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Slow Software

inkandswitch.com

221–230 of 272 posts

Re: Slow Software

#221

I keep coming back to thinking that it's the gap between dev and "mainstream" hardware. Forget about phones for the moment (lol, Javascript performance on a $99 Android). My PC is a 6-core, 32GB of RAM beast. I suspect that most (non-PC gamers) people's machines look closer to https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/acer-aspir... . Dual core, 8GB of RAM, spinning hard drive (!) I can tell you from experienc…

Something similar happened to a designer I was working with: The guy had his Apple Retina display Super-duper whatever, which he used to design. At some point, he went to a developer screen to see how his designs were looking once implemented in code, and his first comment was "Why are the colors looking so bad?" ... Well, apparently the colors he chose looked great on his retina display but did not look that good on…

You know what's really funny, we had this exact same issue with developers.

Yeah, your UI runs fast against a local copy of that API with a local ElasticSearch instance backing it with 0% load on a $3000 Macbook, now test that bitch on a $100 dollar Android running on 2G against AWS.

Re: Slow Software

#222

Input latency, I can understand. Web latency, at least you know what you are paying for (trackers, fonts, bloated stylesheets, MBs of JS libraries...). But core software latency, that is pure madness. Android share menu: what on earth takes 500ms-2000ms to display a menu?? Android scrolling: I could have a smoother scrolling if I rendered the view on a wall in Doom III. Why on earth is the scrolling process not prior…

Office on Mac is garbage - I had someone told me that it remains single-threaded on Mac which would explain this. I find my Pixel (v1) surprisingly fast given its age and have no plans to replace it currently, although the share menu slowness is weird. It happens any time the device has to enumerate the list of installed apps—like loading the apps page in settings—, which bizarrely it doesn't seem to cache.

From what I know, the gui rendering has to happen on the main thread, not another spawed thread on OSX. I'd guess that's a contributing factor.

Re: Slow Software

#223

Input latency, I can understand. Web latency, at least you know what you are paying for (trackers, fonts, bloated stylesheets, MBs of JS libraries...). But core software latency, that is pure madness. Android share menu: what on earth takes 500ms-2000ms to display a menu?? Android scrolling: I could have a smoother scrolling if I rendered the view on a wall in Doom III. Why on earth is the scrolling process not prior…

Skype for Business almost completely drains my MBP battery in one session. I'm certain it has dedicated hardware for this, it should be able to do videoconferencing without breaking a sweat, it certainly never happens with FaceTime. And it can never keep conversations in sync, and for some reason it keeps nagging me the rest of the day that the call could not be completed despite having completed long ago.

Who makes this stuff, unpaid interns? In fact I'd expect better software even from unpaid interns.

Re: Slow Software

#224
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Place I worked at the laptops often had one core pegged at 100% load by some disk monitor that was competing with the AV software. I left very quickly and you should too.

Why not compaign for the change to different AV software?

That kind of change would either never happen or take years to happen. I haven't got time for that.

Re: Slow Software

#225
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For practical purposes, that's not true. Macs do not allow running unsigned software by default, and no one runs antivirus on Mac, ever. So even if they were commonly being infected, which they aren't, the person above would have organizational indemnity if someone were infected because they're following industry best practices by not running antivirus on Mac. If you want, you can further restrict Macs to only App St…

In many enterprises you are only allowed to connect laptops into the network if an anti-virus is present, that includes company issued Macs.

I used to run John Norstad's Disinfectant in Classic Mode years ago. Of course it did nothing but, but it did get me on the network, and that's all that mattered.

Plus, the about box was always fun to bring up.

Re: Slow Software

#226

> When dragging items on the screen, for example, users perceive latencies as low as ~2ms This seems doubtful, given that even a state-of-the-art 240Hz screen only refreshes every 4.16ms. I guess they could compare dragging on a screen to dragging a physical object, but that would still be comparing 4.16+ms latency to 0ms latency, which doesn't explain the 2ms figure.

> This seems doubtful Ever tried playing a fast paced game with VSync turned on?

True, the next frame can start getting drawn before the last one, but every desktop compositor I know of uses vsync.

Re: Slow Software

#227
post #187
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Macs have entered the zoo in 2015. What "zoo"? To this day, Macs are practically virus-less, which they always where (99.999% of the scares in the media were for trojans, and even those at worse affected something like 1-5% of the total user base) -- nothing like the good ole Windows (XP and pre) days where after 1 day surfing the web you'd have a few viruses. And of course if you go with the default options (gatek…

> To this day, Macs are practically virus-less Exactly what I'm talking about. Not to this day, but to some time back in 2015. Right now any trojan toolchain on the black market comes with a Mac-targeted package.

Trojans always existed. But trojans aren't viruses, and if you don't get your stuff from shady websites you don't have much to worry about (and if you just get signed and sandboxed App Store stuff, even less or nothing to worry about).

Re: Slow Software

#228
post #99
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went into construction, and then industrial alpinism with tree-trimming inclination starting 2016. But before I did that, the one-before-the-last place I've tried to work was this hostile environment where everything was Windows and MS-based, as far as what we were meant to use for work. I couldn't bring my own lappy. I ended up writing an AutoHotkey script that would get mouse scrolling about 80% sane and manage m…

> I ended up writing an AutoHotkey script that would get mouse scrolling about 80% sane and manage my clipboard. I used to run AlwaysMouseWheel to fix up focus scrolling, but forgot to set it up after my last reinstall. Thanks for the reminder! :) http://www.softwareok.com/?Download=AlwaysMouseWheel As for the other stuff, ugh. I've made it a general rule not to work anywhere where I don't get root on my own box.

This is no longer needed in Windows 10.

Re: Slow Software

#229
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think low power mode disables almost all animations on apple

Wouldn't that also disable other features as well (push notifications, maybe?)? Animations are something I disable permanently just to have a better user experience, I wouldn't like to sacrifice anything else.

Yes it would. But you can only reduce effects:

Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion.

The only thing I dislike is the slightly counter-intuitive quick fading effect when minimizing or switching between apps. Outside of that though, any iDevice feels snappier with that option enabled (== effects reduced).

Re: Slow Software

#230
post #67
post #54

Somebody once posted a well known news website with an alternate link that loaded instantly. Anyone remember this? I don't remember if it was WSJ, or NYT or something else.

A couple news sites have 'text-based' versions. Became popular as a way to give people in disaster areas with spotty signal a chance to find things out. These are some I found: [0] https://lite.cnn.io/en [1] http://thin.npr.org/

Oh my God. It's like 1993 all over again, only with a 1000x faster "modem" and it is wonderful.
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