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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)

#371

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

karatestomp wrote: post #362
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree. The comparison you make is unfair. I experienced QNX and Beos too. But what could you really do with it out of the box, compared to a full blown Linux-distro? The 'feeling' of snappiness is a matter of carefully choosen defaults IMO. Almost nobody does that anymore. So have this lowest common denominator, and mostly crappy tools to change them from within the GUI, or have to dive down in the cessp…

shrug I've had Linux desktops across Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and maybe some others. Oh I think Fedora in there somewhere. Gentoo and the first few years of Ubuntu (pre-Pulseaudio, basically, though it's not the only reason it suddenly got worse right around that time) were the only ones that felt like they weren't built on some kind of horrid Jenga tower always on the verge of toppling over, but in Gentoo's…

That reminds me of something wrt configuration files. What always rubbed me the wrong way, for instance in Debian were the commented out examples in config files inapplicable for the configuration of the running system. I remember this for the bootmanager, framebuffer and X when setting up a flicker free boot with the SAME video mode as early as possible, networking, and file systems.

Only Mandrake and PCLinuxOS got this right, they had nothing in /etc which wasn't applicable, because somehow generated programmatically by their installer, according to the choosen configuration.

That was CLEAN, there were no useless ##commented out things for stuff the system didn't even had installed.

Unfortunately their package repos at the time were 'clean' (meaning lacking the stuff i needed/wanted) too.

SUSE also tried this with YAST, but got it wrong often, and felt sluggish and bloated.

I can't really remember XFree86 and later Xorg crashing on me, except when pushing its boundaries wrt multi monitor and hotplugging, i guess that depends on the used hardware and the quality of their drivers?

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

#372

Post by kungtotte »

welly wrote: post #361
kungtotte wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Maps runs like crap on my current desktop. That's precisely the problem!

Is your current desktop at 133Mhz Pentium? It runs perfectly well on my 2015 Macbook Pro!

Perfectly well? Really? Scrolling around the map or zooming causes you no kind of rendering delays or artefacts? It feels consistently snappy no matter what you do?

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

#373

Post by Arnt »

kungtotte wrote: post #369
smush wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it OS and SDK bloat? Where do you think most of the cruft is coming from? Let's say I had a given LOB application written in vb6, c#.net winforms, heck, maybe even WPF. All single-threaded. If I re-wrote the same application (features, UI, still single-threaded) in native Win32, would that improve the latency?

Who knows? My hunch is there's two main factors influencing this. The first is that constraints breed creativity. If you know you only have 133MHz on a single CPU you squeeze as as possible much out of every cycle, on modern CPUs what's a few thousand cycles between friends? The second is SDK/framework/etc. bloat, which is probably influenced by the first. With excess cycles you don't care if your tools start to bloa…

Think harder.

I worked on a framework in the nineties and did such things as render letters to pixels. Here are some of the optimisations we did then, compared to now:

We used much lower output resolution.

We used integer math instead of floating point, reducing legibility. How paragraphs were wrapped depended on whether we rendered it on this monitor or that, or printed it.

We used prescaled fonts instead of freely scalable fonts for the most important sizes, and font formats that were designed for quick scaling rather than high-quality results. When users bought a new, better monitor they could get worse text appearance, because no longer was there a hand-optimised prescaled font for their most-used font size.

We used fonts with small repertoires. No emoji, often not even € or —, and many users had to make up their minds whether they wanted the ability to type ö or ø long before they started writing.

Those optimisations (and the others ­— that list is far from complete) cost a lot of time for the people who spent time writing code or manually scaling fonts, and led to worse results for the users.

I think you're the kind of person who wouldn't dream of actually using anything other than antialiased text with freely scalable fonts and subpixel interletter space. You just complain that today's frameworks don't provide the old fast code ­that you wouldn't use and think develpers are somehow to blame for not wanting to write that code.

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

#374

Post by erikbye »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #327
erikbye wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learning to program for free on your own time? We have been doing this for many decades.

Maybe a small select group have been. Do you really believe that the resources available in 1983 are even in the same category as the current ones? Come on.

> Do you really believe that the resources available in 1983 are even in the same category as the current ones?

No, I never wrote anything remotely close to suggest so, if by "in the same category" you mean volume. If you implied quality, well, that is another matter. There is so much low-quality content online; you could argue it makes enough noise to drown out the high-quality content. The first search results are rarely the best.

However, people should stop disseminating distorted realities. People learned things before the Internet. I would even suggest many learned better before the Internet. You did not need a superficial Medium blog post on a subject or a hand-holding tutorial. You reverse engineered the binary. Besides, there's been a ton of books on programming for a long time. I have a great one from '78, The C Programming Language.

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

#375

Post by 6510 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #364
6510 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illl ignore the pedantic part since it was just an analogy, if it doesn't work for you there is little to talk about. > Games have huge advantages of .... I have thoughts like that but I consider them "making up excuses". You don't have to see it that way but I can't see someone fix a problem by making up excuses for it to exist. For me it is just like you can always come up with an excuse not to do something. 8 giga…

I'm still happy with the configuration we have where my map is a little slower than maybe I'd like it to be (though honestly, I just loaded maps.google.com and moused around randomly and... it's fine? Certainly not so slow I'm bothered by it) but the mapping app also can't crash my computer due to the three layers of abstraction it's running on top of. Because that would suck. If you're curious where the time goes, b…

> If you're curious where the time goes, btw...

Since it is software nothing is set in stone, everything can be changed, we know how to do it really really fast and really really efficiently.

People did incredible things to improve almost everything.

To me this means all of the performance loss is there for no reason. All we need is for people to stop making excuses. I for one know how to get out of the way when better men are trying to get work done.

You are the engineer if not the artist, impress me! Impress the hardware people! Impress the people who know your field. Some attention to consumers wishes is good but Gustave Eiffel didn't build his tower because consumers wanted that from him.

Why would you even have tap water if the well is down the street? A horse and carriage is just fine, it is good enough for what people need. no? What if our doctors measured their effort in "good enough's" and living up to consumer expectation only?

The hardware folk build a warp capable star ship and we are using it to do shopping on the corner store because that was what mum wanted. Of course there is no need to even go to Mars. It's missing the point entirely you see?

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

#376

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #332
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You know that actually KDE it's light like xfce?

Not in my experience. I tend to use older computers with crappy GPUs though.

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

#377

Post by masukomi »

shadowgovt wrote: post #195
TeMPOraL wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. There's a very subtle point the Twitter thread was making here. This use case may be most popular not because it's what the people want, but because it's all that they can easily do . The tools you use shape how you work, and what you can work on. FWIW, I learned to pay attention when the machine doesn't help me do what I want (it's…

> It's the experience for the non-expert users that has degraded in a way they can't fix for themselves. Why not?

because it's not practical to write a Google Maps (or whatever) replacement most of the time? It's a ton of work. Sure we can smooth over rough edges but actually implementing lots of missing non-trivial things? Or, making things faster that rely on some 3rd party back end? Usually either not an option, or not an option without recreating the entire front end.

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

#378

Post by nvesp »

mike_ivanov wrote: post #140
nvesp wrote: post #131

Whoa no need to attack the poor mouse. It has its place. Especially in a generation of PC gamers that came up with optical mice. Me personally the muscle memory I have from PC gaming for some reasons or other seem to have made navigating ui with a mouse that much more intuitive to me over the last 2 decades and some odd years. To the point it actually feels really good and extremely proficient to me. I feel like I'm…

"Whoa no need to attack the poor mouse." Did you actually read the article?

I think I responded to the wrong comment.

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

#379

Post by tom75 »

ryanlol wrote: post #75
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.

I run xmonad on Debian bullseye with 5.5.3-grsec kernel, it’s definitely snappy. There’s no perceptible input lag, even when testing using the iPhone slo-mo thingy. I mostly use Chromium, electrum, signal-desktop and urxvt. Everything goes to shit as soon as you install one of those “desktop environments” though.

No one can get any more the grsec patch... Post grsecurity/kconfig file on github or pastebin for view...

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

#380

Post by Godel_unicode »

erikbye wrote: post #374
Godel_unicode wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a small select group have been. Do you really believe that the resources available in 1983 are even in the same category as the current ones? Come on.

> Do you really believe that the resources available in 1983 are even in the same category as the current ones? No, I never wrote anything remotely close to suggest so, if by "in the same category" you mean volume. If you implied quality, well, that is another matter. There is so much low-quality content online; you could argue it makes enough noise to drown out the high-quality content. The first search results are…

> you could argue it makes enough noise to drown out the high-quality content

> I would even suggest many learned better before the Internet.

Ok Boomer.

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