Comment by jerf
3 years ago
There's actually an answer to this; if you compare the Windows machine to the average spec from the time it was released you'd probably find comparable performance. This is not a coincidence. What is happening is this: Work is put in to attain the minimum level of performance a paying user will find acceptable. This threshold has not changed, so in general, neither has real performance. The places where modern computers actually strut their stuff is where the paying users care a lot. For example, a game pushes 120Hz at 4K because the paying customer cares. Video editors care about every last bit of performance because at scale each bit becomes seconds to minutes to hours pretty quickly.
(There's an averaging effect to. That game paying customer might like it if Windows was snappier, but in that market they're just another voice in the crowd of people who on average are satisfied with the current status quo.)
"Paying customer" is important too because you can almost measure how much social power the user has by how slow the software is. Why is the point-of-sale device in the checkout miserably slow? Why does the device the desk receptionist is using at your national-scale bank need 30 seconds just to pull up your appointment information? Those people have no social power, so they get to just sit and wait while the computer swaps things in and out for a truly simple task. Executives get machines that can switch between email and the browser in a heartbeat with the other 24 gigs of RAM and 6 cores do nothing. Using what machines the developers get as a metric for how much the company cares about them is something smarter developers have been doing for a while; if your developer interviewer uses the 8 minutes it takes their machine to boot to sing the praises of the engineering culture the company has, well... make appropriate judgments.
(In 2023 this almost impresses me. Setting up a computer that needs 30 seconds to switch between a calendar and an email is almost a challenge now. You need to harvest those last few precious $10/unit to give them really shitty hardware and combine it with an almost sociopathic dedication to layering on enough virus scanning and tracking software to slow down a cheap machine even so. Even the cheap stuff shouldn't be that slow!)
If you work at it even a bit on Linux, you can set up a very responsive system. You've been able to for a long time, really. But you may find you don't get to use the latest and greatest of the heaviest weight desktop system at the time. It's a lot easier on Linux to use the stuff from years ago that flies now. Emacs use to be joking referred to as "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"; now it's a "light-weight" text editor. (Though it doesn't quite start instantly for me, it is under a second in my configuration. YMMV.)
>if you compare the Windows machine to the average spec from the time it was released you'd probably find comparable performance.
This is not the case, he specifically debunks it it in the twitter thread. He took a contemporary late 90s machine with modest specs, and it was still snappier than the modern PC with Windows 10.
And even if that were the case, it does not follow that we should accept modern machines not being able to load Notepad instantly. Modern machines are hundreds of times more powerful than 20 years ago, but Notepad has not become hundreds of times more featureful.
There is a lot of fuzz in that comparison. I used machines at that time. They were not snappy if you had the average specs. I am not convinced he got that in his comparison. In particular modern iterations of those old machines are usually stuffed with RAM by comparison because since then it has become so dirt cheap to do that that it's not worth not doing it. I acknowledge he at least tried but I'm not convinced he succeeded and even by his own text you can tell he's not exactly putting a huge marker down on the older system being the exact right system. Average specs typically dipped into swap. (The supposed minimum specs were often a joke.)
"accept"
I'm a bit at a loss as to how anything I said sounds like we should accept this. Did I not call it almost sociopathic how IT departments manage to slow machines down for people who have no social power? Does that sound like I think this is hunky dory?
Not snappy on reading I/O but the UI was fast as hell. With SSD's a Pentium IV with SSE2 support with TDE3 under Slackware Linux running Konqueror, Amarok and Kopete (Konqueror against a non-JS site) will run circles around lots of core i7 setups with Spotify and Slack...
> it does not follow that we should accept
Just to point that all the GP said is that we do accept. There's nothing there about what we should do.
I am going to play devil's advocate here. What can an average person do. I eventually dropped windows for a linux distribution and while it was a learning experience, I can kinda see why it is not a default approach for most people. It is hard for most to overcome inertia. Personal example, before I felt compelled to jump I installed dual boot I almost never used. Things simply have to get bad enough for people not to accept things. As long as they in the 'annoying' realm, most will put up with it.
It is a sad commentary about human nature, because it suggests a slow enough decline will be accepted.