Do you understand how fast computers are?
computers · 8 comments · 650 words · read ~351 times.
A million years ago, I was helping advise an analogue office who were thinking about making the great leap forward to the digital future. I was sat in the boss's office extolling the virtues of digitisation.
"How long does it take you to look up a file from your archives?" I asked, impudently.
"Let me show you," said the kindly old proprietor. A wizened man straight out of the pages of a Dickens novel. He pressed a switch on his (landline) phone. "Miss Moneypenny? Could you bring us, let's say, the file from Smith vs Jones in 1997? Thank you. Tea?" The last question was aimed at me. We chatted amiably while the tea was poured and, barely five minutes later, a slightly dusty Miss Moneypenny slid the file onto the desk.
"You see!" The old boy exclaimed, "How could a computer ever be faster than Miss Moneypenny?"
Writing in his book "Platformland", Richard Pope talks about how working with data gives one an appreciation of where it is fast and where it is slow:
It’s hard to appreciate the true nature, risks and opportunities of data, for example, without experiencing the feel of data in a database; the potential for its tables to join together that tugs at the edge of your mind; the intrinsic understanding of what is quick, what is messy and what is risky. If your mental model is a catalogue, or a filing system or a lake, then those things are lost, or at least diluted.
This is also explored in the seminal XKCD 1425.
The lightly fictionalised law firm boss had only dealt with slow computer systems. Grinding hard-disks powered by a 386 running a hookey copy of Windows were already faster than a sprightly secretary scrabbling around in the archives. But his experience of retrieving data, like most people's, was being on interminable hold to call centres, or being told that to expect a written reply in 28 working days, or that the hospital has lost their records. It is no wonder they distrusted digital filing.
As an experiment, download the complete works of Shakespeare in plain text format and then hit ctrl+F (or whatever search you want to use) and try to find the word "invocations". It will be instant. The file isn't a structured database but, in less than a second, you can find every instance of a word. Computers are fast.
And yet, think about every interaction you have with a computer in public? Ticket machines asthmatically wheeze as they slowly trick you into buying the most expensive option. Passing through an airport seems to involve waiting impatiently at a number of desks while arthritic mainframes slowly coalesce your data. Advertising screens stutter and jerk their way through low-framerate videos trying to sell you perfume. Every time you speak to a call centre, I guarantee someone says "sorry, my system's running slow today."
The perception is that most computers are slow.
Would a computerised system have made a difference to that company? Moneypenny would have gotten less dusty, but clients booked their appointments days in advance - so file-retrieval time wasn't critical. Backing up data, insuring its integrity, and keeping it confidential were all important - but digitisation also came with risks. Filing cabinets rarely get hacked and typewritten documents are unlikely to be encrypted by ransomware.
If you pay attention to the news, all you hear about is the times when data goes wrong. You never notice the times when things run smoothly, but you are painfully aware of every time a computer screws up.
It is no wonder that even the most basic efforts of digitisation are heavily resisted by those without empathy for what computers can do - and how fast they can work - when set up properly,
@blog
I feel like once you grok the construct of Extract-Transform-Load, you can’t help but see it everywhere and not in a good way.
#ETL
Another interesting thing is that the state of the art with computers changes. That XKCD came out about a decade ago, and it was spot on at the time - I had recently finished a project on identifying nature and automation was hopelessly useless. But now it is almost as straightforward to hook up an image classifier and tell you whether a photo contains a bird than check whether a location is in a national park - quite possibly easier, since there's APIs for that that pretty much anyone who can code can use, but the location lookup might need a bit more development.
I once read a great write-up - I cannot for the life of me remember where, and search engines are not being helpful this morning - comparing various computer operations while making the time scales involved more relatable by converting nanoseconds to seconds (multiplication by 10^9).
Using some (admittedly old, circa 2002) stats on various data access operations, we arrive at: - Register access: 1-3 seconds - L1 Cache (on-chip): 2-8 seconds - L2 Cache (off-chip): 5-12 seconds - DRAM: 10 seconds to a minute - HDD: 1 to nearly 4 months - LAN (5ms ping): two months - WAN (100ms ping): 3 years
References and tools: - Wolfram Alpha - Understanding CPU caching and performance - Ars Technica
@Edent
It's the "when set up properly" that seems to be the trouble.
I don't think it's unreasonable for people to be resistant to tech when all their interactions with it (as you pointed out, in your "in public" section) are miserable.
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@Edent
As an anecdote, just this morning, I spent 40 mins debugging the integrated camera on my girlfriend's laptop.
The fix ended up being uninstalling the "Integrated Camera" device from the arcane "Device Manager" menu.
That kicked off some hidden Windows system, which re-enabled the device, and now the camera was magically fixed!
She had been living with that broken camera for weeks at this point.
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@Edent
That's the experience that people expect these days from computers.
You and I may be able to tweak our devices to our liking, but most people are just stuck with crap 🙁
I'm not sure where we go from here -- so long as people are disempowered to truly own their devices, and tech companies keep pushing out rot, nobody will experience that magical "instant" feeling.
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DinoNerd says:
What computer speed giveth, user interface design and outright bugs taketh away. In my experience, routine tasks have been getting slower and slower, to the point where I'm predicting they'll eventually become slower than they were in the pre-computer era.
As an example, Apple dis-improved their Macs a few years back, so one must move the mouse to where a control will appear, then wait for it to become visible, then use it. If you are too clumsy with the mouse, it disappears again. This can be slower than using typeahead on an ancient system communicating over an acoustic coupler.
Then we have recent security improvements. To log in, I must first provide a user ID and password, then wait 30 seconds to 2 minutes for a text message on my phone, then type the code from that message into the 2 factor authentication box. Sometimes the text message fails to arrive; then it's try again with email, which generally takes longer. And when both fail (not often), it's wait a day or two in the hopes the supplier fixes their problem.
Of course this process is also dis-improved by some number of unwanted popups, either before or after the login sequence. Dismissing them takes time, and sometimes you need to double check to make sure you aren't accidentally enabling something you absolutely don't want.
It already takes me longer to find a service provider (e.g. a plumber), compared to using the yellow pages. The phone book would have a close to complete list, and while the providers paid extra for bigger messages, rather than a mere name and phone number, they weren't paying to be pushed to the head of the line, such that you'd see them first - possibly seeing a well paying plumber even if you searched for an electrician. There were essentially no fake reviews, unkindly provided by competitors and others who made a (blackmail?) business of writing them.
This morning I find an appointment in my calendar set 15 minutes later than I remembered. I'm not sure I misremembered; I could too easily have butt-dialed a change accidentally. Cell phones are unreliable.
Then there's the delight of monitors turning themselves off, often while I'm actively using the computer. I'm not sure whether the dis-improvement is due to KVM misfeatures, HDMI misfeatures, conversion of video formats, or something else. But each time this randomly happens, I take at least a 60 second hit - and it happened multiple times last night in the course of recording information in my bookkeeping program from a handful of notifications. I'm not yet nostalgic for bookkeeping on columnar paper, but it's getting closer.
Computers these days seem to be very fast at doing what you don't want; not so fast at doing what you intended.
mmphosis says:
Compare a 2005 Apple Power Macintosh G5 "Quad Core" with 16 GB RAM with my Dell which has 4 "Dual Cores" and 16 GB RAM. Computers are not getting faster like they used to. Today, QEMU can't run fast enough to emulate the G5.
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