| ▲ | refulgentis 7 hours ago |
| “On the Core 2 Duo machine that preceded it, running XP from spinning rust, the calculator would appear instantly - certainly before I can release the button.” This reminds me that there’s an NBA rule that disallows any basket made after a clock stoppage with 300ms or less in the clock - i.e. if player A managed to pass to player B who then attempted a shot, it’s impossible for all that to occur before 300 ms has elapsed. Meaning, I’m sure you remember it fully launched, 100% certainly before the key came back up from your press, but that is impossible. |
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| ▲ | mikkupikku 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Your comment reminds me of that rule from baseball that says something about batters and hats, or maybe it was about helmets or something, it doesn't really matter though because the only point of this sports ball rambling is to distract you from noticing that my "nuh uh" has no substance. Did it work? |
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| ▲ | refulgentis 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is more than a bit out of place on HN in my experience, please, try to engage politely. I’m not sure what I can say that will qualify as more than “nuh uh” to you, shy of getting a Core 2 Duo running with XP and the same keyboard as OP. That isn’t possible at the moment, is there anything else I could do? | | |
| ▲ | actionfromafar 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 300ms is a lot of time, especially if the calculator.exe was in disk cache already. | | |
| ▲ | refulgentis 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 300 ms is a long time on a computer, definitely. Just, the autistic side of me has to speak up when it’s wildly unrealistic glorification of the past. Keypress duration is likely much less than 300 ms, top Google result claims 77 ms on average. And that’s down and up. I see it being in cache already as sort of game playing, i.e. we can say anything is instant if we throw a cache in front of it. Am I missing something about caching that makes it reasonable? (I’m 37, so only 18 around that time and wouldn’t have had the technical chops to understand it was normal for things to be in disk cache after a cold boot) | | |
| ▲ | do_not_redeem 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Okay, let's say the cache is cold and you're on an old clunky spinning rust 5400 RPM hard drive. Do the math. How long will it take, worst case, for the platter to spin to where calc.exe is stored? | | |
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| ▲ | OsrsNeedsf2P 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Why is it impossible? |
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| ▲ | refulgentis 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Tl;dr reaction time, 300 ms is the golden rule for reaction speed, and apparently there was actually a sports medicine study that came to that #. I was surprised to see that, 300 ms comes up a lot in UX as “threshold of perceptible delay” but it was still surprising to see. | | |
| ▲ | yjftsjthsd-h 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I was curious, so did a quick web search, which claims that 300ms is the average reaction time and plenty of people run faster than that. But I think the question was the other way: Why couldn't calc.exe launch in 300ms? | | |
| ▲ | refulgentis 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 300 ms is way longer than they budgeted; separately, I was alive then and it's a ridiculous claim, like, it takes a general bias we all have towards seeing the past with rose-colored glasses and takes it farcically far. Don't want to clutter too much, I'm already eating downvotes, so I'll link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642003 | | |
| ▲ | chungy an hour ago | parent [-] | | I have Windows 95 on a Pentium 120 MHz and calc.exe is instantaneous enough that it's probably much less than 300ms to launch. XP's calculator is hardly any different than 95. It's easy to believe that launching it on a Core 2 Duo of all things is also instant. |
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| ▲ | jcelerier 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | yeah no. Ask musicians using computers - 50 milliseconds of latency between sound and movement is generally considered unplayable, 20 milliseconds is tough, below 10ms usually is where people start being unable to tell. |
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