11 ms·
Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
- eridius 10y agoIf it's just for benchmarks, why not make it a preference (defaulted off), so benchmarks can be run with the default settings (off) just fine, but people can turn it on if they want to?
- daok 10y ago1) People with it on would say "Windows is slow". 2) Because it adds code to maintain that doesn't need to be.
- eridius 10y agoDisplaying seconds is a valuable feature, so it's not a matter of having unnecessary code. As for being slow, the ability to display seconds was removed because of the minimum system requirements for Windows. Anyone with a machine that has more than the bare minimum can probably spare the kilobytes necessary to draw seconds.
- j3097736 10y agoCertainly more useful/less code than the analog clock in the date/time settings window.
- shmerl 10y agoI always switch it on (KDE).
- HeavenBanned 10y agoI used Winaero tweaker to turn the second hand on on my Windows 10.
- phkahler 10y agoOn 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 count, and there are occasions when I want to time something to the second, but from a UI perspective those are not common use cases that warrant screen real estate for extra digits especially back then.
- serf 10y ago>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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Coincoin 10y agoJust click on the clock, it will pop a window with seconds in it.
- kakarot 10y agoIt 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
- tedunangst 10y agoIf you find yourself measuring compile times frequently, I think you'll be much happier with a command that actually times the operation than trying to eyeball it from the status bar. I can't imagine staring at a compilation and being unable to look away lest I miss the finish.
- ams6110 10y agoMacOS can optionally show seconds. Anyone know if it has similar benchmark impact?
- JoshTriplett 10y agoAnd 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoThat's why Apple got rid of the Time Machine icon animation, IIRC.
- adviceadam 10y agoI 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.
- ams6110 10y agoDisplaying the clock in Mac OS doesn't prevent the machine from sleeping, whether seconds are shown or not.
- kristofferR 10y agoHe is talking about a different form of sleeping.
- Sunset 10y ago> Modern systems can easily sleep for more than a second at a time, even with the screen on (and not updating). Good luck with that with quadrillion services chugging away in the background including file indexing service and all the spying bullshit.
- e2e8 10y agoI have been using T-Clock for many years to get seconds in the taskbar clock. https://github.com/White-Tiger/T-Clock https://github.com/White-Tiger/T-Clock
- neverminder 10y agoI always have the seconds on (Ubuntu) and it's a good feature. I leave work every day at 17:28:15 sharp, otherwise I will miss my train (London DLR) and yes, seconds matter in this case.
- bbcbasic 10y agoI love that about London. 15 seconds before the train arrives 50 people turn up walking briskly at 5mph just in time.
- neverminder 10y agoExactly this. I really like this punctuality and routine, so delays are rather annoying when they occur.
- Someone 10y agoIf that isn't satire, how are you using the on-screen clock to do that? Do you start staring at it at around 17:20 (or even earlier?) and wait for it to hit 17:28:15, or is your internal clock so good that you only have to start staring at it at 17:28:00? Either way, why spend time staring at an on-screen clock if you also could spend that time walking to the train station, or even walking on the platform? I would find some tool that allows me to set daily alarms at around 17:15 (as an early warning to finish whatever I am doing) and 17:28:15 (as a sign to leave now), so that I wouldn't have to waste time staring at that clock.
- neverminder 10y agoIt's not that hard once you're used to it. I just glance at the clock several times towards the end of work to know exactly when to wind things down and stand up from my chair at exactly 17:28:15. The optimal time was determined by observing elevator business patterns, crowd thickness downstairs and delay margins of train arriving at my stop.
- achivetta 10y agoIt might not be the memory concern it once was, but today it might very well be a power concern. Modern laptop display pipelines can save power if they don't have to redraw any of the screen: constantly updating status bar animations break that.[1] 1: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2013/712/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2013/712/ (I think the relatively short graphics section mentions this. Can't seem to find the talk that goes into it in more detail...)
- Moter8 10y agoCan't watch on either Chrome or Firefox. Apple are real gits.
- huxley 10y agoNeither Chrome or Firefox support HLS on the desktop despite providing support on mobile (since Android 3.0 I believe). They have categorically refused to add desktop support, if you have any complaints I would take it up with them.
- milesrout 10y agoWhy would they support a closed, proprietary format when there exist better, open ones?
- dogecoinbase 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming#Server_implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming#Server_imp...
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoYou didn't actually answer the question.
- clouddrover 10y ago
- anc84 10y agoHow could I benchmark this on XFCE nowadays?
- lucb1e 10y ago... in Windows 95. I mean, the article describes why in versions of Windows from an era that was much more memory-constrained. Even in 2003, Windows 95 was as old as Android 2.2 is now. I configured my task bar to display seconds and can't say Cinnamon is hogging that much more memory or CPU because of it.
- krallja 10y agoToo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014)
- LeoNatan25 10y agoWe 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.
- mschuster91 10y agoBut 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.
- movedx 10y agoYou'll probably get down-voted for your choice of language, but I agree. I actually feel what's going to happen is the JS community will start implementing WebASM and other very low-level mechanism to improve the speed of slow software components and, given enough time, will eventually just have entire binary applications being delivered through the browser (automatically installed, without asking you.) We'll go from `yum install software-suite` to `https://www.software-suite.com/` https://www.software-suite.com/` and the results will be the same. We'll have gone full circle.
- valuearb 10y agoI worked on a visual programming language in late 80s. It would compile it's programs but the compiler was really slow, took minutes for small programs. We worked on optimizing it but couldn't find much to optimize. Then the founder took out the code that updated the progress bar as it compiled and compiles finished 10x faster. This was on Mac Plus.
- Namrog84 10y agoI wonder if it was trashing the cache or something? What was so bad about this particular progress bar?
- Gracana 10y agoNo cache on a Plus. It was probably just updating the progress bar too frequently. The 68k in the Plus is an 8MHz 32 bit processor with 16 bit data bus, 4 clock cycles per bus access if there are no wait states, and most instructions are more than one word long. There's not a whole lot of time to do useful work!
- Nition 10y agoMeanwhile in 2016: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283 https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283
- digi_owl 10y agoTruly seems like those that do not learn from history is forced to relive it...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bzbarsky 10y agoSoftware still does this today. For example, a large part of https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721822 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721822 is down to progress bar rendering making the loading of the saved-data file be much slower. :( See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721822#c32 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721822#c32 for the most recent data there...
- mschaef 10y agoThis 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 'spectator') on the night of the Windows95 release. (It was a midnight release and the stores were open late.) There was a line out the door that snaked around through the store past the Windows 95 boxes, the Plus Pack, boxes, MS Office, and then the memory upgrade desk...
- Steeeve 10y agoI worked there at the time. That line didn't go away, it lasted for days. It was reminiscent of empire strikes back. 4MB SIMMS at that time were more expensive than 4GB sticks today. People had 16MB of RAM, but that was mostly reserved to gamers and programmers. Or Macs at graphics design shops.
- bitwize 10y agoThe 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.
- movedx 10y agoI'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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGYcNcFhctc This led me to a few other videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2owaKucyU1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2owaKucyU1Y Sigh. The 90s.
- Arizhel 10y agoThe 90s were really great in a lot of ways. But as you've shown, it was really awful in a few others. I wonder if there's a parallel universe out there where Windows 95 never happened and Microsoft went out of business somehow. That would be the universe where the 90s were a truly wondrous age.
- firasd 10y agoRaymond once had an article about why the date/time control panel is not a calendar https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050621-04/?p=35253 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)
- anonymfus 10y agoAnd since Windows 10 1607 it shows your calendar events.
- IshKebab 10y ago> 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.
- petercooper 10y agoMy gut reaction was going to be that it fared poorly in user testing. I'd be pretty distracted by such a thing and prone to idly watching it :-D
- alkonaut 10y agoWould have thought it would be useless because our eyes notice movement in the periphery and it distracts you to look at it. I would be annoyed with some animation going on that I don't care about.
- devereaux 10y agoOn 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.
- userbinator 10y agoOne thing I've always wondered about the taskbar clock is why they didn't just follow an existing time formatting standard... http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9pDonc_uipU/UEoMOdhA-eI/AAAAAAAABw8/8gyhuFzTG3A/s1600/Edit_Digital_Clock_Configuration_Window.png http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9pDonc_uipU/UEoMOdhA-eI/AAAAAAAABw... ...and invented their own: https://www.groovypost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/image_714.png https://www.groovypost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/image_...
- toast0 10y agoFrom the screenshot, someone not familiar with strftime would be lost; but most people would be able to figure out the invented format. Also, it looked like users got to choose from a drop down of suggestions -- the "format string" was probably only for users to read, not actually parsed.
- userbinator 10y agoAlso, it looked like users got to choose from a drop down of suggestions -- the "format string" was probably only for users to read, not actually parsed. Actually it is possible to write your own format string, since those are comboboxes: https://www.bleepstatic.com/tutorials/windows/customize-windows-time/time-customize-format.jpg https://www.bleepstatic.com/tutorials/windows/customize-wind... Also, I would agree that the Windows UI is better since it provides a short description of the format letters; but they could've just as easily done that for the commonly-used strftime() specifiers too, with perhaps a link that opens a popup with all of them. The live preview at the top also helps.
- ex3ndr 10y agoFunny thing is that Android removed in 5.0 animations in status bar to save power as redrawing frequently will eat battery.
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- frik 10y ago> Because that blinking colon and the constantly-updating time were killing our benchmark numbers. Like Visual Studio Code uses 12% CPU in idle due to cursor blinking? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014 In comparison the Windows Shell (up to Win7) is a lot more efficient and coded in C/C++.