Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031010-00/?p=42203

by breadtk • 9 years ago

123 116 9 years ago

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

eridius3• 9 years ago

If it's just for benchmarks, why not make it a preference (defaulted off), so benchmarks can be run with the default settings (off) just fine, but people can turn it on if they want to?

daok• 9 years ago

1) People with it on would say "Windows is slow". 2) Because it adds code to maintain that doesn't need to be.

eridius3• 9 years ago

Displaying seconds is a valuable feature, so it's not a matter of having unnecessary code. As for being slow, the ability to display seconds was removed because of the minimum system requirements for Windows. Anyone with a machine that has more than the bare minimum can probably spare the kilobytes necessary to draw seconds.

j30977362• 9 years ago

Certainly more useful/less code than the analog clock in the date/time settings window.

shmerl• 9 years ago

I always switch it on (KDE).

phkahler• 9 years ago

On a more practical note, why would you want to have seconds on the clock? I find that most of the time I don't want to know the time to a precision of better than 5 minutes. That may just be me, but when someone asks the time and I read it off my phone as 3:56 it really bothers me and sometimes I convert that to 5-to-4 just to avoid what in most cases is arbitrary extra precision. Sure there are times when minutes count, and there are occasions when I want to time something to the second, but from a UI perspective those are not common use cases that warrant screen real estate for extra digits especially back then.

serf• 9 years ago

On a more practical note, why would you want to have seconds on the clock?

for timing things.

For example, it's super easy to check a heart rate if you don't need to provide timing or rhythm.

Or waiting on ramen , or steeping tea. Lots of reasons.

Coincoin• 9 years ago

Just click on the clock, it will pop a window with seconds in it.

mikeash• 9 years ago

Seems like you've answered your own question. Typically this is configurable, so that people who want the seconds to always be visible can have it.

anonred• 9 years ago

On macOS, it’s a useful indicator of when the system has frozen/kernel panic, which unfortunately happens far too often.

JoshTriplett2• 9 years ago

Cursor movement works for that. Or if the system freezes in a way that allows the hardware cursor to keep working, then move the cursor over something that would normally react to it.

throwaway2016a2• 9 years ago

You must have really bad luck with Macs.

As a MacOS user for seven years I can't say I've ever had that issue. Certainly not enough to need the seconds to be an indicator. I've had my system completely lock up maybe four times and those times my mouse refusing to move was enough of an indicator.

Heck, right now it's been two and a half months since I've rebooted... and probably a year since I've rebooted because it froze.

I'm not an Apple fan boy either. In fact my next computer will probably be Linux. But I have to admin the last three Macs I have owned have been great computers.

valuearb2• 9 years ago

I returned to the Mac 7 years ago, and work on one every day (development, Xcode compiles, run web server, WebStorm, business stuff like numbers/pages, etc). Not sure I ever remember having a kernel panic.

j30977362• 9 years ago

To synchronize radio-less clocks/timers/etc?

draw_down• 9 years ago

I mean, come on. It's a clock! Surely seconds are relevant.

I understand that everyone might not want to see them, but this isn't a great argument for leaving off a feature that is surely useful in other circumstances. The article is interesting, but I don't think these sort of technical explanations Chen gets into should be accepted as valid reasons to leave out a feature. They're interesting in context, but we should all be able to recognize that showing seconds is a good feature for a clock. Even the team in question would have left the feature in if it had performed OK at the time, which indicates they agreed with its utility.

tedunangst2• 9 years ago

Lots of broken clocks in my house... Alarm clock, microwave, stove, wall, ... none of them show seconds.

coin2• 9 years ago

why would you want to have seconds on the clock?

* Timing things, such as software execution

* Starting a phone interview on time

* Timing a trade just before the market closes

megablast2• 9 years ago

Starting a phone interview on time

Down to the second?

JosephHatfield• 9 years ago

I concur. I think it would be a great option if users could specify the granularity of time they wanted to see. I'd probably set mine to 30 minutes.

woliveirajr• 9 years ago

Some years ago, I would set the clock of my linux (ubuntu? gnome? don't remember specifics) to display a "fuzzy time". It would tell time in that way : a quarter to eleven... two and a half... And it was very good, instead of worrying if I was being productive by checking the time twice every minute, I would just let it go.

i336_4• 9 years ago

This was a KDE thing. I'm unsure if it still has the option now.

ams61102• 9 years ago

MacOS can optionally show seconds. Anyone know if it has similar benchmark impact?

JoshTriplett2• 9 years ago

And on current systems, updating every second would decrease battery life by preventing your system from sleeping. Modern systems can easily sleep for more than a second at a time, even with the screen on (and not updating).

I also, personally, can't stand to have distractions like that on my screen away from where I want to focus.

TazeTSchnitzel• 9 years ago

That's why Apple got rid of the Time Machine icon animation, IIRC.

adviceadam• 9 years ago

I had completely forgotten about the Time Machine icon animating before. Interesting. Odd choice perhaps because I imagine most people have the hard drive at their desk, when wall power is easily available. There is a setting that enables backing up on battery power but I think the default value is disabled.

ams61102• 9 years ago

Displaying the clock in Mac OS doesn't prevent the machine from sleeping, whether seconds are shown or not.

kristofferR• 9 years ago

He is talking about a different form of sleeping.

Sunset• 9 years ago

Modern systems can easily sleep for more than a second at a time, even with the screen on (and not updating).

Good luck with that with quadrillion services chugging away in the background including file indexing service and all the spying bullshit.

e2e8• 9 years ago

I have been using T-Clock for many years to get seconds in the taskbar clock. https://github.com/White-Tiger/T-Clock

neverminder3• 9 years ago

I always have the seconds on (Ubuntu) and it's a good feature. I leave work every day at 17:28:15 sharp, otherwise I will miss my train (London DLR) and yes, seconds matter in this case.

bbcbasic• 9 years ago

I love that about London. 15 seconds before the train arrives 50 people turn up walking briskly at 5mph just in time.

neverminder3• 9 years ago

Exactly this. I really like this punctuality and routine, so delays are rather annoying when they occur.

Someone• 9 years ago

If that isn't satire, how are you using the on-screen clock to do that?

Do you start staring at it at around 17:20 (or even earlier?) and wait for it to hit 17:28:15, or is your internal clock so good that you only have to start staring at it at 17:28:00?

Either way, why spend time staring at an on-screen clock if you also could spend that time walking to the train station, or even walking on the platform?

I would find some tool that allows me to set daily alarms at around 17:15 (as an early warning to finish whatever I am doing) and 17:28:15 (as a sign to leave now), so that I wouldn't have to waste time staring at that clock.

neverminder3• 9 years ago

It's not that hard once you're used to it. I just glance at the clock several times towards the end of work to know exactly when to wind things down and stand up from my chair at exactly 17:28:15. The optimal time was determined by observing elevator business patterns, crowd thickness downstairs and delay margins of train arriving at my stop.

achivetta• 9 years ago

It might not be the memory concern it once was, but today it might very well be a power concern. Modern laptop display pipelines can save power if they don't have to redraw any of the screen: constantly updating status bar animations break that.[1]

1: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2013/712/ (I think the relatively short graphics section mentions this. Can't seem to find the talk that goes into it in more detail...)

Moter8• 9 years ago

Can't watch on either Chrome or Firefox. Apple are real gits.

huxley• 9 years ago

Neither Chrome or Firefox support HLS on the desktop despite providing support on mobile (since Android 3.0 I believe). They have categorically refused to add desktop support, if you have any complaints I would take it up with them.

clouddrover3• 9 years ago

You can at least download the video in HD or SD under the "Resources" section on the page. They also have slides from the talk.

devashishp• 9 years ago

That's how LG's panel self refresh works. http://www.anandtech.com/show/7208/understanding-panel-self-...

PhasmaFelis2• 9 years ago

Does updating 1 frame out of every 60 (or whatever) add significantly to the power expenditure compared to 0 out of 60?

anc84• 9 years ago

How could I benchmark this on XFCE nowadays?

lucb1e• 9 years ago

... in Windows 95.

I mean, the article describes why in versions of Windows from an era that was much more memory-constrained. Even in 2003, Windows 95 was as old as Android 2.2 is now. I configured my task bar to display seconds and can't say Cinnamon is hogging that much more memory or CPU because of it.

krallja• 9 years ago

Too bad the team which made that decision wasn't available to help the VS Code team not use 13% CPU to render a blinking cursor (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014)

LeoNatan253• 9 years ago

We are in a different era now, where desktop apps are written in JS. Performance is implicitly thrown out of the window(s) when compared to software written for control over every bit of CPU and memory usage.

mschuster914• 9 years ago

But the JS ecosystem learns things! They implement tree shaking and other stuff to improve performance!

Obviously real programmers learned all this decades ago - same for the "NoSQL" followers who after years of struggling with piles of cr.p finally (re)discover what a true ACID-capable database is...

I'm just waiting for the JS world to rediscover threads and proper multitasking, but given the track record I don't expect that in the next decade.

Seriously, the JS world is a hellhole of disasters, and many of them easily preventable if the people acting as "evangelists" actually had a bit of clue about what they're talking. And to top it off, a JS-only implementation will never be nearly as fast as well-written C or even C++ code, no matter how hard "evangelists" push it.

MikusR• 9 years ago

That is a problem with chrome and not VS Code.

valuearb2• 9 years ago

I worked on a visual programming language in late 80s. It would compile it's programs but the compiler was really slow, took minutes for small programs.

We worked on optimizing it but couldn't find much to optimize. Then the founder took out the code that updated the progress bar as it compiled and compiles finished 10x faster.

This was on Mac Plus.

Namrog84• 9 years ago

I wonder if it was trashing the cache or something? What was so bad about this particular progress bar?

Gracana• 9 years ago

No cache on a Plus. It was probably just updating the progress bar too frequently.

The 68k in the Plus is an 8MHz 32 bit processor with 16 bit data bus, 4 clock cycles per bus access if there are no wait states, and most instructions are more than one word long. There's not a whole lot of time to do useful work!

Nition• 9 years ago

Meanwhile in 2016: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283

digi_owl2• 9 years ago

Truly seems like those that do not learn from history is forced to relive it...

bzbarsky• 9 years ago

Software still does this today. For example, a large part of https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721822 is down to progress bar rendering making the loading of the saved-data file be much slower. :( See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721822#c32 for the most recent data there...

mschaef• 9 years ago

This is a good article, but keep in mind the timeframe it writes about. Not only was it 22 years ago, its writing about systems at the bare minimum system requirements. (Personally speaking, I remember speccing out a previous gen Windows 3.1 machine with 8MB of RAM in 92... and this is covering 4MB systems in 1995. By that time, 8-16MB would've been common.)

Another story from the time is that I went to CompUSA (as a 'spectator') on the night of the Windows95 release. (It was a midnight release and the stores were open late.) There was a line out the door that snaked around through the store past the Windows 95 boxes, the Plus Pack, boxes, MS Office, and then the memory upgrade desk...

Steeeve• 9 years ago

I worked there at the time. That line didn't go away, it lasted for days. It was reminiscent of empire strikes back. 4MB SIMMS at that time were more expensive than 4GB sticks today. People had 16MB of RAM, but that was mostly reserved to gamers and programmers. Or Macs at graphics design shops.

bitwize• 9 years ago

The Windows 95 hypetrain was truly something to behold. The Empire State Building lights in Windows colors, Friends castmembers appearing in a (truly lame) promotional video... Windows 95 was the release that put the phrase "operating system" on the common man's lips -- for better or worse.

movedx4• 9 years ago

I'd never heard of this "Friends castmembers" video, so I did a bit of YouTubing... I have no words (nearly an hour long, and I think there's a part-two): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGYcNcFhctc

This led me to a few other videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2owaKucyU1Y

Sigh. The 90s.

digi_owl2• 9 years ago

Heh, still recall having to use a special bootloader that would load a BIOS extension, or some such, because the new HDD i got, so that i could run Win95 and still have room for anything else, was not compatible with my 486 otherwise.

Even given that i can't help think computing was less complicated back then.

Const-me• 9 years ago

People even composed songs about Win95 hardware requirements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Eti38Vzkk

firasd• 9 years ago

Raymond once had an article about why the date/time control panel is not a calendar https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050621-04/?p=...

In Windows 7 they've finally given up and the UI lets you easily scroll up and down through months after clicking on the clock. (Edit: sorry I meant Windows 10)

anonymfus• 9 years ago

And since Windows 10 1607 it shows your calendar events.

IshKebab• 9 years ago

In Windows 7 they've finally given up

You mean seen sense? How often do you change the date or time on your computer? Probably never since it's automatic these days.

How often do you want to know the date, or what day of the week a day is? I'm guessing a lot more than never.

The old UI was stupid.

petercooper• 9 years ago

My gut reaction was going to be that it fared poorly in user testing. I'd be pretty distracted by such a thing and prone to idly watching it :-D

alkonaut• 9 years ago

Would have thought it would be useless because our eyes notice movement in the periphery and it distracts you to look at it. I would be annoyed with some animation going on that I don't care about.

devereaux• 9 years ago

On Linux, there is a very practical reason: to reduce the number of wakeups per second, and save power.

You may think it is far fetched, but try a minimalist XFCE or LXDE desktop, run powertop updating every 5 seconds (so that screen refresh from powertop do not alter your measures) and see for yourself.

For that same reason, you may want to disable the blinking cursor, and conky, and other gizmos that blink things on the screen.

userbinator2• 9 years ago

One thing I've always wondered about the taskbar clock is why they didn't just follow an existing time formatting standard...

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9pDonc_uipU/UEoMOdhA-eI/AAAAAAAABw...

...and invented their own:

https://www.groovypost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/image_...

toast0• 9 years ago

From the screenshot, someone not familiar with strftime would be lost; but most people would be able to figure out the invented format. Also, it looked like users got to choose from a drop down of suggestions -- the "format string" was probably only for users to read, not actually parsed.

userbinator2• 9 years ago

Also, it looked like users got to choose from a drop down of suggestions -- the "format string" was probably only for users to read, not actually parsed.

Actually it is possible to write your own format string, since those are comboboxes:

https://www.bleepstatic.com/tutorials/windows/customize-wind...

Also, I would agree that the Windows UI is better since it provides a short description of the format letters; but they could've just as easily done that for the commonly-used strftime() specifiers too, with perhaps a link that opens a popup with all of them. The live preview at the top also helps.

ex3ndr• 9 years ago

Funny thing is that Android removed in 5.0 animations in status bar to save power as redrawing frequently will eat battery.

frik• 9 years ago

Because that blinking colon and the constantly-updating time were killing our benchmark numbers.

Like Visual Studio Code uses 12% CPU in idle due to cursor blinking? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014

In comparison the Windows Shell (up to Win7) is a lot more efficient and coded in C/C++.

Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

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