Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 388 posts

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

#261

Post by GordonS »

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...

Another +1 for Brother here - I finally switched away from inkjets hell around a year ago, to a Brother laser MFD.

It always worked completely as expected, zero issues. Price was good too.

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

#262

Post by fwsgonzo »

davidguda wrote: post #25

"one of the things that makes me steaming mad is how the entire field of web apps ignores 100% of learned lessons from desktop apps" Not perhaps 100% but sure, in the modern age of web apps for everything I miss having proper desktop apps. Even more so, programming web apps is nowhere near as convenient as developing desktop apps in late 90's with tools like Delphi.

I remember that. It was very easy.. I sort of have that same feeling with .NET, but I wonder if it's still going to be a layer on top of windows C system functions which might just be wrappers for system calls, which require an expensive context switch.

One big difference between win95 and now is the security aspect. Another big difference is the tons of services running on Windows 10 now that is always there (such as YourPhone). On Android for some vendors you are forced to use FaceBook and it can't easily be removed.

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

#266

Post by GekkePrutser »

jws wrote: post #114
GekkePrutser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really :) Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud, and couldn't actually handle constant streams at that speed . However I do agree with the general message of the article. Current UX is a mess, websites are overblown by tons of javascript. There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age with the power we have at our fingertips.

Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud… The VMS manuals suggested that system administrators may want to keep the hard wired terminals down to 2400 buad and hide the fact from users by turning on "smooth scroll" (which only scrolled about that fast anyway) in order to keep the interrupt load down on the Vax. Something about batching of interrupts on the multiport serial cards.

Yes there was that but it also just couldn't handle the full speed continuously. It depended a lot what kind of commands were sent. Full text was fairly OK but drawing commands took a while as far as I remember. In any case, flow control was a must-have in those days. Either CTS/RTS or at least XON/XOFF

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

#267

Post by _abox »

ralusek wrote: post #168
GekkePrutser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really :) Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud, and couldn't actually handle constant streams at that speed . However I do agree with the general message of the article. Current UX is a mess, websites are overblown by tons of javascript. There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age with the power we have at our fingertips.

There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age...when spinners are almost exclusively used in web apps in order to denote that the web browser is yet to receive the necessary data over YOUR internet connection.

Then why do I still see them with my verified 600/600 connection :)

The problem is just that there's too much javascript running in the browser and it's too poorly written (loading each post individually in Reddit by example instead of batching them). Reddit's redesign in particular is really really bad. At least they offer the old site but it looks so bad. I'd love to have something looking more modern but without the javascript overload.

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

#268

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

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…

> to a much wider audience and are much more usable now.

Doctors hate their life because of computers: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha..., but maybe you'll think the article is too old to be true or maybe you will quibble about the headline. Why not believe something true instead?

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

#269

Post by drbawb »

antisthenes wrote: post #60
gridlockd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wher…

In my experience Windows 10 runs well enough on even the shittiest of hardware as long as it has an SSD. I can't tell you how many people (both personally and professionally) have asked me to troubleshoot slow Windows installs, and almost invariably they are running Windows on an HDD. Many times they got it because "well it was the bigger storage size, so that must mean it's better, right?" - In the premium segment that might be true, but in the value segment where most people shop they're still trying to offload inventory of HDDs, I guess.

Mac OS isn't much better, I had a 2011 MacBook Pro w/ the best CPU for that model which was borderline unusable until I put an SSD in it. That was HFS which was designed w/ spinning rust in mind, I couldn't even imagine running APFS on top of spindles for an OS volume. CoW & the features it brings is awesome on flash w/ lots of IOPS, but painful on anything else.

---

That all being said though, Windows 10 is just crap. I'm not convinced there's any amount of hardware you can throw at it that will make it feel as snappy as Windows 7 did, because it's evident to me that the developers just don't care anymore. I initially installed Windows 10 on an i7-6700K w/ one of the fastest consumer NVMe drives and one of the best GPUs available at the time. The start menu lagged perceptibly on a pristine installation. That was before all the "feature updates" shoveled Microsoft's ever increasing amounts of managed code, adverts, and online crap into the start menu.

If the developers gave a shit about UI latency the Start menu wouldn't require internet connectivity[1] and the task bar wouldn't make hundreds of thousands of IO calls.[2] Even if you can come to accept the speed the start menu, the functionality just isn't there. It routinely feigns ignorance of plain text files sitting in the root of my "Documents" library; even if I type the exact file name. I would gladly welcome the Windows 7 file index service back into my life.

[1]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-s... [2]: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/09/08/taskbar-latency...

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

#270

Post by thewebcount »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66
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…

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…

> a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter.

As someone who helped with the transition from crappy text-only DOS interfaces on POSes to graphical interfaces on POSes, I have to disagree. Learning those interfaces was terrible. I don't know where the author gets the idea that even a beginner had no trouble learning them. I worked at NCR during the switchover from the old system to the new one that used graphical representations of things and the new system was way easier to use and for beginners to learn. And that's not just something we felt, we measured it. (Interestingly, it was still DOS-based in its first incarnation, but it was entirely graphical.)

Post reply on HN