Going Nowhere Really Fast, or How Computers Only Come in Two Speeds.

by mbateman • 16 years ago

17 28 16 years ago

As the sometime user of an Underwood manual typewriter, I have to say that I haven't hit cursor lag on a word processor since the days of WordPerfect 6.0, fourteen years ago. I should add that my typing speed was never really challenging the Underwoods, either, though.

StavrosK3• 16 years ago

In my experience, this is 100% spot on. Hell, while typing this comment the caret is catching up to my keystrokes. Why can't we get interfaces right? We have all this processing speed available and yet our computers are slow. I press the shortcut to open a new filemanager window and it takes a second, why can't it take a few ms? My window manager is already loaded, what takes so long!

Like it or not, this is the primary reason that the iPhone is so popular. It is the first fast smartphone. All the other phones I had tried before the iPhone came out were just frustratingly slow. Hopefully, with the competition, other phone manufacturers have started to fix this (I'll get my first Android phone soon, I hope it's a fast one).

houseabsolute• 16 years ago

> Why can't we get interfaces right? We have all this processing speed available and yet our computers are slow.

My computer is not slow. I rarely see issues like a cursor that is delayed with respect to my typing. What kind of device do you have? Have you actually tried doing any performance analysis to see why it is slow? Did you buy your computer based on it not being slow, or, to put it another way, give an economic incentive to the outcome you want? (Clearly not, based on your post.) Or was there something else you opted to prioritize over that quickness you say you want so much?

Groxx• 16 years ago

I've had cursor-delay happen on every OS I've tried, in nearly every application, unless I was using Vim / the CLI. Except for Windows' CLI - that gets more worthless the more I use it, and is significantly slower than many other Windows tools.

StavrosK3• 16 years ago

It's a Core 2 Quad with 4 GB ram and an Intel X-25M SSD...

I think it's not that your computer is fast, it's that you are slower than your computer. Which do you use more frequently for navigation, the mouse or the keyboard?

sry_not4sale• 16 years ago

Love this blog!

If only there was more constructive criticism of the broken mess that is desktop OSs...

jseliger2• 16 years ago

As I posted in his comments section:

<em>And could exist again.</em>

I hope it does.

Still, this reminds me of Joel Spolsky's <a href="http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html>Bl... and the 80/20 myth</a>. The reason this computer doesn't exist is because people don't want it—or, to be more precise, they don't want to make the trade-offs it implies in sufficient numbers for there to be a market for such a computer.

Nothing is stopping someone from making a stripped-down version of, say, Linux that will boot "into a graphical everything-visible-and-modifiable programming environment, the most expressive ever created faster than the latter boots into its syrupy imponade hell." But most people evidently prefer the features that modern OSes and programs offer. Or, rather, they prefer that modern OSes support THEIR pet feature and make everything as easy to accomplish as possible at the expense of some speed.

Retric• 16 years ago

The problem with bloatware is not how much HDD it costs, but how much it slows things down. Let's say MS sold a copy of windows that wasted 60 fewer seconds of each day. For the average developer that adds up to far more than the cost of windows over the lifetime of the computer.

PS: Using a SSD on a high end machine with plenty of RAM simulates what a low bloat system could provide. It might cost more, but it really does pay for it's self fairly quickly.

jseliger2• 16 years ago

I turned this (and some other stuff) into a post of my own: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/30/computers-and-network-effects... .

konad• 16 years ago

If you use LinuxBIOS instead of whatever Phoenix outs on, you get to useable Linux in 5s

jodrellblank4• 16 years ago

I was skimming through Peter Cochrane's 108 Tips for Time Travellers, a book from 1997/1998 this week. In it, he complains that his computing power has gone from 4Mhz to 40Mhz and word processors have slowed even then, and in future we'll need supercomputers to write letters.

yummyfajitas2• 16 years ago

What year is this guy living in?

I can't remember the last time I noticed my UI hanging. Maybe once or twice when I had a macbook, but certainly not in the past year.

asciilifeform4• 16 years ago

Load MS-Word or Powerpoint with a modestly-graphical document and get back to us.

Or hell, GMail. Or a similar Web 2.0 lagware abortion.

machrider• 16 years ago

If you think Office is slow, try something from Adobe.

jodrellblank4• 16 years ago

I notice my UI hanging all the damn time. VMWare, there's a company that loves a good laggy UI, firewall vendors and web browser companies do too, so does Adobe, explorer, Vista screen grabbing utility, iTunes, iPhoto...

Almost anything which uses a network connection more than SSH or FTP, especially anything with remote procedure calls such as WMI. Anything that invokes a virtual machine such as a Java or .Net program, PowerShell is particularly bad.

You haven't noticed your UI hanging? What do you use - a Chrome, a terminal and vim?

yummyfajitas2• 16 years ago

Emacs doesn't hang either, nor does eclipse, nor java apps I use at work.

I admit, I've never used iTunes, I never installed adobe, and I access VM's from the terminal. Maybe the key is to avoid windows/OSX?

jcromartie• 16 years ago

Web apps.

jsz0• 16 years ago

This is exactly why I'll never buy another computer without an SSD. No other upgrade I've done in the last 10 years has benefited the overall feeling of responsiveness as much. I'd be very interested in seeing a blind taste test of an an Atom + SSD vs. i7 + 7200RPM HD. I bet most would pick the Atom as the faster machine for most common tasks.

jodrellblank4• 16 years ago

I'm very suspicious of the LISP-Machine nostalgia. I bet once it had grown up to support TCP/IP and firewalls and FireFox and Skype and 3D cards with weird drivers and Win32 compatibility and antivirus software and multiple users with loads of ACL systems and Adobe Reader and Flash and so on, it wouldn't be half as wonderous.

asciilifeform4• 16 years ago

Funny how you mention 3D cards and the Web - both were extensively prototyped on Lisp Machines. As was just about everything even vaguely worth using in modern computing.

As for "Win32 compatibility, antivirus software, Adobe Reader and Flash" - let's bolt oxcart compatibility onto your car and see how well it handles on the freeway.

jodrellblank4• 16 years ago

As for "Win32 compatibility, antivirus software, Adobe Reader and Flash" - let's bolt oxcart compatibility onto your car and see how well it handles on the freeway.

So... you agree?

eogas• 16 years ago

This in no way rings true with my experience of modern computers. I think most people will agree, unless you are blatantly taxing a machine beyond what it was ever meant to handle (running 17 instances of Visual Studio at once, and trying to edit a Word document perhaps), even an entry level machine should run relatively smoothly.

asciilifeform4• 16 years ago

Evidently, a single instance of MS Powerpoint is too much for my 3GHz XP box - the equivalent of a dozen or more Cray-II's.

Dredge up an MS-DOS box running WordPerfect and remember what an actually responsive computer feels like. Seriously, do it. Then tell me your modern PC is "smooth."

cubicle67• 16 years ago

I remember building an 700MHz (I think) pc, setting it up with Win98SE and Office 97 and commenting to someone that I didn't see how anyone could want for much faster processor speeds; boy, did it have teh snappy.

Seems I was wrong...

richmassena23• 16 years ago

It feels like the article merely repeats some of what I read in the Unix haters handbook years ago.

LISP machines were extraordinarily expensive for a single-user machine, much of which was due to the heavyweight hardware (like 32-bit processors, 32MB of RAM and fast high-capacity disks in the 1980s).

If I recall correctly, your basic Symbolics LISP machine, with software, cost about $50,000 in 1986. According to an online inflation calculator, that's $96,500 in today's money. I can guarantee that the resulting 64-core 128GB machine with 1TB of SSDs in RAID-10 configuration would beat the pants off of the Symbolics workstation, use less power and make much less noise and you'd have money left over.

All that said, interface responsiveness is part of the user experience. If your application/OS/device crosses that threshold were the user has to wait, it's a failure. People only stick with Word for Windows (surely the unnamed word processor referenced) because they don't know better or have a choice.

asciilifeform4• 16 years ago

> I can guarantee that the resulting 64-core 128GB machine with 1TB of SSDs in RAID-10 configuration would beat the pants off of the Symbolics workstation

Running MS junk, web 2.0 crapware, or open-source masterpieces of infinite bloat such as Firefox? Don't be so sure.

mithaler• 16 years ago

Um, the machine I'm using now cost about $400 and doesn't have an SSD, runs Ubuntu with programming IDEs, OpenOffice and WinXP virtual instances for IE testing and Flash and Gmail open constantly and it almost never hangs or feels unresponsive unless a program is misbehaving, which is rare and easy to detect and fix.

I'm really curious about his setup. If it's Windows, I've been able to make long-used Windows machines feel much snappier by trimming cruft annually or so. One of the reasons I love Ubuntu so much is that I don't have to do that.

Going Nowhere Really Fast, or How Computers Only Come in Two Speeds.

Related Stories