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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

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

#321

Post by vikramkrishnan »

squarefoot wrote: post #248

The corporate culture to release a product in time rather than having it perform fast ruined the IT world and is infecting the FOSS ecosystem too. Just throw away all VM-constrained or interpreted languages (or use them only for prototyping) and the problem is almost solved. Then make everything work offline unless it is absolutely necessary to do the opposite (backups, updates etc). Rediscovering the lost art of opt…

So, you want people to write web apps in C: a language with overflows all over the place and something a child could launch a DDoS attack against. This is not a defense against feature-itis and slow response times. Especially when bulk of the time lost is in accessing dbs and rendering front end js.

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

#322

Post by thibran »

Its 2017 and I wait for my computer. I wait on Linux, I wait on Windows. This sucks hard. It is still complicated to search for stuff or to morph data from one representation into another. The web is even worse. And lets not talk about sharing data or other computer-resources with others.

When looking back at what people invented in the 80s till today, I hardly see much progress.

I don't care much about how much RAM an application takes, I care about speed. The next big OS should have a golden rule, never make the user wait. That's the ultimate goal which all OS's fail to address today.

What I want in the end is most times some text which is layout in a visually pleasant way, some images, some videos. I thought multiple times about writing a program which would fetch all data from all the websites I'm interested in, messengers, email-accounts and so on and store them somewhere – so that I could later view them (with whatever program) without any fucking delay.

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

#323

Post by scotty79 »

erikbye wrote: post #225
tomc1985 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. Guys think bigger than just web stacks. Pluma/Gedit, notepad++, TextMate... stop sucking off JS

Kate, Sublime, Vim, Emacs, 4coder, UltraEdit, BBEdit, Bluefish...

After using various IDEs for a brief period of time I was always comming back to Kate because there's no input lag there.

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

#324

Post by cosatelo »

pmlnr wrote: post #120
Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

You do, in fact, have a choice, you always did, everyone does. There are decent, completely offline solutions (Libreoffice vs GDocs), you can self-host a lot of things and do a private "cloud" on a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop ( https://yunohost.org/#/ ; https://cloudron.io/ ; etc). The tradeoff is compatibility and not being trendy. However, that has always been a problem both the 80s and the 90s. Mac vs PC? Amiga…

If you follow popular technology you get a slow stream of annoying technology thats predatory by nature. When I switched to the free software side, my experience sped up and I had finer control over everything. My files are mine and not a company's, non-free javascript is disabled so the web is faster, and my system is lightning fast since its devoid of windows telemetry. Encryption keys and offline password managers can be a hassle but the freedom overshadows the difficulty for me. Or maybe its stallman stockholm syndrome.

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

#326

Post by katastic »

digi_owl wrote: post #191
katastic wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but due to an existing bug/oversight in Windows, you can actually freeze your mouse pointer with a machine... even with 24 cores sitting idle. (Great read.) https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and... We have gigantic, steamrolling, bullet train machines capable of going nearly infinite miles-per-hour. And everyone's "design" solution... is to add their own stops along the way so the…

Similarly, with Gnome on top of Wayland the mouse is hitched to the main refresh loop...

Holy crap. That seems like such an oversight for something so crucial.

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

#327

Post by rpedela »

vikramkrishnan wrote: post #272

The front end developer at one of the companies I was working for nearly fainted when I told him I like Craigslist's web interface. The only criticism he could muster was "But it looks like the 90s". And then he proceeded to tell me off "because you don't want to learn how to use a new interface". Of course I don't want to, it is a skill with zero transferability. Learning how to be productive with an interface that…

The Office ribbon was/is far superior to the original, flat UI for novice and intermediate users. By flat, I don't mean aesthetics but rather the layout. Every menu option and button had the same visual importance of every other button/option which makes it difficult for novice and intermediate users to find the right one. It was fine for power users because they will put in the effort to learn the interface no matter how crappy it actually is. And power users usually get upset when the interface changes because they now have to relearn it. But that doesn't mean it was a bad change in absolute terms, it is a lot better for non-power users which are the vast majority of users.

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

#328

Post by lordlimecat »

Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

Sounds like you need a new editor, friend. Can I suggest Sublime Text?

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

#329

Post by sclangdon »

kgwxd wrote: post #21
ambrosite wrote: post #15

I wonder how much of this is a result of UI designers deliberately putting tiny delays/animations into their UIs to make them more "usable"? For example, it was a common piece of advice that if clicking a button opens up a dialog box, there should be a brief animation showing the box expanding from the direction of the button, so the user would associate the clicking of the button with the appearance of the box and u…

Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.

There is a similar setting in Windows, in case anyone is interested.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay

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

#330

Post by digi_owl »

dredmorbius wrote: post #275
digi_owl wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noscript or Umatrix?

Neither of those are an option on Chrome/Android, and I don't think they apply on Firefox/Android (not sure about disabling JS). Firefox does offer uBlock, at least, which is a massive relief. I also run (on the router) a large, and after significant modularisation by me, flexible dnsmasq blocklist that addresses another large set of issues. On desktop (Linux, MacOS), I have and use: NoScript, uBlock, uMatrix, and St…

Could have sworn i have seen a version of Noscript that worked with Firefox on Android.
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