71–80 of 388 posts
I 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.
> almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 .... amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly. .... now: type in two words, wait for an AJAX popup. get a throbber for five seconds. oops you pressed a key, your results are erased So we start with something 15 years AFTER the title as evidence of the "good" times, then make a vague…
> ...there's no actual evidence in this article, and it comes across as a rant and selective nostalgia. You're saying that as if somehow that was a problem, but it's not.
If the author makes an assertion that contradicts my experiences, they better provide SOME evidence, or be dismissed (which is presumably NOT their intent).
Result a far faster program, but far less options available to the user. I think you will find many of the older systems that are faster are also more limited in what options they offer to the users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, I still can't set up a linux that's both graphical and feels snappy to this day.
could you do that in the past though?
Wanna talk about stability, not responsiveness and snappiness, you can add OSX/macOS to that list in addition to the above. It's not great but it's vastly better than anything else not on the above list. I've never, in 20 years, had a Linux GUI system that wasn't fairly crashy. "Oh it was just an app crash" or "oh X just quit but the OS is still up and you can restart it" or "oh some KDE daemon just shit the bed, restart X or do [arcane invocation] to put KDE back in a good state and it'll be fine" yeah OK well it's still a crash and I still lost stuff so it may as well have BSOD'd for all I care. Before I switched to macOS I was kinda blind to how bad it was because it was just normal. Modern Windows seems to be getting better on that front but I only use it for gaming so IDK.
[EDIT] to be fair, if I hadn't experienced BeOS and QNX (on shitty hardware, mind you, even by the standards of the time when I ran them) then super-minimalist Linux GUIs might be what I'd consider "snappy and responsive". Those were just in a whole other league, and really reset my understanding of what was possible (but rarely achieved)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast. Maybe the HN crowd can but not your average or median computer users > I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing I still have computers that take some time to boot. Issue is, I just rarely power off/on. Instead the computers go to sleep which if much faster to come out of. Of…
Nah, I still can't set up a linux that's both graphical and feels snappy to this day.
Everything goes to shit as soon as you install one of those “desktop environments” though.
This 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…
The slowness is orthogonal to all those things that have improved. We can put the fast back just fine while keeping those things.
> almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 .... amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly. .... now: type in two words, wait for an AJAX popup. get a throbber for five seconds. oops you pressed a key, your results are erased So we start with something 15 years AFTER the title as evidence of the "good" times, then make a vague…
Also the amount of data we query in most cases is many orders of magnitude larger. Most of the 1980-1995 cases could fit the entire datasets in CPU cache and be insanely fast. Most things I query these days are in the gigabytes to terabytes range. Lastly, we have to make them secure,especially against malformed data attempting to attack the app, which eats a lot of CPU cycles.
How big do you think CPU caches were at the time? CPUs towards the start of the era didn't even have caches.
This 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…
Most of the old nonsense you listed is specific to PCs. Amigas (for example) were much friendlier.
This 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…
>But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. You still have to waste a lot of time doing this crap. Last time I set up a printer for my mom, it was a PITA: I had to download drivers, install some giant pile of crap software, go through a bunch of screens of garbage, etc. Needless to say, her computer runs Windows 10. By contrast, when I wanted to print to…
This 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…
OP gave examples. Could you provide a couple of examples as well?