3 ms·

I used to be able to do that on my 25MHz Amiga with 10MB of RAM. Static absolute task priority scheduling is actually a very good way to ensure your MP3 will pl

I used to be able to do that on my 25MHz Amiga with 10MB of RAM. Static absolute task priority scheduling is actually a very good way to ensure your MP3 will play without stuttering.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Some of those more-obscure operating systems simply felt like magic. Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time. Mouse just seemingly-randomly becomes unresponsive. BeOS on the same machine? Hard to load the system enough that playback isn't smooth, and input was only rarely anything other than instant-feeling. Closest I've seen to that recently is iOS, but it cheats by suspending or evicting backgrounded programs. ... but, point is, a chat app ought to be able to run smoothly using perhaps 10% of a single efficiency-core on an M1, when actively being used, and about 0% when inactive. These programs acting like they're mining Bitcoin just to let you chat, which we used to do on hardware far weaker than many modern thermostats have (hell, maybe even some lightbulbs), are absolute jokes.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  > Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time. Not my experience. Windows (and IIRC MacOS too) always had a great disk I/O scheduler that prioritized audio related tasks so I never had mp3s pop or skip on me, no matter how hard I was thrashing my spinning rust disks back then. Linux was the one where I noticed this issue intensely back then as the schedulers used by mainstream distros were all tuned for server/mainframe workloads.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    To be fair to Windows, it didn't take much more powerful hardware before that problem went away—the mp3 stuttering, anyway, UI lag/unresponsiveness is still struggling to match BeOS on ~every major OS, today. Was all Win98 for me in that era, maybe XP and such improved it (I don't think I ever tried to run it on anything that weak)

I used to be able to do that on my 25MHz Amiga with 10MB of RAM. Static absolute task priority scheduling is actually a very good way to ensure your MP3 will play without stuttering.

yamtaddle 4y ago

Some of those more-obscure operating systems simply felt like magic. Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time. Mouse just seemingly-randomly becomes unresponsive. BeOS on the same machine? Hard to load the system enough that playback isn't smooth, and input was only rarely anything other than instant-feeling. Closest I've seen to that recently is iOS, but it cheats by suspending or evicting backgrounded programs. ... but, point is, a chat app ought to be able to run smoothly using perhaps 10% of a single efficiency-core on an M1, when actively being used, and about 0% when inactive. These programs acting like they're mining Bitcoin just to let you chat, which we used to do on hardware far weaker than many modern thermostats have (hell, maybe even some lightbulbs), are absolute jokes.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
> Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time. Not my experience. Windows (and IIRC MacOS too) always had a great disk I/O scheduler that prioritized audio related tasks so I never had mp3s pop or skip on me, no matter how hard I was thrashing my spinning rust disks back then. Linux was the one where I noticed this issue intensely back then as the schedulers used by mainstream distros were all tuned for server/mainframe workloads.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  To be fair to Windows, it didn't take much more powerful hardware before that problem went away—the mp3 stuttering, anyway, UI lag/unresponsiveness is still struggling to match BeOS on ~every major OS, today. Was all Win98 for me in that era, maybe XP and such improved it (I don't think I ever tried to run it on anything that weak)