Comment by fragmede
Comment by fragmede a day ago
The best one, of course, is the one where Windows would install faster if you jiggled the mouse.
Comment by fragmede a day ago
The best one, of course, is the one where Windows would install faster if you jiggled the mouse.
I still have the brainwash/muscle-memory to type:
$ gunzip -c somefile.tar.gz | tar xvf -
.. because there was, once, a day when the terminal buffer available for this pipe was bigger than available memory offered to a process by default, meaning the thing would unpack faster if I did that versus:
$ tar zxvf somefile.tar.gz
Admittedly, this discrepancy of available memory was usually because the BOFH hadn't realized there was also an allocation for pipes-per-user, so it was a neat trick to get around the hard limits that BOFH had imposed on some of my processes in terms of heap allocation ..
I this related to when you are scrolling and selecting within a document, and you wiggle the mouse, it scrolls faster ? I always thought it was just a nice UI optimisation, but I could believe it's actually some accidental side-effect at play.
(like make a 20 page word doc, and start selecting from the first page and drag through - it wil go faster if you jiggle. same in excel and nearly every windows app, even windows explorer)
No, it has to do with every time you move the mouse over a window, a hover event is sent to the application, which runs its main event loop. Either the installer only updated its progress bar when an event happened (in which case it would only appear to be going faster, because the progress bar would move more smoothly) or there was some really terribly written code that literally only made progress when an (unrelated) event happened. My guess is the former.
No, that's not quite correct.
It was not giving the impression of being faster, it was faster.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...
Being a bored kid in the 90s with nothing better to do, I had timed it. It was actually faster.
Explanation for that is here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210126-00/?p=10...
There must be so many subtle features like these that people use subconsciously, and when they try to move to another operating system, they try it, nothing happens and they get frustrated.
Makes me wonder how much of Windows is like Pokemon glitching, a community that never stops, even several generations ahead.
I was told a story by some hackers in the old multi-user mainframe days. They said that a good speed booster was to have the program open a terminal because it made the mainframe OS think it was a real-time user interactive program and give it more resources.