The Insidious Creep of Latency Hell 297
Twinbee writes "Gamers often find 'input lag' annoying, but over the years, delay has crept into many other gadgets with equally painful results. Something as simple as mobile communication or changing TV channels can suffer. Software too is far from innocent (Java or Visual Studio 2010 anyone?), and even the desktop itself is riddled with 'invisible' latencies which can frustrate users (take the new Launcher bar in Ubuntu 11 for example). More worryingly, Bufferbloat is a problem that plagues the internet, but has only recently hit the news. Half of the problem is that it's often difficult to pin down unless you look out for it. As Mick West pointed out: 'Players, and sometimes even designers, cannot always put into words what they feel is wrong with a particular game's controls ... Or they might not be able to tell you anything, and simply say the game sucked, without really understanding why it sucked.'"
Changing TV channels (Score:5, Interesting)
And here I thoguht I was the only one complaining that changing channels gets slower and slower with every new receiver box.
On analog it was basically instant, less than 100ms.
First digital box took half a second. Full HD box sometimes takes a whole second or more (and it's not even deterministic anymore)
That SUCKS big time!
N900 (Score:5, Interesting)
The N900 suffers from this, alas.
I can't comprehend why the phone app isn't in memory on boot. It's a PHONE. Instead, when the phone rings you have to wait several seconds for the phone application to load.
In contrast, my wife's new HTC Z snaps and zings along with Android, even though it's "bloaty" Java / Davlik.
Re:Changing TV channels (Score:5, Interesting)
That's down to compressed stream buffering. An analog box could be instant because every frame was transmitted uncompressed. With digital TV, you have to wait for a keyframe at least.
Re:Changing TV channels (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Changing TV channels (Score:5, Interesting)
it is the encryption technique utilized that introduce this lag. There is a key change at about 1s so it must wait until the next key to decode the stream.
Re:I noticed this (Score:1, Interesting)
Wow, such a well thought out and reasoned argument. I especially like your empirical facts. Yes, that's sarcasm.
I recall a presentation made by Microsoft that suggested that almost twice as many new features were added to Word and Excel between Word 97 and Word 2007. The large number of new features was one of the reasons that Microsoft chose to abandon standard menus, as standard menus just didn't scale.
This isn't quite the presentation I remember, but it has some good statistics on slides 27 and 28.
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2008/03/20/the-story-of-the-microsoft-office-ribbon-by-jensen-harris/ [90percento...ything.com]
Word 97 had 200 Menu items, and office 2003 had almost 300 (not sure how many items 2007 and 2010 have, but likely a lot more). While also adding almost 20 Task Panes and nearly almost 20 toolbars. That's toolbars, not buttons on the toolbars.
So, sorry.. No, Word 2010 does not have 99% of the features that Word 97 had. Not even close.
Re:I noticed this (Score:5, Interesting)
The only personal experience I have with this is that, among many other things I do professionally, usually at any organization I'm at (as a consultant or otherwise), I'm embarrassingly the "Excel guru".
Using Excel a moderate amount, I do try to use VBA pretty sparingly given its obvious slowness compared to other methods of calculation, but on occasion, it's markedly more efficient than other designs (e.g. testing for a series of involved conditions which would otherwise process extremely slowly using a formulas, etc.)
I've found that even on modern hardware, Excel 2007 VBA execution, of identical code, is much slower than Excel 2003.
For that reason, along with the sheer inefficiency of the ribbon design in terms of responsiveness and usage of screen real estate, I keep all Office 2007 usage relegated to a VM which I rarely even need.
To further clarify the issue, I have developed a personal library of macros I use in simply navigating spreadsheets efficiently. Even on modern hardware, Excel 2007 cannot keep up with my usage of these macros and throws errors repeatedly whereas I never see such errors in Excel 2003. Keep in mind, this is on modern hardware.
My interpretation of this is that speed and efficiency were low priorities for the Office development team. Given that their interface redesign was, I believe admittedly, largely geared towards novice users, these alleged low priorities make more sense.
To appeal to your sense of empiricism, which I appreciate, please see (perhaps not of the greatest quality...)
http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=10&threadid=81967 [wilmott.com]
http://www.excelbanter.com/showthread.php?t=137875 [excelbanter.com]
http://www.ozgrid.com/forum/showthread.php?t=78673&page=1 [ozgrid.com]
for what it's worth, I always disable screen refresh and calculation during a macro (except in rare circumstances when that behavior is necessary)