5 ms·

This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user

This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started. It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load." Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start using it.

cowsandmilk 2y ago
Eh, in a case like this, without the 30 second “assume loaded” timeout, the system would be forever stuck in the loading screen for those impacted by the bugs. Sometimes it is better for your users to be optimistic that the system did indeed load.
- analog31 2y ago
  Of course I'm not your typical user, but I'd rather see the error log.
- mattnewton 2y ago
  Then maybe they would have caught the error in a preview release / QA
cosmicgadget 2y ago
Or, in the corporate information systems world, we have to wait for the half-dozen security and monitoring systems to get done scanning memory and blocking while painstakingly logging to the clould. Only then do you get to watch a catatonic UI thread idly wait for every last piece of the underlying software to load.
- analog31 2y ago
  Yes and everything hangs because the security software is the last to load.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    Ctrl+Alt+Delete, log off, then mash space to cancel the logoff. Kills the security software while leaving the rest of the system running. (Windows provides APIs to prevent this, but nobody writing "security" software uses them: in the Age of AI, I expect this to get even worse.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  Not only do they forbid devs to use Linux on their dev machines, they then proceed with cb.exe etc. Nothing shows how they value your time quiet as much as these artificial slowdowns they love to introduce. (Along with gigantic privacy issues, as it allows the employer to essentially look at a live feed of your desktop whenever they want) I could understand it if your device needed special access (VPN to prod etc), but you usually can't do that either from the dev machines - and need to first connect to a virtual machine (via browser or rdp) to be able to do that...
  - bregma 2y ago
    Well, we use Linux dev machines but IT has loaded them up with enough panopticon software that several times a week for an hour or so I can not get enough CPU or resident RAM to do productive work. But at least there are no forced system reboots at inconvenient times during the work day.
    - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
      At a previous job they offered Linux laptops (yay!), but... - umask was not 022, so installing pretty much anything with `sudo make install` would fail, as would some software. - Running nmap caused an alert to phone home to IT, who would nag me on slack. - Opening well-known ports to my LAN (like 22) caused an alert to IT. - An "agent" program ran constantly, often using 100% of a CPU. The system overall had about 45 minutes of battery life. - Various system settings were overridden by a sysctl.d/ file that was regenerated by the agent at boot. Fortunately I know how ASCII sorting works and could produce a file that overrode the overrides. - Various capabilities (CAP_...) were disabled for my sudoer user. It wasn't that bad, and IT was helpful, but it was a persistent annoyance. Maybe what happened is somebody googled "how to harden Linux" and then just made everything on the first page of results company policy.
      - DmitryOlshansky 2y ago
        At my work they would also disable ptrace in the kernel and require you to explain why need it
chii 2y ago
> showing the user environment before the software was fully started. and it has migrated to web apps today - where doing something causes the UI to show a loading/progress wheel, but it takes forever in actuality (or on start up of the webpage, you get a blank screen with placeholder bars/blurred color images etc). And this is the so-called responsive design...
- forgotusername6 2y ago
  What would you suggest? Is it better to wait until the whole app is loaded to show anything? Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place?
  - arkh 2y ago
    > Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place? Ding! Ding! Ding! We got a winner! Yeah, maybe we could expect machines which got 40 years of Moore's law to give you an experience at least as snappy as what you got on DOS apps.
    - 72deluxe 2y ago
      Yes I am baffled how modern apps are painfully slow. Everything seems to include a Chrome Embedded Framework and therefore have an entire browser running. There is sadly a generation of people who grew up after .net was introduced who think it's perfectly reasonable for a VM spooling up as part of an app load or loading a browser is fine too, and have no idea how speedy Windows 95 used to be, or how loading an app took less than 1 second, or how easy Delphi apps were to create. It's honestly very sad.
      - mike_hearn 2y ago
        Let's not go too far with the rose tinted glasses. Win95 apps are speedy if you run them on modern hardware but at the time they were all dog slow because the average Win95 machine was swapping like crazy. Loading apps on it definitely did not take one second. The prevalence of splash screens was a testament to that. Practically every app had one whereas today they're rare. Even browsers had multi-second splash screens back then. Microsoft was frequently suspected to be cheating because their apps started so fast you could only see the splash for a second or two, and nobody could work out how they did it. In reality they had written a custom linker that minimized the number of disk seeks required, and everything was disk seek constrained so that made a huge difference. Delphi apps were easier to create than if you used Visual C++/MFC but compared to modern tooling it wasn't that good. I say that as a someone who grew up with Delphi. Things have got better. In particular they got a lot more reliable. Software back then crashed all the time.
grishka 2y ago
It's clear to me that the intent with this 30-second timeout was that it's better for you to have a possibly half-broken but at least somehow usable desktop than be stuck with the loading screen forever, having to boot into a different OS to try to fix your main one.

cowsandmilk 2y ago

Eh, in a case like this, without the 30 second “assume loaded” timeout, the system would be forever stuck in the loading screen for those impacted by the bugs. Sometimes it is better for your users to be optimistic that the system did indeed load.

analog31 2y ago
Of course I'm not your typical user, but I'd rather see the error log.
mattnewton 2y ago
Then maybe they would have caught the error in a preview release / QA

cosmicgadget 2y ago

Or, in the corporate information systems world, we have to wait for the half-dozen security and monitoring systems to get done scanning memory and blocking while painstakingly logging to the clould. Only then do you get to watch a catatonic UI thread idly wait for every last piece of the underlying software to load.

analog31 2y ago
Yes and everything hangs because the security software is the last to load.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  Ctrl+Alt+Delete, log off, then mash space to cancel the logoff. Kills the security software while leaving the rest of the system running. (Windows provides APIs to prevent this, but nobody writing "security" software uses them: in the Age of AI, I expect this to get even worse.
ffsm8 2y ago
Not only do they forbid devs to use Linux on their dev machines, they then proceed with cb.exe etc. Nothing shows how they value your time quiet as much as these artificial slowdowns they love to introduce. (Along with gigantic privacy issues, as it allows the employer to essentially look at a live feed of your desktop whenever they want) I could understand it if your device needed special access (VPN to prod etc), but you usually can't do that either from the dev machines - and need to first connect to a virtual machine (via browser or rdp) to be able to do that...
- bregma 2y ago
  Well, we use Linux dev machines but IT has loaded them up with enough panopticon software that several times a week for an hour or so I can not get enough CPU or resident RAM to do productive work. But at least there are no forced system reboots at inconvenient times during the work day.
  - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    At a previous job they offered Linux laptops (yay!), but... - umask was not 022, so installing pretty much anything with `sudo make install` would fail, as would some software. - Running nmap caused an alert to phone home to IT, who would nag me on slack. - Opening well-known ports to my LAN (like 22) caused an alert to IT. - An "agent" program ran constantly, often using 100% of a CPU. The system overall had about 45 minutes of battery life. - Various system settings were overridden by a sysctl.d/ file that was regenerated by the agent at boot. Fortunately I know how ASCII sorting works and could produce a file that overrode the overrides. - Various capabilities (CAP_...) were disabled for my sudoer user. It wasn't that bad, and IT was helpful, but it was a persistent annoyance. Maybe what happened is somebody googled "how to harden Linux" and then just made everything on the first page of results company policy.
    - DmitryOlshansky 2y ago
      At my work they would also disable ptrace in the kernel and require you to explain why need it

chii 2y ago

> showing the user environment before the software was fully started. and it has migrated to web apps today - where doing something causes the UI to show a loading/progress wheel, but it takes forever in actuality (or on start up of the webpage, you get a blank screen with placeholder bars/blurred color images etc). And this is the so-called responsive design...

forgotusername6 2y ago
What would you suggest? Is it better to wait until the whole app is loaded to show anything? Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place?
- arkh 2y ago
  > Or is the only solution to fix loading times in the first place? Ding! Ding! Ding! We got a winner! Yeah, maybe we could expect machines which got 40 years of Moore's law to give you an experience at least as snappy as what you got on DOS apps.
  - 72deluxe 2y ago
    Yes I am baffled how modern apps are painfully slow. Everything seems to include a Chrome Embedded Framework and therefore have an entire browser running. There is sadly a generation of people who grew up after .net was introduced who think it's perfectly reasonable for a VM spooling up as part of an app load or loading a browser is fine too, and have no idea how speedy Windows 95 used to be, or how loading an app took less than 1 second, or how easy Delphi apps were to create. It's honestly very sad.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Let's not go too far with the rose tinted glasses. Win95 apps are speedy if you run them on modern hardware but at the time they were all dog slow because the average Win95 machine was swapping like crazy. Loading apps on it definitely did not take one second. The prevalence of splash screens was a testament to that. Practically every app had one whereas today they're rare. Even browsers had multi-second splash screens back then. Microsoft was frequently suspected to be cheating because their apps started so fast you could only see the splash for a second or two, and nobody could work out how they did it. In reality they had written a custom linker that minimized the number of disk seeks required, and everything was disk seek constrained so that made a huge difference. Delphi apps were easier to create than if you used Visual C++/MFC but compared to modern tooling it wasn't that good. I say that as a someone who grew up with Delphi. Things have got better. In particular they got a lot more reliable. Software back then crashed all the time.

grishka 2y ago

It's clear to me that the intent with this 30-second timeout was that it's better for you to have a possibly half-broken but at least somehow usable desktop than be stuck with the loading screen forever, having to boot into a different OS to try to fix your main one.