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Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

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Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#51

Post by throwaway2016a »

rabbidruster wrote: post #23
throwaway2016a wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have really bad luck with Macs. As a MacOS user for seven years I can't say I've ever had that issue. Certainly not enough to need the seconds to be an indicator. I've had my system completely lock up maybe four times and those times my mouse refusing to move was enough of an indicator. Heck, right now it's been two and a half months since I've rebooted... and probably a year since I've rebooted because it f…

Do you use an external display? Mine crashes about once a week after I've unplugged it from the thunderbolt display

I switch between two external displays at work then go home and plug the computer into a single external display.

Worst case, sometimes the layout of my windows gets messed up and I have to move them around to get back where I want them to be.

The only major issue I've had is sometimes bluetooth gets confused and it takes me a few minutes to get my track pad connected when I switch between home and work. (by a few I mean almost half an hour :( )

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#52

Post by Coincoin »

serf wrote: post #6
phkahler wrote: post #4

On a more practical note, why would you want to have seconds on the clock? I find that most of the time I don't want to know the time to a precision of better than 5 minutes. That may just be me, but when someone asks the time and I read it off my phone as 3:56 it really bothers me and sometimes I convert that to 5-to-4 just to avoid what in most cases is arbitrary extra precision. Sure there are times when minutes c…

>On a more practical note, why would you want to have seconds on the clock? for timing things. For example, it's super easy to check a heart rate if you don't need to provide timing or rhythm. Or waiting on ramen , or steeping tea. Lots of reasons.

Just click on the clock, it will pop a window with seconds in it.

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#53

Post by adviceadam »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #14
JoshTriplett wrote: post #12

And on current systems, updating every second would decrease battery life by preventing your system from sleeping. Modern systems can easily sleep for more than a second at a time, even with the screen on (and not updating). I also, personally, can't stand to have distractions like that on my screen away from where I want to focus.

That's why Apple got rid of the Time Machine icon animation, IIRC.

I had completely forgotten about the Time Machine icon animating before. Interesting. Odd choice perhaps because I imagine most people have the hard drive at their desk, when wall power is easily available. There is a setting that enables backing up on battery power but I think the default value is disabled.

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#54

Post by devereaux »

On Linux, there is a very practical reason: to reduce the number of wakeups per second, and save power.

You may think it is far fetched, but try a minimalist XFCE or LXDE desktop, run powertop updating every 5 seconds (so that screen refresh from powertop do not alter your measures) and see for yourself.

For that same reason, you may want to disable the blinking cursor, and conky, and other gizmos that blink things on the screen.

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#55

Post by mschuster91 »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #51
rabbidruster wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use an external display? Mine crashes about once a week after I've unplugged it from the thunderbolt display

I switch between two external displays at work then go home and plug the computer into a single external display. Worst case, sometimes the layout of my windows gets messed up and I have to move them around to get back where I want them to be. The only major issue I've had is sometimes bluetooth gets confused and it takes me a few minutes to get my track pad connected when I switch between home and work. (by a few I…

> Worst case, sometimes the layout of my windows gets messed up and I have to move them around to get back where I want them to be.

Hyperswitch combined with SizeUp works wonders in this case (you use Hyperswitch to directly target individual windows and SizeUp to properly full-screen them).

Why Apple still doesn't have proper keyboard-only management for windows (Cmd-tab only allows to select the foreground app, not individual windows of it, and what Apple calls "fullscreen" is an abomination) is way beyond my understanding.

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#56

Post by IshKebab »

firasd wrote: post #31

Raymond once had an article about why the date/time control panel is not a calendar https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050621-04/?p=... In Windows 7 they've finally given up and the UI lets you easily scroll up and down through months after clicking on the clock. (Edit: sorry I meant Windows 10)

> In Windows 7 they've finally given up

You mean seen sense? How often do you change the date or time on your computer? Probably never since it's automatic these days.

How often do you want to know the date, or what day of the week a day is? I'm guessing a lot more than never.

The old UI was stupid.

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#57

Post by mschuster91 »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #39
krallja wrote: post #25

Too bad the team which made that decision wasn't available to help the VS Code team not use 13% CPU to render a blinking cursor ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014 )

We are in a different era now, where desktop apps are written in JS. Performance is implicitly thrown out of the window(s) when compared to software written for control over every bit of CPU and memory usage.

But the JS ecosystem learns things! They implement tree shaking and other stuff to improve performance!

Obviously real programmers learned all this decades ago - same for the "NoSQL" followers who after years of struggling with piles of cr.p finally (re)discover what a true ACID-capable database is...

I'm just waiting for the JS world to rediscover threads and proper multitasking, but given the track record I don't expect that in the next decade.

Seriously, the JS world is a hellhole of disasters, and many of them easily preventable if the people acting as "evangelists" actually had a bit of clue about what they're talking. And to top it off, a JS-only implementation will never be nearly as fast as well-written C or even C++ code, no matter how hard "evangelists" push it.

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#58

Post by kakarot »

Coincoin wrote: post #52
serf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On a more practical note, why would you want to have seconds on the clock? for timing things. For example, it's super easy to check a heart rate if you don't need to provide timing or rhythm. Or waiting on ramen , or steeping tea. Lots of reasons.

Just click on the clock, it will pop a window with seconds in it.

It depends on how often you find yourself timing things at that level of fidelity. For me it's quite often and having seconds always displayed really helps out. Especially when developing software and checking things like compile times, load times, etc

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#59

Post by throwaway32617 »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #17
anonred wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On macOS, it’s a useful indicator of when the system has frozen/kernel panic, which unfortunately happens far too often.

You must have really bad luck with Macs. As a MacOS user for seven years I can't say I've ever had that issue. Certainly not enough to need the seconds to be an indicator. I've had my system completely lock up maybe four times and those times my mouse refusing to move was enough of an indicator. Heck, right now it's been two and a half months since I've rebooted... and probably a year since I've rebooted because it f…

You must not work in an organization that insists on installing security software for you. If I have >2w uptime on my machine I generally have to restart for some reason or other. It's like people have forgotten that computers can and should have more uptime than that.

A faulty update from one of our security software vendors caused a once-per-hour kernel panic and forced reboot for a day or two. It was really nice.

(Obviously none of this is the fault of OSX or Apple but I would kill for 2.5m of uptime on my work laptop).

Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

#60

Post by movedx »

bitwize wrote: post #44
mschaef wrote: post #29

This is a good article, but keep in mind the timeframe it writes about. Not only was it 22 years ago, its writing about systems at the bare minimum system requirements. (Personally speaking, I remember speccing out a previous gen Windows 3.1 machine with 8MB of RAM in 92... and this is covering 4MB systems in 1995. By that time, 8-16MB would've been common.) Another story from the time is that I went to CompUSA (as a…

The Windows 95 hypetrain was truly something to behold. The Empire State Building lights in Windows colors, Friends castmembers appearing in a (truly lame) promotional video... Windows 95 was the release that put the phrase "operating system" on the common man's lips -- for better or worse.

I'd never heard of this "Friends castmembers" video, so I did a bit of YouTubing... I have no words (nearly an hour long, and I think there's a part-two): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGYcNcFhctc

This led me to a few other videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2owaKucyU1Y

Sigh. The 90s.

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