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You actually notice sub second delays? What are you, the amazing Spiderman? I mean if you want to argue that X is faster than Y then sure, even though i have never used haiku (although I did use BeOS for awhile, whatever the RC version was they released right before going under) then sure I might buy that, but saying you can actually notice sub second delays? at that level how would one even know the delay was caused by the OS and not by something in the hardware or a badly optimized driver?

The problem with caring about raw speed anymore is frankly even the low end X86 units are so insanely overpowered it isn't even funny. I mean YouTube is covered with videos of guys playing games like Crysis on an E350 which is what you find in $350 netbooks now, so its kind of hard to get really excited by such feats in haiku when RAM is so cheap you can practically find it in Cracker jacks and multicores are the norm.

Funny that TFA makes a crack about tablets when that is EXACTLY the kind of market Haiku should be targeting. people don't expect app compatibility between devices there like they do X86 desktops and laptops and if haiku is as lean when multitasking as the original beOS then that would probably be a really sweet tablet.

Reply Parent Score: 3

looncraz Member since:

Humans can detect incredibly minute delays - particularly if they have muscle memory trained - there delays as little as 10ms can cause a slightly sensation of a disconnect, though that is at the very extreme (such as an audio sync problem, where the brain senses a slight disconnect).

When it comes to UI responsiveness, BeOS could open a menu in about 50ms when Windows was taking 250-300ms, this is a very large discrepancy in performance.

It also helped that BeOS native apps were small and clean, and thus would launch so fast that you could practically disregard the delay entirely.

And all that on lowly pentiums/II...

--The loon

Reply Parent Score: 6

WorknMan Member since:


Yeah, we'll see what happens to 'small and lean' and apps popping up instantly if/when they start porting apps like Photoshop to it ;) hehe

BTW: I tried clicking on menus in several apps in Windows, as well as the Start menu. I don't know how long it took for them to appear, but I could not perceive any kind of delay.

Reply Parent Score: 2

Neolander Member since:

This may sound surprising to you, but for intensive GUI interaction, a second of latency is simply huge.

To see what it is like, take some kind of watch, start counting seconds in your head, then try to imagine what would happen if scrolling in your web browser took so much time to respond (you turn the mouse wheel, then one second later something starts to move on the screen). Targeting something precisely would turn out to be either impossible or extremely slow.

As part of the development of a new low-latency audio codec, Monty from Xiph has shown that people are not even able to sing a song which they know by heart in a synchronous fashion if they have to overcome a 250ms communication delay ( ).

Myself, I always disable GUI animations on my computers and cellphones when I can, because after you have lived without these 100-200ms of unneeded latency for a few months there is no going back. Everything just feels slow when I leave them on.

And the worst here is that modern computer hardware is more than powerful enough to work at 20ms latencies and below. It is ill-designed system software that is holding it back.

Edited 2012-04-28 11:39 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 11