The only slowness I feel running off an NVMe SSD is iTunes on Windows. For some reason Apple made every basic click in iTunes have a built in delay. Doing almost anything has 300-5000ms of delay. Playing video and seeking ahead or back freezes for about 5 seconds for me, while VLC, MPC-BE or Power DVD are nearly instant for 60GB 4K UHD files played off a NAS.
Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
251–260 of 388 posts
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#252One of the things that drew me to Linux in '93 was running 'find /' on the console. This was blindingly fast versus the same on a SparcStation 4 (a far more expensive and generally superior platform).
This was sort of an accident, in that SparcStation consoles were slow partly because they weren't meant to be used. But still, it was impressive as hell at the time.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using Linux since... oh, 1999 or 2000, and I've never seen a Linux GUI desktop I'd describe as snappy and responsive. The best I've ever achieved is "not incredibly clunky" and that only by ensuring the graphical interface basically did nothing but run the current application or two I had open. I've seen BeOS, QNX, and (Apple) iOS graphical operating systems/environments that were consistently, remarkably s…
Your point about Linux GUIs is quite true. I've found DEs like Gnome and KDE to be more resource intensive and klunky. Some 8 years back, there was only one distro (I forget the name) that used FluxBox that was blazingly responsive but lacked intuitiveness. (I've heard i3 is also very fast, but I have never used it as I don't like tiling WM). Before corporates entered the Linux market (e.g., Red Hat and Canonical), L…
I'd love to know what BeOS did to achieve those magical-feeling results, and why it hasn't been copied by everyone else. I reckon it's gotta have a lot to do with process scheduling and how UI events are dispatched, but if it's mostly those couple things, why isn't every modern OS doing what BeOS did? There must have been trade-offs I guess but from the user's perspective it seemed to be 100% an improvement over everything else—it's not like multimedia took a backseat to user interaction, or parts of the UI lagged so others could feel fast, everything felt smoother, quicker, and more responsive. On single core machines with 1/16 the memory it takes to start Slack, too!
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#254This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the g…
> Remember autoexec.bat files? Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability?
Maybe my memory is bad but I seem to have the same issues today, just in different shapes.
The operating system choose to update itself in the middle of me typing a document and then 15 minutes later while in a conference meeting the app decides that a new version is immediately required. Then I open up a prompt and the text is barely readable because the screen DPI is somehow out of sync with something else and now the anti-aliasing (?) renders stuff completely broken. According to Google there are 31 ways to solve this but none of them works on my PC. Then all the Visual Studio addins decide to use a bit much memory so in the middle of the debug process the debugger goes on a coffee break and the just disappear. In the afternoon I need to update 32 NPM dependencies due to vulnerabilities and 3 had simply disappeared. Weird.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#255As the OP who wrote this while drunk two years ago and thinks that about 30-50% of it is objectively wrong, it's extremely funny to me that every five months someone reposts it here and everyone gets in a fight about it again. Many of the details are entirely inaccurate - the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at t…
That tendency to rathole and nitpick, while discarding the larger point, is increasingly frustrating.
It seems like a lot of this boils down to people getting stuck in a local maxima. If someone isn't used to zooming out to the big picture, are they more likely to solve problems in isolation and end up with layers of dependencies, npm installing all the things? Resulting in an unstable stack and less predictable ecosystem at large.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you got the wrong printer. Some manufacturers do a good job of supporting Linux (HP is probably the best actually; their drivers all ship standard in most distros), others don't bother.
"I had some trouble with Linux on this hardware" "You chose the wrong hardware bro!" This is why people don't like Linux Evangelists.
I guess you don't like Apple evangelists either: you can't just buy some random hardware and just expect it to work on your MacBook. It only works that way on Windows because Windows has ~90% of the desktop market, so of course every hardware maker is going to make sure it works on Windows first, and anything else is a distant maybe.
Would you buy an auto part without making sure first that it'll work on your year/make/model of car?
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#257> When you're all done, you go back to your plotted trip and start laying out the chosen locations and optimizing your path.
> You can do this with a paper map. You can't do this with gmaps. So you just don't do it.
Has this guy never used Google Maps? You can definitely plot out a trip with multiple points and pick specific routes for each leg along the way. I know because I take a lot of road trips.
Anyhow, computers might be perceptually slower but do so, so much more and are more pleasant to use. Being able to save all my documents to the cloud and use them from any browser is massive. Google Maps has changed the way I travel. The fact I can control my TV from my browser while using HN and planning a route on Gmaps at the same time. The fact I can plug anything into my laptop and have it just work (even my Linux laptop!). And if you really, really miss that 80's era text-only interface, well, you can still have that.
Again though, the sheer amount of data you have access to nowadays and the way computers can visualise it is mind-boggling. Staying on the maps theme, the fact you can find any location on earth, get a satellite image of it and a whole bunch of info in it just by dragging a map around is insane, and I grew up in the early internet era.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter. It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map . It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-t…
> Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter. I know of an ERP system that somehow manages to take about 15 seconds to search an inventory of ~100k items. If you export all t…
There was a time when I would have been interested in how such a system came to be, but now I think I have been around long enough to guess that someone was protecting their job, and then either got fired anyway or became technical-architect-for-life.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map. It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for people who know where they are and where they are going; As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Note also that for most smartphone users of Google Maps the use-case is actually much broader than that. The UI flow also totally…
> 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…
>FWIW, I learned to pay attention when the machine doesn't help me do what I want (it's a good source of ideas for side projects), so I've noticed that I do want a map that works like a map - something I can explore and annotate. I do sometimes resort to screenshotting GMaps, or photographing paper maps in the past, just to have a map on my phone.
https://mymaps.google.com has that, and I think google has a 'mymaps' app too:
https://support.google.com/mymaps/answer/3433053?co=GENIE.Pl...
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I remember all these things, because they're almost all still a thing. But now with a shitty React front-end.
Pretend the modern web made computers worse and then try Figma in the browser. It's glorious. Granted it's not written in React but it really shows what the web can be. It's BETTER than any desktop equivalent I've tried. It requires zero installation. Plugins are added instantly. It has native collaboration. It's scary fast. I'm not at all nostalgic about the old days.
It's okay. The functionality is great, but that's pretty unrelated to it being a webapp. I often run into slowdowns when using it on my medium spec'ed laptop. It sometimes gets pretty bad. It consistently feels slower than using native desktop apps. The zero installation is definitely a perk, though a minor one. Plugins adding instantly and native collaboration aren't functions of it being a web app.
The trade seems to be a still quite noticeable performance hit vs no installation. It's probably the single best serious web app I've ever used, and I'd still trade it for a high quality desktop app if I could.