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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)

#281

Post by mcguire »

ncallaway wrote: post #100
TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

Earlier 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…

> 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."

...

"I'm confused by the complaint that the "Maps" app only caters to the 90-percentile use case for maps, but doesn't cover the other uses-cases well."

Seems like there is an awful lot of room between "probably the most popular use case" and "90-percentile use case", no?

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

#282

Post by lucideer »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #275
flohofwoe wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot to mention that computers have become at least ten-thousand times faster in the meantime. There really isn't a single objective reason why we should wait for anything at all for longer than a few milliseconds on a modern computing device to happen. I actually think that this is just a sign that things are only optimized until they are "fast enough", and this "fast enough" threshold is a human attribute tha…

I don't disagree... but in the old days, I hardly ever remember having more than 1 to 2 apps open at a time. Maybe 3 if was feeling crazy. ...Right now, I've spotify, Word, Excel, Exchange, emacs, slack, mattermost, pycharm, and matlab, acrobat, and firefox (20+ tabs)... all open at once.

I (unlike most, I think) still today don't keep a lot of apps open. This is less about performance, and more some irrational OCD sense of comfort.

And it doesn't improve performance.

I actually think the one thing that has improved performance-wise is concurrency. Our computers can now do many more things at once than before. But all of those things are slower, regardless of whether you're doing 50 or just 1.

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

#283

Post by aforwardslash »

Reedx wrote: post #255
gravislizard wrote: post #217

As 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 ecos…

If you were a hammer manufacturer, wouldn't you nitpick if someone said "I feel hammers have gotten worse since the 80's, and handles aren't what they used to be"? To many people, computers are a tool;to many IT people, they are a way of life. Its not about big picture, its about proximity- some rant about some minor detail on something you value captures more attention than something you don't care about.

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

#284

Post by dougmwne »

Reedx wrote: post #255
gravislizard wrote: post #217

As 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 ecos…

Yes, the ratholeing vs. generalizing is an interesting phenomenon. I get the sense that it's largely personality-based. Some people (most computer people) are wired up to get every detail exactly correct and if anything is out of place they break out the tweezers and start tweaking. That's exactly what's required in most engineering work. It can lead to perfecting something that's about to get thrown away.

The other personality deals with abstractions, analogies and top-down thinking. When faced with an issue they'll start by defining goals and values. And it's easy to be blind to the details when you're thinking of the big picture and ask for things counter to the laws of physics.

Even if you're a two-minded kind of person and can deal with both generalities and specifics, it's incredibly hard to deal with both at once and quite a task to switch from the one mindset to the other.

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

#285

Post by kungtotte »

welly wrote: post #176
kungtotte wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thus far in this thread nobody has offered any counterpoint to the speed argument. The first PC we bought at home was a 133MHz Pentium. My current box is a Ryzen 3700 at 16*3.6GHz. It doesn't feel like I have that much more power at my disposal doing everyday things. Web browsers aren't 400 times faster today than Internet Explorer was in 1995. They should be. Even if you account for all the extra stuff that's going…

Try running Google Maps on your 133Mhz Pentium.

Google Maps runs like crap on my current desktop. That's precisely the problem!

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

#286

Post by hackpert »

A use case where I see this issue very often and would love to see pure text based interfaces is healthcare. Half of providers’ and nurses’ time is spent clicking on tiny things in drop down boxes before scanning a barcode, which to me is pretty silly. Hitting F4 or something and entering whatever, and then scanning would make it so much faster.

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

#287

Post by caleb-allen »

gravislizard wrote: post #217

As 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…

I appreciate your perspective a lot. And I agree that 90% of our use of computers is complete trash, and for those of us in the industry the addiction of being able to understand and maneuver through that trash can overpower the desire to remove the trash entirely.

Studying the history of CS and following it to its roots has been simultaneously invigorating because of the elegance of the fundamental ideas, but also disappointing, because of the line I can trace from the hopes and dreams of those pioneers to the current state of computing.

I'm hopeful that a new wave of software is just over the horizon. Perhaps I am naive, but I'm holding out against pessimism about the future for as long as I can.

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

#288

Post by gdubs »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #35

This 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…

The endless configuration pain you mention pretty perfectly describes anytime I try to dip into a modern framework and find myself spending hours and hours updating ruby or python or some random node module until all the dependencies finally align and I can write a single productive line of code.

Or when I spend 10 minutes fighting various websites just to get a dumb TV streaming site to login with the app it’s connected to.

I have to agree with the general premise: despite the phenomenal power of computers today, they generally feel just as irritating as they always have.

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

#289

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

shepardrtc wrote: post #175
sandyarmstrong wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are you talking about? How in the world is a DOS that can only run a single app at a time better than a system that can run dozens of apps at once? How is non-multitasking a better experience? The person you were replying to was specifically talking about POS (Point of Sale) systems. Retail workers use these systems to do repetitive tasks as quickly as possible. Legacy systems tend to be a lot faster (and more…

My mistake. I thought they meant Piece-Of-Shit.

Well, the acronym works for both. And I've never seen a Point-Of-Sale system that wasn't (in several ways) a Piece-Of-Shit.

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

#290

Post by marcosdumay »

ncallaway wrote: post #100
TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

Earlier 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…

> 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.

I don't think fully deciding an entire path was ever the major use of paper maps. But well, now that apps only allow for this usage, I am pretty sure it's the most popular one.

Personally, I very rarely use maps this way. What makes Google shit useless for me (worse, actually, because it insists on opening by default, and people now decided they can send a Google marker instead of an address, and Google makes it impossible to retrieve data from a marker).

Most people I know, faced with the option of turn by turn directions or nothing choose nothing nearly all the time.

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