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This is our 6th time discussing this topic, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.
Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
181–190 of 388 posts
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
Last printer I had to configure on my Linux machine required finding a downloading a hidden mystery bash script from the manufacturer's website and running it with root permissions. Not exactly "plug and play" or "safe"
My printer says it requires that. But it works fine with the free drivers included in my package manager when I pick some other random printer model.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#183Even if true, our computers are able to access many, many, many orders of magnitude of information than my computer could in 1983. What my computer can do for me today is probably 1,000 times more valuable to me than what my computer could do in 1983.
If it takes being slower, I'll take that tradeoff in a heartbeat.
(But I also remember it taking up to a couple minutes to load a program from a floppy, so there's also that.)
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thus far in this thread nobody has offered any counterpoint to the speed argument. The first PC we bought at home was a 133MHz Pentium. My current box is a Ryzen 3700 at 16*3.6GHz. It doesn't feel like I have that much more power at my disposal doing everyday things. Web browsers aren't 400 times faster today than Internet Explorer was in 1995. They should be. Even if you account for all the extra stuff that's going…
Try running Google Maps on your 133Mhz Pentium.
I am sure that Microsoft Autoroute was available for that era. It probably was also faster then Google Maps is today.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#185LOAD"*",8,1 Go get a snack and a drink, walk back to the computer bzz bzzzztttzzzt bzzzz Oh, great, I recognize that noise from the disk drive, it means the game is almost loaded. Just another 30 more seconds.
Right... or it can be even slooooower, you can watch a full "V" episode if you have a Datasette.
As you point out, the waiting times were not in the seconds but in the two digit minutes.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#186Google Maps is great for A to B. I love it. Use it even if I know the route since traffic can be a pain. It appears fast for me. I'm very much disconnected from what the post says. I've used DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and so on. Now I'm on Mac and Fedora. Never will look back.
Let's remember here that most operations were executed against a cache of data on the local system. That cache is way too big to store on the local system nowadays, so of course we are going contact a server to perform the operations and we will experience network latency that will vary. US internet speed has stagnated. Some time in the future, if typical ISPs don't get their way and we get faster and faster connection speed then these latency complaints will be irrelevant.
Developers could do better in sending less data in general, but that will take more time. Does product management care much about latency if they are not given the mandate? We seem to all want features and more features, but less of the cruft that follows as a result of development, which is weird. Best way to vote in the end is to just build your own application however you can. Waze's features would have never made it into Google Maps if users were not using them instead of Google Maps.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have several atlases and IMO they have considerable advantages over Google Maps. As does Google Maps over them. But none of that is relevant to the matter at hand: "Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than in 1983".
Thus far in this thread nobody has offered any counterpoint to the speed argument. The first PC we bought at home was a 133MHz Pentium. My current box is a Ryzen 3700 at 16*3.6GHz. It doesn't feel like I have that much more power at my disposal doing everyday things. Web browsers aren't 400 times faster today than Internet Explorer was in 1995. They should be. Even if you account for all the extra stuff that's going…
With browsers the network latency caps the speed ultimately, no matter how fast a CPU you have. Also HDD/SSDs are very slow compared to the CPU caches. Granted PCs of the previous era also had the same limitation but their processors were not fast enough to run a browser 400 times faster if only the HDD wasn't there.
But other simpler programs should be very much faster. That they perceptually aren't is because (IMO) code size and data size has increased almost exponentially while CPU caches and main memory speeds haven't kept up.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I would recommend Brother every time for a printer. They're not fancy but they are well built and don't require you to install a software suite. Roommate and I are still using the same laser printer from college. It's not wireless but if we really wanted to we could attach a pi and setup a printer pool but for now a long cable serves us just fine for the few times we need to print.
+1 on Brother printers. I'm on my second Brother laser printer and It Just Works. I also have a Canon Ink Jet that is mostly harmless. My sister's HP printer, however...
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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#189This 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…
> So if I'm being "elitist" to point out that spyware is a bad thing, then I'll happily accept that moniker.
The article isn't talking about spyware. It's a chuntering rant about "Kids these days" with no analysis of why things are the way they are. Spyware doesn't fit, because it's doing exactly what it's meant to do, and the question of whether it pisses you off is secondary at best as long as you're convinced there's no alternative to the kinds of software which bundles spyware as part of you getting what you pay for.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#190This 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…
Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter. It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map . It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-t…
> While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter.
These aren't orthogonal in any way. A significant chunk of modern performance hit relative to older Von Neumann architectures is the cross-validation, security models, encapsulation, abstraction, and standardization that make BSODs an extremely unexpected event indicative of your hardware physically malfunctioning that they have become (as opposed to "Oops, Adobe reverse-engineered a standard API call and botched forcing bytes directly into it when bypassing the call library's sanity-checking; time to hard-lock the whole machine because that's the only way we can deal with common errors in this shared-memory, shared-resource computing architecture!").