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Lately I've been thinking about this exact thing, so it's interesting that someone has actually written an article about it. (With much better supporting detai

by simmons 10y ago

Lately I've been thinking about this exact thing, so it's interesting that someone has actually written an article about it. (With much better supporting details than I could come up with.) I find it frustrating that in 2017 I still spend plenty of time waiting for the computer to do something. Occasionally even typing into a text field in a web browser is laggy on my high-end late-model iMac. For every extra cycle the hardware engineers give us, we software engineers figure out some way to soak it up. The terminal is not for everyone, but lately I've found it's the one environment where things can be instantaneous enough that my flow is not thrown off. For kicks, I installed XUbuntu on a $150 ARM Chromebook with the idea of mostly just using the terminal (and having a throwaway laptop that I'm not scared to use on the bus/train). I expected to mostly be using it as a dumb terminal to ssh into servers, but amazingly, most local tasks are still pretty instantaneous.

brandur 10y ago
Thanks for reading! > I find it frustrating that in 2017 I still spend plenty of time waiting for the computer to do something. Occasionally even typing into a text field in a web browser is laggy on my high-end late-model iMac. For every extra cycle the hardware engineers give us, we software engineers figure out some way to soak it up. I totally agree. In a very subjective sense, it feels like despite our massive advancements in hardware, computers aren't getting any faster. I have vivid memories using web browsers around 2000 or WinAmp 3 back in the mid 90s and they felt like about the same speed as what I get today. Obviously the complexity of our apps have increased by an order of magnitude or two, but the things we're doing with them are not an order of magnitude more complex. In a very real sense it's like you say: we're soaking up all the advances that new hardware is providing, and mostly just because we can.
- mpweiher 10y ago
  > computers aren't getting any faster. Wirth's Law: software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. And the hardware is getting faster slower than it used to, too.
zer0t3ch 10y ago
> For every extra cycle the hardware engineers give us, we software engineers figure out some way to soak it up This seems to be true in way too much of the tech field these days. My go-to example is drive storage. Every year, our hard drives get increasingly larger, by pretty big margins even, but game developers just make bigger and less compressed assets, even though they're not needed.
wott 10y ago
One thing that drives me crazy nowadays is the bloody telly and the stuff around: insane warming up (boot) times, insane delay for channel switching. The second used to be immediate and the first almost immediate (I am not talking of very very old CRT which needed a long time to warm up the screen, but 80's 90's models were fast). And then we have to periodically (like weekly) do a hard power-off and re-init, else the bloody thing gets slower and slower every day after a while.

by simmons 10y ago

brandur 10y ago

Thanks for reading! > I find it frustrating that in 2017 I still spend plenty of time waiting for the computer to do something. Occasionally even typing into a text field in a web browser is laggy on my high-end late-model iMac. For every extra cycle the hardware engineers give us, we software engineers figure out some way to soak it up. I totally agree. In a very subjective sense, it feels like despite our massive advancements in hardware, computers aren't getting any faster. I have vivid memories using web browsers around 2000 or WinAmp 3 back in the mid 90s and they felt like about the same speed as what I get today. Obviously the complexity of our apps have increased by an order of magnitude or two, but the things we're doing with them are not an order of magnitude more complex. In a very real sense it's like you say: we're soaking up all the advances that new hardware is providing, and mostly just because we can.

mpweiher 10y ago
> computers aren't getting any faster. Wirth's Law: software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. And the hardware is getting faster slower than it used to, too.

zer0t3ch 10y ago

> For every extra cycle the hardware engineers give us, we software engineers figure out some way to soak it up This seems to be true in way too much of the tech field these days. My go-to example is drive storage. Every year, our hard drives get increasingly larger, by pretty big margins even, but game developers just make bigger and less compressed assets, even though they're not needed.

wott 10y ago

One thing that drives me crazy nowadays is the bloody telly and the stuff around: insane warming up (boot) times, insane delay for channel switching. The second used to be immediate and the first almost immediate (I am not talking of very very old CRT which needed a long time to warm up the screen, but 80's 90's models were fast). And then we have to periodically (like weekly) do a hard power-off and re-init, else the bloody thing gets slower and slower every day after a while.