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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)

#231

Post by ehsankia »

rootbear wrote: post #123
wazanator wrote: post #93

Earlier 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...

+1, I struggled with many printers until I saw the light and finally got a Brother. I still have it a decade later and never had any issues.

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

#232

Post by shadowgovt »

abraxas wrote: post #215
shadowgovt wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, abst…

Yes but the flip side of it is that it takes more time now to restart an Adobe application than it took to reboot the machine in the 1980s

The time that matters isn't how long it takes to restart the app; it's how many hours of changes just got eaten because the app crashed and the data was either resident in memory only or the crash corrupted the save file (the latter scenario, again, being more common in the past where correctly shunting the right bytes to disk was a dance done between "application" code and "OS toolkit" code, not the responsibility of an isolated kernel that has safeguards against interference in mission-critical tasks).

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

#233

Post by goph0 »

ncallaway wrote: post #100
TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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-turn directions for people who know where they are and where they are going; As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Note also that for most smartphone users of Google Maps the use-case is actually much broader than that. The UI flow also totally…

> As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world.

Popularity is not a measure of quality. Also, the snarky tone is unnecessary.

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

#235

Post by soulofmischief »

RHSeeger wrote: post #206
113 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement? It's at the end of their comment.

The page in question discusses latency in terminals, not how it compares to performance of previous generations. That being said, it also seems to have to pull in the 99th percentile behavior in order for the timings to be an issue, and even then it's not horrible; it doesn't get actually "bad" until you consider the worst performance (99.9th percentile) of the worst performer (st). It seems overly picky to me.

https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/

Here is another survey which takes it from a different angle.

I should have clarified my original post but it's too late:

I am lamenting primarily against the latency introduced by the amount of layers involved both at the hardware and software level compared to yesteryear.

Compositors, virtualization, higher level languages, etc. do not come for free; despite explosive increases in computing capability, we also have an explosive increase in the number of running threads and the resources required to maintain them.

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

#236

Post by privateSFacct »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #177
wazanator wrote: post #93

Earlier 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.

A tangent but still - what does make a printer fancy? Brother has models with every bell and whistle everything else has as well - color LCDs, wifi, airprint. What else is there that would make it fancier?

Some systems require a big software suite or make it very hard to download basic drivers, so you end up with a "fancy" bunch of software - yes it let's you do a few more things, but not a ton. You can have stuff where you pay by the page now - with full telematics back to the printer owner. The one issue - you stop paying and the printer stops working. It's pretty cool - but the overhead (everything has to be working including internet, credit card not changed etc) means its more brittle.

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

#237

Post by [deleted] »

mrdatawolf wrote: post #212
soulofmischief wrote: post #15

Earlier 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." In 1983 the top selling computers were the TRS-80, Apple II and IBM PC (among others). I started on those computers. And what you said is crap... straight out BS. Any person from that era should remember what happened when you typed dir (or equivalent) into a folder with a couple hundred items. It was time to go make some coffee while each...i…

[deleted]

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

#238

Post by ergothus »

gridlockd wrote: post #115
ergothus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? The article is based on an assertion that directly counteracts my memories. I remember using computerized library card catalogs in the 80s. I remember using AltaVista in the 90s. I remember using the Up/Down/Left/Right navigation (and full-screen re-renders) in Mapquest pre-google maps. I remember using the cgi-bin version of imdb.com. I can see how promptly things work now. I can see the additional benefits…

> How so? The article is based on an assertion that directly counteracts my memories. Human experience is subjective and one account is not invalidated by another. > If the author makes an assertion that contradicts my experiences, they better provide SOME evidence, or be dismissed (which is presumably NOT their intent). This is inconsequential.

> This is inconsequential.

Well....yeah, sure. If the author of the piece has no interest in actually supporting their point, and if readers on HN (the audience of my comment) have no interest in finding out that the article is just an opinion restating the title at length, then yeah, it's all inconsequential.

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

#239

Post by kova12 »

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…

I was about to say same thing. I remember I had to recover some files off the diskette, and oh boy it was frustrating. That feeling when you start copying a megabyte-size file and just sit there staring at the screen for five minutes - we forgot how bad it used to be.

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

#240

Post by soulofmischief »

mrdatawolf wrote: post #212
soulofmischief wrote: post #15

Earlier 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." In 1983 the top selling computers were the TRS-80, Apple II and IBM PC (among others). I started on those computers. And what you said is crap... straight out BS. Any person from that era should remember what happened when you typed dir (or equivalent) into a folder with a couple hundred items. It was time to go make some coffee while each...i…

The terminal is not experiencing input latency while the shell runs the dir program. The drawing program is experiencing latency. My comment is oversimplified for brevity, but not factually incorrect.
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