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Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

pcworld.com

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Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#441

Post by athenot »

sgarland wrote: post #382
alliao wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

some of the modern software is slower because someone made a poor decision to fetch something from the network on the critical path of main functionality... kills me

It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…

It's also a Product issue: "fast and snappy" is almost never on their list of priorities. So product managers will push devs for more features, which satisfy the roadmap, and only get concerned about speed when it reaches painful levels.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#442

Post by p_ing »

mike_hearn wrote: post #115
marcodiego wrote: post #8

That's is not a new idea. I think Office 97 had an accelerated startup that made windows take a little longer the boot but faster the start office.

It was rumoured to have such a thing but, iirc, did not (or at least it didn't depend on one to start fast). Such rumours got started during the Slashdot era when people were comparing the performance of open source office suites like StarOffice/OpenOffice to MS Office and wondering why there was such a huge gap. The rumours went away when Wine started being able to run Office well enough to be usable, and people dis…

The Office Startup Assistant was a thing and did improve startup times. I'm not sure where you're making up this rumour stuff from.

https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Microsoft_K...

> The OSA initializes the shared code that is used by the Office 97 programs. The benefit of using the OSA to initialize shared code is that the Office 97 programs start faster.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#443

Post by troad »

dijit wrote: post #356
wafflemaker wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could some game programmer say if it's true that kernel level anti cheat is just bad programming? Primagean recently said that in a video commenting PewDiePie's "I switched to Linux" video. While he's apparently a good programmer (he worked at Netflix), he uses Vim, so I don't trust him. Edit: part about vim is an edgy joke.

Weird reason not to trust someone, and I think prime is a decent programmer. I work in AAA gamedev and have deployed kernel level anti-cheats before, and I’m aware how unpopular they are; so, sorry for that… you would also accuse us of “bad programming” if there was an overabundance of cheaters that went undetected and/or uncorrected. The answer is unfortunately complicated, the kernel level anti-cheats themselves ar…

Good faith question: why is the server not the source of truth? With local interpolation for things like character movement, reconciled in heartbeat updates?

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#444

Post by rafaelmn »

LtWorf wrote: post #365
bigfatkitten wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want to like GNOME, but GNOME's developers have almost as much arrogance and contempt for their users as Microsoft. As an example, the power button can no longer be configured to power off the machine, because this is "too destructive". I'm not talking about defaults -- they removed the ability for me to make this choice for myself. Not even Microsoft has done that. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id…

Try plasma.

Plasma was super unstable and janky, and the whole KDE desktop environment feels like developer art.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#445

Post by p_ing »

mikaelsouza wrote: post #57
NoPicklez wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, my Windows machine loads into the OS quicker from login than my Mac.

I think the way macOS and Windows loads stuff after login is a bit different though. Since most macOS installations use FileVault by default, the login screen looks like it loads only stuff related to the login screen and not anything from the OS. Windows on the other hand, seems to load more stuff in the spinning thingy screen that appears before the login screen. For instance, if you disable Filevault on macOS, the…

That would be an implementation deficiency. If Windows can be FDE and load faster than macOS, then the way macOS has implemented the FDE solution is suboptimal, if startup time is your primary measurement.

I personally don't have issues with startup times on my M2 Air or 5800X3D/Win11, both encrypted.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#446

Post by oriettaxx »

one day we'll be able to estimate the underdevelopment and waste of energy caused from such a bad software, good for me I learned very early to stay far from the whole microshit world: never had any doubt.

...and his head is till pontificating on how the world should run...

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#447

Post by kgeist »

jeroenhd wrote: post #240
krembo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware. Lucky for MS they are kind of a monopoly in the corporate world.

Office is like Jira: taken on its own, it sucks, but there are no real alternatives to it.

Interesting, our company migrated from Jira to Youtrack (by JetBrains) and never went back.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#448

Post by int_19h »

wafflemaker wrote: post #412
dijit wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird reason not to trust someone, and I think prime is a decent programmer. I work in AAA gamedev and have deployed kernel level anti-cheats before, and I’m aware how unpopular they are; so, sorry for that… you would also accuse us of “bad programming” if there was an overabundance of cheaters that went undetected and/or uncorrected. The answer is unfortunately complicated, the kernel level anti-cheats themselves ar…

This is well written and quite easy to understand. (I only have cursory knowledge of programming.) However, what if Primeagen meant that HAVING to IMPLEMENT kernel level anti cheat is a symptom of bad programming, and not the anti cheat per se? (that is, with good enough programming, it could somehow be avoided). And kudos to you. I appreciate people in game dev, they can get a lot done in short time. I haven't playe…

The reason why you need kernel-level anti-cheat for it to be meaningful is because it necessarily needs to sit on a level lower than cheats themselves; and cheats can be very advanced these days.

Long term I'm kinda hopeful that this is something that will be mitigated through AI-based approaches working to detect the resulting patterns rather than trying to detect the cheat code itself. But this requires sufficiently advanced models running very fast locally, and we're still far from that.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#449

Post by dijit »

troad wrote: post #443
dijit wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird reason not to trust someone, and I think prime is a decent programmer. I work in AAA gamedev and have deployed kernel level anti-cheats before, and I’m aware how unpopular they are; so, sorry for that… you would also accuse us of “bad programming” if there was an overabundance of cheaters that went undetected and/or uncorrected. The answer is unfortunately complicated, the kernel level anti-cheats themselves ar…

Good faith question: why is the server not the source of truth? With local interpolation for things like character movement, reconciled in heartbeat updates?

FD: Still on a phone on vacation. :)

The reason is the round trip time mainly.

Server corrections will feel like “floaty” or “banding” behaviour, we used to do that and people get upset because it “feels” wrong.

Re: Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

#450

Post by jMyles »

athenot wrote: post #441
sgarland wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…

It's also a Product issue: "fast and snappy" is almost never on their list of priorities. So product managers will push devs for more features, which satisfy the roadmap, and only get concerned about speed when it reaches painful levels.

> only get concerned about speed when it reaches painful levels.

...and by then, the requests for performance are somewhere between onerous and ridiculous.

I'm as wary of premature optimization as anyone, but I also have a healthy fear of future-proofed sluggishness.

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