5 ms·

This. I spend probably 4GB+ RAM only to send IMs to people. (I run WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and Chrome/Facebook) The sad fact is that the general public only

This. I spend probably 4GB+ RAM only to send IMs to people. (I run WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and Chrome/Facebook) The sad fact is that the general public only seems to care about the fancy buttons. And from a business standpoint, cheap software (high level langs/tools that are bad for perf) and following current design trends are more important than CPU cycles. Perhaps we'll see some kind of "back to the basics" movement in the future where UI and software becomes much more simpler.

na85 10y ago
There used to be little animated gifs that we'd put on our Geocities pages with flashing "thank you for not using AOL" or "don't surf and AOL" slogans. IMHO the web needs a movement akin to "nosql", but for bloated crap like JavaScript. My web browsing experience has only improved after installing noscript.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  I think the world is starting down this path, this is the second link to a .txt file in my news feed today :) I've recently been longing for a way to easily filter the internet to text/plain only content, not only is there no bloat, the content tends to have actual substance. Edit: Holy smokes, the site hosting the content is what I'm talking about http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher I'd still like a text/plain only Google though, I'd be willing to POST the search request for such a thing via cURL.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    This was also the second link I followed to a text file today, both on this domain (same author?). I went through the hassle of pinch-zooming to make the first one sort-of legible on my phone, because the content (C without the stdlib) was worth it, but I immediately hit the back button on this one. I really don't understand the inclination to make things harder to use, for what purpose, nostalgia?
    - stiGGG 10y ago
      Same here. Tried to read the "C without the stdlib" article on my phone, it was only readable in landscape mode and i gave up after the third time the screen rotated and i lost the line where i was reading. I tried it later on my desktop with 27" screen and all the content was aligned to left, keeping 80% of the screen black. I opened developer tools to align the content to the middle and wondered where the layout came from, there was almost no css. Then i realised that the author did every linebreak manually with a <br> in html. Yeah that's oldschool... facepalm
      - Qwertystop 10y ago
        According to the bit at the top, it's proxied from gopher. The column width limit is probably automatically inserted by the intermediary.
    - na85 10y ago
      I think there's a middle ground to be struck between making something harder to use and making a page that won't even load text without JavaScript, something I find more and more.
    - GrinningFool 10y ago
      Is it really harder to use? You get nothing buy the raw content, which you are free to style as you wish.
      - sanderjd 10y ago
        Yes, it is really harder to use! The use case here is "user reads the text", not "user with large screen reads the text". I click on the link on my phone and I can't read the text. Even with pinch-zoom to fill the screen, I can still only sort of read the text. If I must gain expertise with the stylesheet of a site in order to manually re-style it to fulfill its primary use-case, then that site is very hard to use. I'm not even arguing with the theory here. Proxying gopher text files to a simple text-based website is a really nifty idea, but this implementation has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. An implementation of this that conscientiously picks and chooses web platform features that aid in usability (for instance, perhaps responsive layout and typography) while rejecting those that are unnecessary for this use case (perhaps javascript) would be neat.
- anc84 10y ago
  I would love a no-javascript, no-external-urls, no-captchaflare movement so much.
- s_kilk 10y ago
  I've fantasized about creating a browser that can only load markdown documents, and render them with a pretty default style. Maybe I should get to work on that.
  - sawmurai 10y ago
    If you do and need help ... I would love to!
jeremiep 10y ago
Its not high level languages which yield bad performance. Its developers not taking the time to optimize their architectures at the macro level (and unlike micro-optimizations, these are very rarely premature), or generally don't have the first clue in how to do so. You can write badly performing code in C++, its dead easy.
- cylinder714 10y ago
  In fairness, it's not the developers but their managers setting unreasonable schedules that preclude any chance of optimization.
  - jeremiep 10y ago
    That happens a lot as well! But its our job as developers to challenge the managers when the expectations are unrealistic. They are very receptive when you put it in terms they understand. I've also seen plenty of developers jumping head first into code with a very shallow understanding of the requirements or the tech stack they're working with. For a large fraction of developers I worked with at previous jobs, the mention of "optimization" meant arcane low-level micro optimizations using techniques the compiler can mostly automate nowadays. Very, very few of them knew what cache lines or branch predictions are. I've seen entire game engines with shipped games on all prev and current generation consoles built that way. Then they wonder why a PS3 has trouble running a simple 2D game with 20 sprites on screen.
nunez 10y ago
I would love a super lightweight messaging application similar to what we had with IRC and AIM but I don't think that will happen again. The whole point of faster and larger hardware is for software to take advantage of it.
noxToken 10y ago
> The sad fact is that the general public only seems to care about the fancy buttons. I think general public does care. Every couple of years, people lament the lack of speed that their laptops have. All of your programs are beefy, because people want quick turn around. And then the devs never come back to cut the fat. A friend of mine joked that 32GB of RAM was the new minimum standard, and someone else took a step further to say that disk I/O is the new RAM. We're still quite a ways away from that, but we're still trending in that direction. Edit: This isn't to say that we'll be using disk I/O as RAM. It's a hyperbole, but there's no denying that it's now acceptable to ignore memory footprint of desktop apps.
- falcolas 10y ago
  > disk I/O is the new RAM If you try to run OSX on a machine with a magnetic drive, you'll see that this is the case now. :/ To make it clear, my Mac Mini was performant about three major OS releases ago, and went to crap after an OS upgrade, so it's not the hardware.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    Well, with the SSDs in them approaching 3,000MB/sec reads, it's probably faster than RAM from a few generations ago. Can't wait for desktops to fully embrace PCIE SSDs, I'm talking like 6 slots for them + the PCIE lanes required to read them all at full speed. Hopefully Zen will get us closer. Edit: ooh, and shared HBM2 memory between the CPU and GPU. And make it socketed + upgradable :)
Lagged2Death 10y ago
The sad fact is that the general public only seems to care about the fancy buttons. The general public is (by our standards) astonishingly bad at using computers. http://boingboing.net/2016/11/28/people-really-really-suck-at.html http://boingboing.net/2016/11/28/people-really-really-suck-a... https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ Perhaps most users need the fancy buttons, need the leading-users-by-the-nose-through-a-garden-of-visual-delights sort of experience that modern, beautiful, dumbed-down web UIs mostly provide. The dense old interfaces the author champions are very rewarding and powerful for people who understand how to use them, but they're a huge turn-off for people who don't understand them and who aren't interested in investing the time needed to learn new tools. Pretty much every web UI post-mortem you see finds the same thing: The more clicks you require of users to perform a function or use a feature, the less users engage with that function or feature. One click is often too much to ask. Even so, the web as it stands today seems like (from a comp-sci point of view) a monumentally inefficient way of producing the functions it provides, with a ridiculous amount of hardware and software consumed by the problem of displaying, say, a news article which the reader has maybe a 5% chance of actually reading through and a 1% chance of commenting on.
falcolas 10y ago
> 4GB+ RAM only to send IMs to people On my machine, especially if people are getting GIF emoticon happy, Hipchat will gladly consume a full core of my processor as well. Reinstalls, stops/starts, etc... none of these work to make it behave again. A real battery killer.

na85 10y ago

There used to be little animated gifs that we'd put on our Geocities pages with flashing "thank you for not using AOL" or "don't surf and AOL" slogans. IMHO the web needs a movement akin to "nosql", but for bloated crap like JavaScript. My web browsing experience has only improved after installing noscript.

jasonkostempski 10y ago
I think the world is starting down this path, this is the second link to a .txt file in my news feed today :) I've recently been longing for a way to easily filter the internet to text/plain only content, not only is there no bloat, the content tends to have actual substance. Edit: Holy smokes, the site hosting the content is what I'm talking about http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher I'd still like a text/plain only Google though, I'd be willing to POST the search request for such a thing via cURL.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  This was also the second link I followed to a text file today, both on this domain (same author?). I went through the hassle of pinch-zooming to make the first one sort-of legible on my phone, because the content (C without the stdlib) was worth it, but I immediately hit the back button on this one. I really don't understand the inclination to make things harder to use, for what purpose, nostalgia?
  - stiGGG 10y ago
    Same here. Tried to read the "C without the stdlib" article on my phone, it was only readable in landscape mode and i gave up after the third time the screen rotated and i lost the line where i was reading. I tried it later on my desktop with 27" screen and all the content was aligned to left, keeping 80% of the screen black. I opened developer tools to align the content to the middle and wondered where the layout came from, there was almost no css. Then i realised that the author did every linebreak manually with a <br> in html. Yeah that's oldschool... facepalm
    - Qwertystop 10y ago
      According to the bit at the top, it's proxied from gopher. The column width limit is probably automatically inserted by the intermediary.
  - na85 10y ago
    I think there's a middle ground to be struck between making something harder to use and making a page that won't even load text without JavaScript, something I find more and more.
  - GrinningFool 10y ago
    Is it really harder to use? You get nothing buy the raw content, which you are free to style as you wish.
    - sanderjd 10y ago
      Yes, it is really harder to use! The use case here is "user reads the text", not "user with large screen reads the text". I click on the link on my phone and I can't read the text. Even with pinch-zoom to fill the screen, I can still only sort of read the text. If I must gain expertise with the stylesheet of a site in order to manually re-style it to fulfill its primary use-case, then that site is very hard to use. I'm not even arguing with the theory here. Proxying gopher text files to a simple text-based website is a really nifty idea, but this implementation has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. An implementation of this that conscientiously picks and chooses web platform features that aid in usability (for instance, perhaps responsive layout and typography) while rejecting those that are unnecessary for this use case (perhaps javascript) would be neat.
anc84 10y ago
I would love a no-javascript, no-external-urls, no-captchaflare movement so much.
s_kilk 10y ago
I've fantasized about creating a browser that can only load markdown documents, and render them with a pretty default style. Maybe I should get to work on that.
- sawmurai 10y ago
  If you do and need help ... I would love to!

jeremiep 10y ago

Its not high level languages which yield bad performance. Its developers not taking the time to optimize their architectures at the macro level (and unlike micro-optimizations, these are very rarely premature), or generally don't have the first clue in how to do so. You can write badly performing code in C++, its dead easy.

cylinder714 10y ago
In fairness, it's not the developers but their managers setting unreasonable schedules that preclude any chance of optimization.
- jeremiep 10y ago
  That happens a lot as well! But its our job as developers to challenge the managers when the expectations are unrealistic. They are very receptive when you put it in terms they understand. I've also seen plenty of developers jumping head first into code with a very shallow understanding of the requirements or the tech stack they're working with. For a large fraction of developers I worked with at previous jobs, the mention of "optimization" meant arcane low-level micro optimizations using techniques the compiler can mostly automate nowadays. Very, very few of them knew what cache lines or branch predictions are. I've seen entire game engines with shipped games on all prev and current generation consoles built that way. Then they wonder why a PS3 has trouble running a simple 2D game with 20 sprites on screen.

nunez 10y ago

I would love a super lightweight messaging application similar to what we had with IRC and AIM but I don't think that will happen again. The whole point of faster and larger hardware is for software to take advantage of it.

noxToken 10y ago

> The sad fact is that the general public only seems to care about the fancy buttons. I think general public does care. Every couple of years, people lament the lack of speed that their laptops have. All of your programs are beefy, because people want quick turn around. And then the devs never come back to cut the fat. A friend of mine joked that 32GB of RAM was the new minimum standard, and someone else took a step further to say that disk I/O is the new RAM. We're still quite a ways away from that, but we're still trending in that direction. Edit: This isn't to say that we'll be using disk I/O as RAM. It's a hyperbole, but there's no denying that it's now acceptable to ignore memory footprint of desktop apps.

falcolas 10y ago
> disk I/O is the new RAM If you try to run OSX on a machine with a magnetic drive, you'll see that this is the case now. :/ To make it clear, my Mac Mini was performant about three major OS releases ago, and went to crap after an OS upgrade, so it's not the hardware.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Well, with the SSDs in them approaching 3,000MB/sec reads, it's probably faster than RAM from a few generations ago. Can't wait for desktops to fully embrace PCIE SSDs, I'm talking like 6 slots for them + the PCIE lanes required to read them all at full speed. Hopefully Zen will get us closer. Edit: ooh, and shared HBM2 memory between the CPU and GPU. And make it socketed + upgradable :)

Lagged2Death 10y ago

The sad fact is that the general public only seems to care about the fancy buttons. The general public is (by our standards) astonishingly bad at using computers. http://boingboing.net/2016/11/28/people-really-really-suck-at.html http://boingboing.net/2016/11/28/people-really-really-suck-a... https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ Perhaps most users need the fancy buttons, need the leading-users-by-the-nose-through-a-garden-of-visual-delights sort of experience that modern, beautiful, dumbed-down web UIs mostly provide. The dense old interfaces the author champions are very rewarding and powerful for people who understand how to use them, but they're a huge turn-off for people who don't understand them and who aren't interested in investing the time needed to learn new tools. Pretty much every web UI post-mortem you see finds the same thing: The more clicks you require of users to perform a function or use a feature, the less users engage with that function or feature. One click is often too much to ask. Even so, the web as it stands today seems like (from a comp-sci point of view) a monumentally inefficient way of producing the functions it provides, with a ridiculous amount of hardware and software consumed by the problem of displaying, say, a news article which the reader has maybe a 5% chance of actually reading through and a 1% chance of commenting on.

falcolas 10y ago

> 4GB+ RAM only to send IMs to people On my machine, especially if people are getting GIF emoticon happy, Hipchat will gladly consume a full core of my processor as well. Reinstalls, stops/starts, etc... none of these work to make it behave again. A real battery killer.