3 ms·

> Now it’s practically instant. No it's not :) Phones do not shut down. Powering off and back on still takes forever. As for desktops, Windows at least keeps

> Now it’s practically instant. No it's not :) Phones do not shut down. Powering off and back on still takes forever. As for desktops, Windows at least keeps starting stuff in the background long after your UI gets displayed.

jama211 1y ago
Yeeeah dude you have some seriously rose tinted glasses on. My windows machine can go from completely powered off to a big application like a web browser fully open and operational on maybe 10-15 seconds, and yes, fully powered off. No way I’m making coffee in that time. Sure, windows might run stuff in the background, but it’s so fast that stuff doesn’t get in the way of me using the thing at all. As for phones, “forever” is a silly thing to say but even if I granted you that one off boot time, you have somewhat moved the goalposts as you talked about the act of using software in day to day usage. On my laptop I can genuinely open 10 apps, close 10 apps, and open 10 apps again all within 10 seconds, probably faster if I wasn’t constrained by literal click actions. My computers growing up would grind to a halt if you tried to run like 3 things at once! There are always instances of inefficient software, but there was back in the day too, I remember generating a new map on civilisation 1 on my 286 and it taking 10 hours. There is no way you can possibly say that on average software is slower today than it used to be, that statement in general is just completely false.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  The improvements you describe come down to one thing: solid state drives. If we had them in the 90s, your software would've been starting up just as fast (or even faster) then. Meanwhile, once the software did start, it ran faster and with fewer resources than software does today. It's not rose colored glasses: software today truly is worse on average than software 20 years ago.
  - jama211 1y ago
    You say that like once the software has started it had washed its hands of that slow spinning disk, anything that interacts with data (god, remember trying to do video editing 20 years ago?? It was hell) was a nightmare. And oh yeah, 100% I agree SSD’s are a huge factor as to why software runs faster now than it used to on average for day to day activities. Thanks for mentioning one of the things that helps demonstrate my point. But it is not the only thing, that’s for sure. I can think of a few other critical things that made usage of computing faster over the years, and I bet you can too. Partially unrelated but I once downloaded anime on dialup, used to take 30 hours per episode at low quality…
- nottorp 1y ago
  > I remember generating a new map on civilisation 1 on my 286 and it taking 10 hours Humm. If my glasses are rose tinted, yours are black tinted. I've played quite a lot of civ 1, even on an xt with 8088, and i'm pretty sure map generation did not take 10 hours. Perhaps if you hacked yours to use larger maps... I'm also pretty sure civ 1 got to the menu on my 8088 faster than Death Stranding 2 on my ps5. Although that might be my rose tinted glasses indeed. Civ 1 also didn't have a 29 Gb day one patch :)
  - jama211 1y ago
    Let’s be honest for a second - we could both pick examples of slow software on old machines, slow software on new machines, fast software on old machines, and fast software on new machines, and talk about cherry picked experiences all day long to “prove our points”. Which… by default… means I’m you’re going to have a lot of trouble asserting your “everything is slower now” point, if you see my point ;). I may also have to accept I can’t assert necessarily that everything is faster now. Fortunately I don’t really need to, as I am happy to restrict my point to simple activities, such as web browsing and such, but that’s by the by. And to answer your question I don’t remember why it took quite so long to generate civ 1 maps, but I have a vague memory of trying to do weird things with the maps with my dad, so perhaps they were larger or there was some generation mod but I honestly couldn’t tell you my memory is too fuzzy. I do remember the copy protection that required looking up words in the manual though…

jama211 1y ago

Yeeeah dude you have some seriously rose tinted glasses on. My windows machine can go from completely powered off to a big application like a web browser fully open and operational on maybe 10-15 seconds, and yes, fully powered off. No way I’m making coffee in that time. Sure, windows might run stuff in the background, but it’s so fast that stuff doesn’t get in the way of me using the thing at all. As for phones, “forever” is a silly thing to say but even if I granted you that one off boot time, you have somewhat moved the goalposts as you talked about the act of using software in day to day usage. On my laptop I can genuinely open 10 apps, close 10 apps, and open 10 apps again all within 10 seconds, probably faster if I wasn’t constrained by literal click actions. My computers growing up would grind to a halt if you tried to run like 3 things at once! There are always instances of inefficient software, but there was back in the day too, I remember generating a new map on civilisation 1 on my 286 and it taking 10 hours. There is no way you can possibly say that on average software is slower today than it used to be, that statement in general is just completely false.

bigstrat2003 1y ago
The improvements you describe come down to one thing: solid state drives. If we had them in the 90s, your software would've been starting up just as fast (or even faster) then. Meanwhile, once the software did start, it ran faster and with fewer resources than software does today. It's not rose colored glasses: software today truly is worse on average than software 20 years ago.
- jama211 1y ago
  You say that like once the software has started it had washed its hands of that slow spinning disk, anything that interacts with data (god, remember trying to do video editing 20 years ago?? It was hell) was a nightmare. And oh yeah, 100% I agree SSD’s are a huge factor as to why software runs faster now than it used to on average for day to day activities. Thanks for mentioning one of the things that helps demonstrate my point. But it is not the only thing, that’s for sure. I can think of a few other critical things that made usage of computing faster over the years, and I bet you can too. Partially unrelated but I once downloaded anime on dialup, used to take 30 hours per episode at low quality…
nottorp 1y ago
> I remember generating a new map on civilisation 1 on my 286 and it taking 10 hours Humm. If my glasses are rose tinted, yours are black tinted. I've played quite a lot of civ 1, even on an xt with 8088, and i'm pretty sure map generation did not take 10 hours. Perhaps if you hacked yours to use larger maps... I'm also pretty sure civ 1 got to the menu on my 8088 faster than Death Stranding 2 on my ps5. Although that might be my rose tinted glasses indeed. Civ 1 also didn't have a 29 Gb day one patch :)
- jama211 1y ago
  Let’s be honest for a second - we could both pick examples of slow software on old machines, slow software on new machines, fast software on old machines, and fast software on new machines, and talk about cherry picked experiences all day long to “prove our points”. Which… by default… means I’m you’re going to have a lot of trouble asserting your “everything is slower now” point, if you see my point ;). I may also have to accept I can’t assert necessarily that everything is faster now. Fortunately I don’t really need to, as I am happy to restrict my point to simple activities, such as web browsing and such, but that’s by the by. And to answer your question I don’t remember why it took quite so long to generate civ 1 maps, but I have a vague memory of trying to do weird things with the maps with my dad, so perhaps they were larger or there was some generation mod but I honestly couldn’t tell you my memory is too fuzzy. I do remember the copy protection that required looking up words in the manual though…