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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)

#21

Post by brosinante »

Has anyone ever also noticed how cars are always heavier than the bikes we used when we were children. And how much more air you need and how much longer it takes to fill a car tire with a hand pump.

Also, remember when none of us was a portuguese author and we used paragraphs rationally and wrote things down without splitting them into 200 letter long strings because we used mediums made for rants and did not need a separate app to wrap it all into something vaguely resembling text?

Also has anyone noticed that time passes and things change?

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

#22

Post by fortran77 »

joncrane wrote: post #2

Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.

Yes. They can fade out the old screen with "snow" until the next MPEG stream starts to decode.

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

#23

Post by thedaemon »

Well, I think it's much more valid to claim it's much slower than 2000. Take for instance, Microsoft Office products. On a business class desktop, i3-i5, they are much slower than they were in 2000 in all aspects. Software has become slower as computers have zoomed in speed.

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

#24

Post by dexen »

acheron wrote: post #12

One that got worse and then better again at least in my experience is boot up time. Old computers running MS-DOS I remember booting up very quickly (unless you waited for the full memory self test), then for quite a long time it took forever to get into Windows no matter what you did to try to speed it up. More recently things start up pretty quickly again; I think it's mainly hardware (solid-state disks being the ma…

>but I do think Windows seems to do a little better software-wise too

Windows 10 does a little trick to speed up boot - when you perform a shutdown, Windows 10 saves a mini-hibernation image to the hibernation file. When you perform normal boot, it can start up quite fast[1]. This gives noticeably shorter boot time especially on spinning rust drives (i know, i know, $CURRENT_YEAR). However if you perform a "reboot" instead of "shutdown + power on", you'll get the full length boot of notably longer time.

[1] assuming the hardware setup is sufficently unchanged

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

#25

Post by jasonjayr »

wolfgke wrote: post #13
joncrane wrote: post #2

Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.

The central reason is that modern video codecs use I-frames and P-frames (sometimes also B-frames; even though as far as I am aware, these are not used for TV broadcasts); see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Video_compression... I-frames are only sent, say, once or twice a second. When a channel is switched, the TV has to wait for the next I-frame, since P-frames (and B-frames) only encode the difference t…

Cache the most recent iframe on the network and have the STB pull + display the cached iframe till it catches up? This would enable fast channel scanning/flipping at the very least ...

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

#27

Post by fortran77 »

wolfgke wrote: post #13
joncrane wrote: post #2

Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.

The central reason is that modern video codecs use I-frames and P-frames (sometimes also B-frames; even though as far as I am aware, these are not used for TV broadcasts); see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Video_compression... I-frames are only sent, say, once or twice a second. When a channel is switched, the TV has to wait for the next I-frame, since P-frames (and B-frames) only encode the difference t…

No. It's not a codec problem. They can leave it on the last decoded frame and fade it nicely to, say, the average color for the 1 second without going to black, and you don't have to be a super decoder genius to implement something that's a little less aesthetically jarring.

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

#28

Post by seanalltogether »

wolfgke wrote: post #13
joncrane wrote: post #2

Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.

The central reason is that modern video codecs use I-frames and P-frames (sometimes also B-frames; even though as far as I am aware, these are not used for TV broadcasts); see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Video_compression... I-frames are only sent, say, once or twice a second. When a channel is switched, the TV has to wait for the next I-frame, since P-frames (and B-frames) only encode the difference t…

Unless I'm very mistaken about modern digital transmissions, cable coming into the house is still based on a broadcast system, which means you're getting everything all the time. The frames are all there for every channel, they're just not being read. I don't know how much processing or memory it would take to read and store frames for surrounding channels to the one you're on, but I imagine its possible.

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

#29

Post by logfromblammo »

ryanianian wrote: post #9
joncrane wrote: post #2

Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.

My favorite "the world is terrible" curmudgeon observation is how awful hotel TVs (and hotel TV remotes) are. Every single hotel room TV I've had the displeasure of using in the last N years takes more than 20 seconds to turn on after multiple button-presses, starts out on a terrible in-house channel at high volume regardless of the last-watched channel+volume, takes multiple seconds to change channels, and has no re…

The usual problem I have is that I need to switch to DHCP based DNS to register my MAC address to the room number, then switch back so the hotel can't screw with my DNS lookups.

It might not be your ad-blocker or script-blocker; it might be your DNS settings.

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

#30

Post by BubRoss »

joncrane wrote: post #2

Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.

It depends on the TV or tuner box. Some are very fast and some are very slow. It is something you have to test before buying if you can.
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