4 ms·

The fastest computing experience I had was somewhere around 2001-02 or so, I had PIII 1Gz with 256MB of RAM and 3MBit DSL connection. Everything was screaming:

by tx 18y ago

The fastest computing experience I had was somewhere around 2001-02 or so, I had PIII 1Gz with 256MB of RAM and 3MBit DSL connection. Everything was screaming: every piece of software I ran, every site I visited. I forgot how "Please wait..." popups looked like. After that, it's been declining ever since: my software has gotten slower and slower, and web sites started to bring back dial-up memories from mid-90s. After switching to Linux I got back most of what I lost, but the web still feels much slower, even Gmail is giving me "Still working..." strip at the top on a daily basis and randomly 1-2 squares on google maps remain gray after initial page load: hard to bitch about free stuff though.

ROFISH 18y ago
I personally have found a lot of software to be I/O bound instead of CPU bound. Specifically hard drives. Try loading up something. Does it wait forever because the CPU is at 100%? Or is the hard drive light blinking like nuts? Our quest for never-ending data seems to slow things down. In the age of terrabyte hard drives, the only real limitation on program size is the average broadband connection on most freely downloadable apps. (And it's even worse for programs that come on a disc!) There recently was an article about how spellcheck worked with limited resources. Word might be loading a smallish, compressed English dictionary back then, but loading uncompressed, unabridged English dictionary today since there's no real hard drive space constraint. Never blame a poor, bloated algorithm when the problem is just as likely our unfettered need for more data.
- tx 18y ago
  I personally have found that most software is idiocy-bound, like creating a search thread for every key typed in "Quicksearch" box (Vista, with indexing disabled). Or loading an entire page via 12 AJAX-requests, instead of serving it all at once, circa 1998. (and THEN doing a round-trip to the server only to report back that I shouldn't be putting dashes in my phone number) As for I/O... it's is nothing, I've got plenty of it.

by tx 18y ago

ROFISH 18y ago

I personally have found a lot of software to be I/O bound instead of CPU bound. Specifically hard drives. Try loading up something. Does it wait forever because the CPU is at 100%? Or is the hard drive light blinking like nuts? Our quest for never-ending data seems to slow things down. In the age of terrabyte hard drives, the only real limitation on program size is the average broadband connection on most freely downloadable apps. (And it's even worse for programs that come on a disc!) There recently was an article about how spellcheck worked with limited resources. Word might be loading a smallish, compressed English dictionary back then, but loading uncompressed, unabridged English dictionary today since there's no real hard drive space constraint. Never blame a poor, bloated algorithm when the problem is just as likely our unfettered need for more data.

tx 18y ago
I personally have found that most software is idiocy-bound, like creating a search thread for every key typed in "Quicksearch" box (Vista, with indexing disabled). Or loading an entire page via 12 AJAX-requests, instead of serving it all at once, circa 1998. (and THEN doing a round-trip to the server only to report back that I shouldn't be putting dashes in my phone number) As for I/O... it's is nothing, I've got plenty of it.