobile web since I can't block things the way I need to. Can't you just use uBlock Origin with Firefox Mobile and run it behind a localhost VPN like Blokada? It's not perfect but it seems enough for me. A different localhost VPN will probably give you even better results, if you customise it to your specific purpose.
Not on iOS, I got one recently for while my Android phone's being repaired, and it was an unwelcome surprise that A) FF (or anything) can't be set as default browser instead of Safari; B) 'content blockers' only work in Safari, even though all browsers are forced to use it to render anyway.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#55Almost everything on computers is perceptually more rich, useful, and intuitive than it was in 1983.
Disagree. It looks prettier but its often not more intuitive. Not 1983, but Windows 95 all the icons had text underneath them, so you knew what they did. More recently it took me a couple of years of seeing hamburger menus to make the connection "it's an icon to give you a menu". Those are everywhere but are in no way intuitive.
Google has been dropping the hamburger menu, now it's your face, lol. (Google Maps 10.34.4)
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast Well... not really. Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Sure, we have greater throughput, but we also have greater latency. https://danluu.com/term-latency/
> Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's. Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement? Most things seem faster to me. As long as the command line responds as faster as I can type, I don't care about it being faster. That being said, overall speed and what can be handled by the system certainly does matter in many cases, even if it is _just throughput_. I've recently been r…
> Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement?
It's at the end of their comment.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#57There are indeed a lot of curious examples of computers seeming to go slower today than 20,30,40 years ago. But on the whole, I completely disagree with the summary. My laptop today is faster than anything I’ve ever used before today. It boots faster, it loads files faster, it responds faster, it does more simultaneous things, it crashes far less often.
My first computer was an IBM PC jr, and using it was an exercise in patience at all times. Maybe the author never played Ultimate III on an IBM PC. It was sooooo slow. The exact same was true of the computers my friends had, C-64, Atari 800, IBM PC. It probably took a full minute to boot. Maybe the author never saw the memory test PCs used to do before even starting to boot, or how slow floppy drives were. My first modem was 110 baud... that’s a whopping 15 7-bit bytes per second. Downloading a 40x40 character image (picture made out of keyboard characters) took a minute and a half. Downloading games routinely took hours. The PCjr hard crashed and needed reboots all the time. Even my later 486 would do the same thing. Rebooting was something you just did constantly, multiple times per hour. Today, almost never.
One thing this article completely avoids acknowledging is the general difference in functionality we have today than with computers in 1983. The database lookups and maps that were faster were faster precisely because they are 7 orders of magnitude smaller data. The article is comparing DBs and maps that fit in the main memory of a computer at the time to databases and maps that are out on the internet and don’t fit on any single computer. It’s amazing that we get the results as fast as we do.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#58This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the g…
> Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability? Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours? Literally all of these are still a thing...
Which? I can't remember the last time any of these happened to me. What "hardware compatibility issues" have you experienced lately?
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#59I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing. After that was the Windows logo. I also remember waiting for the dial-up modem to connect to the internet and waiting hours for a video to download. Heck, last week I played a game streaming on GeForceNow and I was surprised by how seamless the whole experience was. Maybe some web apps are inconvenient, but you can eas…
Most computers weren't that bad, but there was a time when Windows 95/98 and the mainstream hardware it ran on weren't a good match. That's what you remember. Even then, once the thing did boot up, applications were rather responsive. > ...you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast. No, you can't. The majority of people uses software that is imposed upon them. The majority of…
I feel bad for the metaphorical user. They were robbed of their tools.
We get to keep our shell utilities and CLIs, but they were robbed of tiny single-purpose GUI tools.
We get to keep our shell pipelines and perl scripts, but they're getting locked out of their Excel spreadsheets and VBA scripts.
Hell, with how things are going even automation tools like AutoHotKey are going to perish.
"People don't know how to code" or "users aren't tech-savvy enough for data processing and programming" are bullshit statements. They just happen to not code the way Silicon Valley does. And now these users are getting corralled into caged web apps and experiences that give them no flexibility at all and just treat them like children, all the way from the feature set to the presentation.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#60I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing. After that was the Windows logo. I also remember waiting for the dial-up modem to connect to the internet and waiting hours for a video to download. Heck, last week I played a game streaming on GeForceNow and I was surprised by how seamless the whole experience was. Maybe some web apps are inconvenient, but you can eas…
Most computers weren't that bad, but there was a time when Windows 95/98 and the mainstream hardware it ran on weren't a good match. That's what you remember. Even then, once the thing did boot up, applications were rather responsive. > ...you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast. No, you can't. The majority of people uses software that is imposed upon them. The majority of…
> Most computers weren't that bad, but there was a time when Windows 95/98 and the mainstream hardware it ran on weren't a good match. That's what you remember.
That's been the issue with every Windows OS. The cheap consumer hardware available at the time of the release was not enough to provide a snappy OS experience.
Unfortunately, hardware frequencies have sort of stalled, so now we're back to square 1 again, where W10 doesn't run snappy on median consumer hardware, but the hardware isn't getting faster at the same rate it was during the first decade of 2000's.
I have a Windows 7 machine for some legacy games and software, and it feels much faster on a 6-year old CPU (Haswell) than W10 does on a 1 year old CPU.