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

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

#171

Post by bebop »

ambrosite wrote: post #24
fallingfrog wrote: post #3

This! I once took over programming a point of sale system that our (internal to the company) users were complaining about. Turns out there was no concept of tab sequence, you had to use the mouse for everything. I asked the previous programmer to show me how to use the form he created, and he started typing a phone number using the top row of the keyboard instead of the numpad. But hey, it had lots of javascript!

I've always found it easier to type long strings of numbers on the number pad. I don't know why, it's not as though I ever deliberately trained myself to use it, but for me the number pad is much faster than using the top row.

I think that using phones trains the muscle memory for the number pad (although upside down). I have found the same thing though, where I instinctively can use the num pad much faster than I should be able to, with relation to the amount of time I use it.

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

#172

Post by IronWolve »

No doubt, Microsoft office took tasks that was 1 button and made it 5+ clicks. And this feature creep expanded everywhere with companies thinking they are smarter than you, so they try to train "you" to work their sites.

Also why I don't like apple computers, you use dos/windows/linux, and get to an mac, and if you don't know the secret gestures or commands, its just painful.

Its like how Gnome 3 took over and had to redesign everything, then finally came back to Gnome Classic.

Or Windows said TILES is the future, deleted your start button, then went "My Bad" and gave you a start button again.

Directories are disappearing, now its "Search Boxes" everywhere.. Good luck if you know the asset file, and the file doesn't have the name "asset" in it. Or if the damn file has permissions for you to even open it if you find it.

Don't even get me started on android phones, I hit dialer, and I don't get a keypad when I need it, I'm in a menu tree now and dialer wants to display current contanct info.. grrr.

Yeah, KISS is no longer a thing, its all wiz-bang, we can do it better than you. NoSQL is awesome! Oh wait, back to SQL we go. Perl SUCKS! Python2, er, 3 now.

Get off my yard.

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

#173

Post by jayd16 »

glial wrote: post #2

Given the speed of modern computers, I'm fascinated by the fact that so many processes complete in human-scale time (seconds-minutes), rather than milliseconds or years+, depending on problem complexity. If times for compute tasks have some power law distribution (a big if...), I'd expect a very small part of that distribution to overlap with the 'seconds' range. Then again, computers do so many things in the millise…

We're usually not computationally bound. Often its disk or network I/O and that basically means tasks are content bound. We tune for maximum content in the acceptable human scale time. The moment we take less than a second to load something it means we can find more things to load.

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

#174

Post by fastball »

geofft wrote: post #148
pmlnr wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re 1: Slow - compared to google docs? Are you serious? EDIT: not startup time, who cares about startup time? When you load a few hundred pages doc, or a massive excel. re 2: I only wanted to give examples, but you're right, my wording is off. I wanted to say there are fast and good interfaces: there's vim for the terminal, there's Rainloop for webmail, miniflux for RSS reading - these are all keyboard-oriented ones,…

> re 1: Slow - compared to google docs? Are you serious? Slow compared to decent standards of what a word processor needs. For reference, WordPad perceptually opens instantly for me, and has felt like it opened instantly since Windows 95, I'm pretty sure. I am saying that both LibreOffice and Google Docs are examples of software that take way too long to do simple things because they're busy doing complicated things…

If your word processing requirements are very lax you should probably just be using Markdown + an editor.

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

#175

Post by [deleted] »

Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

[deleted]

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

#176

Post by ihaveahadron »

IVE SAID THIS BEFORE ITS STILL TRUE IT WILL ALWAYS BE TRUE IT IS SOMETHING THAT HAS --ALWAYS-- BEEN SOMETHING THAT IN THE PAST WAS, IF USING A SCIENTIFIC METHOD, GOING GO BE FOUND TO BE TRUE. THAT, IN MANY WAYS THE NEWER TECHNOLOGY IS A --DOWNGRADE--. WHEN YOUR SOFTWARE IS --IN REAL TIME-- 10X SLOWER THAN SOFTWARE -- -- -- 20 YEARS AGO -- -- --; THAT IS A -- DOWNGRADE --

part is being logical. but fucking christ that isnt actually any excuse with a little god dam thinking we could speed up computers. -- WE HAVE THE HARDWARE TECHNOLOGY --

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

#177

Post by michrassena »

Last year, in a fit of nostalgia I finally bought an Apple IIe, a system I had wanted 30 years ago, at a garage sale. Somehow in moving it back to my house, I dislodged the floppy controller card, leaving the system to boot from ROM. I turned it on, it beeped, and there was the prompt. I perceived it as instantaneous. I know that from that point I could have written a BASIC program and saved it to a cassette tape. The anecdote falls apart once you actually start trying to boot ProDOS from disk and have to rely on the something besides solid state.

This experience got me thinking. What has changed in the meantime? Computers have become communication devices and communications devices have become computers (though even this ancient Apple came to me with a modem installed). Developer time has outstripped hardware costs, and somehow an hour of developer time is worth the same as wasting a million hours of the users' time (1 million users x 1 hour or whatever formula you wish).

I think we all recognize this problem, and it's already too expensive to fix. The hardware and software space are too federated, too balkanized, too complicated to ever integrate a system into a cohesive whole in the way the Apple II was.

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

#178

Post by finchisko »

dwild wrote: post #156
Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

> I can still install Excel 97 if I want to That's the survivor bias. There's plenty of things that you can no longer install and the things you can still install, it's mostly because there's someone that maintains their API and whatnot (thus, the company hasn't gone out of business or haven't decided not to maintains it). Look at games, GOG has an R&D department to make sure you can run the games on their platform.…

Exactly. When somebody uses Atom, he cannot complain about performance compared to compiled apps. And saying this as huge fan of Atom.

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

#179

Post by monochromatic »

wesleytodd wrote: post #81
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a relief to do a bit of Go from time to time, render a complete html template in 40 ms (with almost 2 MB of JSON data) instead of spending forever figuring out the JS framework du jour to do the same thing, only with it feeling a lot more involved, heavyweight, and slow - even if said framework claims to be faster than all the other JS frameworks. I think I want to do back-end or terminal-based interfaces again.…

This has nothing to do with Go and a lot to do with choosing the right tool for the job. Maybe Go is the best tool for you in this job, but a given js framework can serve someone else just as well if it is in their expertise area. Don't confuse your expertise with language/ecosystem pros and cons.

The right tool for the job != whatever tool is in your expertise area.

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

#180

Post by anjakefala »

Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

I feel like this is the core of how "Open Software" is aiming to combat this. By removing the consumer-driven model away from software and putting users in closer touch with developers, we are supposedly developing tools together that better fit our needs. Though, OSS arguably is struggling to meet this theoretical ideal, especially with the current lack of support most OSS devs have.

My life improved considerably when I switched from Sublime to vim, Excel to VisiData, Word to LaTeX (though, I am unsure if LaTeX is completely OSS), etc. I invested the time in learning the language of the tool, but it pays off in droves.

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