How could I benchmark this on XFCE nowadays?
Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
21–30 of 124 posts
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#22... in Windows 95.
I mean, the article describes why in versions of Windows from an era that was much more memory-constrained. Even in 2003, Windows 95 was as old as Android 2.2 is now. I configured my task bar to display seconds and can't say Cinnamon is hogging that much more memory or CPU because of it.
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
On macOS, it’s a useful indicator of when the system has frozen/kernel panic, which unfortunately happens far too often.
You must have really bad luck with Macs. As a MacOS user for seven years I can't say I've ever had that issue. Certainly not enough to need the seconds to be an indicator. I've had my system completely lock up maybe four times and those times my mouse refusing to move was enough of an indicator. Heck, right now it's been two and a half months since I've rebooted... and probably a year since I've rebooted because it f…
Do you use an external display? Mine crashes about once a week after I've unplugged it from the thunderbolt display
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#24On a more practical note, why would you want to have seconds on the clock? I find that most of the time I don't want to know the time to a precision of better than 5 minutes. That may just be me, but when someone asks the time and I read it off my phone as 3:56 it really bothers me and sometimes I convert that to 5-to-4 just to avoid what in most cases is arbitrary extra precision. Sure there are times when minutes c…
On macOS, it’s a useful indicator of when the system has frozen/kernel panic, which unfortunately happens far too often.
I returned to the Mac 7 years ago, and work on one every day (development, Xcode compiles, run web server, WebStorm, business stuff like numbers/pages, etc). Not sure I ever remember having a kernel panic.
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#25Too bad the team which made that decision wasn't available to help the VS Code team not use 13% CPU to render a blinking cursor (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014)
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#26I worked on a visual programming language in late 80s. It would compile it's programs but the compiler was really slow, took minutes for small programs.
We worked on optimizing it but couldn't find much to optimize. Then the founder took out the code that updated the progress bar as it compiled and compiles finished 10x faster.
This was on Mac Plus.
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#27I worked on a visual programming language in late 80s. It would compile it's programs but the compiler was really slow, took minutes for small programs. We worked on optimizing it but couldn't find much to optimize. Then the founder took out the code that updated the progress bar as it compiled and compiles finished 10x faster. This was on Mac Plus.
I wonder if it was trashing the cache or something? What was so bad about this particular progress bar?
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#28It might not be the memory concern it once was, but today it might very well be a power concern. Modern laptop display pipelines can save power if they don't have to redraw any of the screen: constantly updating status bar animations break that.[1] 1: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2013/712/ (I think the relatively short graphics section mentions this. Can't seem to find the talk that goes into it in mor…
Can't watch on either Chrome or Firefox. Apple are real gits.
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#29This is a good article, but keep in mind the timeframe it writes about. Not only was it 22 years ago, its writing about systems at the bare minimum system requirements. (Personally speaking, I remember speccing out a previous gen Windows 3.1 machine with 8MB of RAM in 92... and this is covering 4MB systems in 1995. By that time, 8-16MB would've been common.)
Another story from the time is that I went to CompUSA (as a 'spectator') on the night of the Windows95 release. (It was a midnight release and the stores were open late.) There was a line out the door that snaked around through the store past the Windows 95 boxes, the Plus Pack, boxes, MS Office, and then the memory upgrade desk...
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#30I worked on a visual programming language in late 80s. It would compile it's programs but the compiler was really slow, took minutes for small programs. We worked on optimizing it but couldn't find much to optimize. Then the founder took out the code that updated the progress bar as it compiled and compiles finished 10x faster. This was on Mac Plus.
Meanwhile in 2016: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283