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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)

#81

Post by ModernMech »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #58
svnpenn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Just yesterday I couldn't connect my laptop to a new classroom projector with a USB-C input. When I selected "Duplicate Display" it caused my whole system to hang unresponsive. Works fine in other rooms with HDMI to USB-C. I have no idea what is wrong.

My new iPhone XS doesn't connect to my car's bluetooth, while the 4 year old phone I replaced does. My wife's iPhone 8 does. I'm stuck using an audio cable like it's 2003 again.

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

#82

Post by thedanbob »

dayvid wrote: post #12

I 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…

I can still remember some of the text displayed when booting up my family's Win95 beige box because stayed up so long. Now if I'm trying to read an error message when booting even a slow modern computer I have to take a video and step through it frame by frame.

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

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

pixl97 wrote: post #31
ergothus wrote: post #4

> 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.

> Most of the 1980-1995 cases could fit the entire datasets in CPU cache and be insanely fast.

They couldn't then. They had to fit it in RAM.

> Most things I query these days are in the gigabytes to terabytes range.

That still is in "fits in RAM on a typical PC" to "fits in SSD on a PC, fits in RAM on a server" range.

There's little excuse for the slowness of the current searching interfaces, even if your data is in gigabytes-to-terabytes. That's where the whole "a bunch of Unix tools on a single server will be an order of magnitude more efficient than your Hadoop cluster" articles came from.

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

#84

Post by wang_li »

phren0logy wrote: post #67
svnpenn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

There are examples, but it's no longer the de facto experience. I have put PCs together from parts since about the 386 era, and there's absolutely no question that it's far smoother now than it ever was before.

Things were getting pretty good for a bit with HDMI, but the USB-C, DisplayPort, HDMI mess is a real shitshow. Sure, I don't have to set IRQs on my ISA attached serial cards, but there are still plenty of things that are really unstable/broken.

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

#85

Post by mortehu »

svnpenn wrote: post #47
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #35

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…

> 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...

Do you remember using jumpers to select IRQ and IO ports on ISA cards, or for selecting master and slave mode on IDE drives?

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

#86

Post by mindcrime »

blfr wrote: post #70

Yes, for a good long while UIs were improving and the last few years I'm fighting most of my computers to stay as usable as they were a decade+ ago. And it's usually a losing battle wherever a terminal isn't available, most painfully on the phone. Online stores have less and less useful categories and filters. Ubuntu's take on Gnome is a weak version of their Unity DE and much less efficient on smaller screens. Googl…

Yes, for a good long while UIs were improving and the last few years I'm fighting most of my computers to stay as usable as they were a decade+ ago.

I blame the advent of the "mobile era" and the much smaller screens, and differing I/O capabilities, of mobile devices. And the fact that, at some point, everybody decided "we need one UI that is applied for both desktop and mobile, despite them being completely different types of devices." And now UI design is all muddled up and nobody can (or will) optimize for large screens, keyboards, and mice, because "not everybody has a large screen, a keyboard, and a mouse." But on mobile, the pull remains to keep a UI metaphor that is basically a slight variation of the WIMP interface that originated on desktop. In the end, nobody wins.

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

#87

Post by magduf »

dahfizz wrote: post #43
stopads wrote: post #5

It 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 think there is a serious culture problem in the web development world. Web devs are obsessed with the fancy new frameworks that allow you to use even more JavaScript and somehow convince themselves that it's what users want. And not only do the users get stuck downloading megabytes of JS, but now the client computer has to do all the calculation of putting the page together! There is a strong aversion to simplicity…

>Web devs are obsessed with the fancy new frameworks that allow you to use even more JavaScript and somehow convince themselves that it's what users want.

Do they really convince themselves of this, or even care about users? Why would they care about anyone besides their employer, who only has an interest in profit, and doesn't care at all about users aside from how much profit they can extract from them?

>There is a strong aversion to simplicity.

Right, because simplicity doesn't generate profit. Simplicity is a web page that tells the user what they need to know, and no more. But that doesn't generate as much profit as having loads of JS which tracks the user so that information can be sold to marketers.

>But web devs want "new and interesting", users be damned. So we get huge kubernetes clusters

The other factor is skill development. Crafting a simple website with minimal JS doesn't look as good on your resume as working with the latest trendy tool, so having Docker and Kubernetes on your resume looks great for future job prospects, so devs have an incentive to use those things everyplace, even if it's just overly complicating the solution and making things slower.

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

#88

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

svnpenn wrote: post #47
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #35

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…

> 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...

1 - YES 2 - NOT REALLY 3 - KINDA 4 - NAH

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

#89

Post by dave_j »

An article like this get posted every so often and it is normally absolute trite.

When I was a kid I had a hand me down computer. Generally it took 20-30 minutes to load a game from cassette. There was no interchangeability between computer manufacturers. I had the choice of BASIC of Assembly to program in and the whole interface was BASIC.

Today I can load up a web browser in a second or two, transfer files between machines with ease (for the most part) and I can download in minutes any language I want to program in.

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

#90

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

serverQuestion wrote: post #41
TheRealPomax wrote: post #19

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?

You could with xfce. You still can with xfce though, it's just that most people use gnome or kde.
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