6 ms·
Shit is slower than it was in the 90s. Spotify is slower than Winamp, Slack is slower than IRC, Webmail is slower than my e-mail client, VS Code is slower than
by 29athrowaway 6y ago
Shit is slower than it was in the 90s.
Spotify is slower than Winamp, Slack is slower than IRC, Webmail is slower than my e-mail client, VS Code is slower than Visual C++ 6.0.
- corysama 6y agoPeople forget that Winamp was instant on a 60Mhz machine with a spinning rust drive. It’s difficult to buy a computer that slow these days. Modern CPUs modulate their speeds by far more than that as part of their moment by moment power management!
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoRelated: when MacBooks switched to SSDs, the performance of my old spinning-disk MBP dropped noticeably basically overnight.
- Narishma 6y agoSame thing on Windows. It became incredibly slow on HDDs when SSDs started to become popular.
- cassepipe 6y agoHaving an Hdd running at 100% on Windows 8, slowing everything down, is actually what made me switch to Linux Mint. Never looked back.
- selfhoster11 6y agoWhen I first bought an SSD and noticed the crazy speed-up, my next thought was that developers will get used to it as the "new normal" and stop caring about IOPS which would slow down SSDs (ruining my blink-of-an-eye super-speed fun) and make HDDs near-unusable. Two to four years later, here we were on Windows, and to some extent, on Linux too.
- jdsully 6y agoThe amount of effort involved in making sure reads were sequential back in the HDD days was immense. It’s not surprising people dropped that as soon as possible.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoWinamp 2 was instant. Winamp 3 and 5 were slow.
- jayd16 6y agoWinamp didn't stream all music in existence over the internet. How is it really comparable?
- Firehawke 6y agoIt had Shoutcast.
- jayd16 6y agoWas Shoutcast all that fast? It didn't seem nearly as rock solid as the rest of winamp but I guess it could have been my internet at the time.
- goodpoint 6y agoYes, it was instant.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoYou could go to the shoutcast website, get the shoutcast links for the radios you were interested in, then make a playlist that could be dealt with just like any other playlist. And it was almost instant.
- kleiba 6y agoIt's comparable only on an abstract level - mostly because there's hardly anybody who really wants/needs "all music in existence over the internet", most people just want to "listen to music that I like". On that level, Winamp did the job just fine.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y agoIt really did not for me by that standard. I have access to orders of magnitude more music now that I know I like than I did during the Winamp days and I was a pretty early and savvy user back then so I had more access than a lot of people. If we're trading music player performance for the massive increase in availability I'll make that trade.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoYeah, this is the weirdest thing to me: Windows NT 3.51 on a Pentium was much snappier perceptibly than even my new M1 MBP (developers are already expanding to the new performance envelope).
- haberman 6y agoDan Luu has done some measurements around this: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/
- XorNot 6y agoWindows Server 2019 has a much snappier UI then Windows 10 I've found (I recently spent a ton of time automating installs for both and boy did that become noticeable). Then you look at the Windows 10 list of crapware and it becomes a lot clearer.
- Spooky23 6y agoWindows 10 is an abomination. It’s incredible how much grief Windows Vista got in comparison.
- selfhoster11 6y agoVista was a worse abomination on 2 GB of RAM. It's likely that if I installed a build of Windows 10 from 2 years ago on the machine in question, it would be faster than a greased lightning in comparison.
- stinos 6y agoThen you look at the Windows 10 list of crapware and it becomes a lot clearer. Is there an actual causal relationship? And which crapware specifically? Asking because I only have access to a bunch of Windows 10 Pro machines which already don't seem to have most of crapware on there (i.e. often I see threads here where people complain about all kinds of ads and other things I never even knew existed) and the rest disabled (as far as I can tell) and still it's less snapy than this one Windows Server instance on comparable machine. (and sadly no single modern OS feels as snappy as even Windows XP SP2 for a similar level of functionality on not-so-recent hardware)
- astrange 6y agoSlack is definitely faster than my IRC client since it's not running over ssh to a host. You can't actually run IRC locally or you'll miss all the chat from when you're not signed in.
- Shikadi 6y agoYou can use a bouncer so that's not true
- krapp 6y ago>Spotify is slower than Winamp, Slack is slower than IRC, Webmail is slower than my e-mail client, VS Code is slower than Visual C++ 6.0. All of which are Electron apps, apart from "Webmail" which is, well, what one might call a "distributed Electron app" (a website.) Maybe, just maybe, Electron is the problem.
- jupp0r 6y agoSpotify is not an Electron app, they are using Chromium Embedded Framework.
- reynhaim 6y agoSpotify runs on all of my devices. In the morning I can ask my smart speaker to play songs that Spotify presumes I like, continue from my car with a voice command, see what my friends are playing or play their playlists. I'll gladly wait for the ~5 seconds it takes for an app to start if it delivers all this. Of course IRC is much faster, it's also few orders of magnitude simpler than Slack. For work related communications I prefer Slack to IRC, but for chatting with friends IRC does just fine. One simple protocol vs hundreds of APIs that provide extremely rich content. Once again, Slack takes few seconds to launch on a modern machine, it's not that bad considering it does so much. Yeah shit is slower, shit is also way more connected and complex than in the 90s.
- User23 6y agoThe subjectively fastest, which is to say the most responsive or lowest input latency, computer I've ever used was a Macintosh 512ke upgraded to 2.5 megabytes of memory, running the system software and apps off of a 1.5 megabyte RAM-disk. When you double-clicked, say, MacPaint in the Finder, it was loaded before you finished the physical mouseup. This was when that hardware and software was still current.
- uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 6y agoVLC has pretty good startup time. VScode plugins (generally) dont take down the whole program or BSOD any more. I do feel that its not as snappy, which is sometimes physically unpleasant, but it is possible that we now wait less because we're not rebooting or ctrl+alt+del'ing our way out of some nullptr deref