I'm running the latest MacOS right now on a modest m4 Mini and it doesn't seem slow to me at all. I use Windows for gaming and Linux for several of my machines as well and I don't "feel" like MacOS is slow.
In any case, Chrome opens quickly on my Mac Mini, under a second when I launch it from clicking its icon in my task bar or from spotlight (which is my normal way of starting apps). When Chrome is idle with no windows, opening chrome seems even faster, almost instant.
This made me curious so I tried opening some Apple apps, and they appear to open about the same speed as Chrome.
Gui applications like Chrome or Keynote can be opened from a terminal command line using the open command so I tried timing this:
$ time open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app
which indicated that open was finished in under 0.05 seconds total. So this wasn't useful because it appears to be timing only part of the time involved with getting the first window up.
My first college girlfriend made me realize that I wasn't a fast thinker. In person our conversations didn't seem problematic to me, but on the phone she would respond too quickly to what I was saying. I wouldn't be able to get into listening mode in time to pick up on the beginning of her replies.
I suppose that different people just have different strengths and mine isn't quick repartee. Another unusual thing I've noticed is my inability to do my best thinking while music is playing. While working briefly at a company to help out some friends I was forced to hear music throughout my time working on location; it was terrible (for me). In school I always did my work in quiet settings.
I was a math major in college and music interfered with my math work more than other subjects. My theory is that math and music both rely on similar mental resources.
> The age of the amber monitor lasted from about 1987 until 1990, a mere moment in the history of computers.
I remember the first time I used an amber monitor. It was in a dimly lit lab at MIT in my last year there. It was 1973. The amber monitor was hooked up to a PDP-7, an 18 bit minicomputer, and the monitor only had 40 columns. It wasn’t the first time I had used a monitor, but before that most of my programming was on cards or teletype style terminals that typed output on fan-fold continuous paper.
This amber colored terminal used a primitive rasterization technique that didn’t have a fixed refresh rate so the frame rate slowed as more characters were needed on the screen. Despite the very long persistence of the amber phosphors the monitor flickered badly, and when too many characters were on the screen it would dim as the earlier lines would get harder to read, hence the dim room lighting. The monitor appeared to be some contraption rigged up by the EE department (which CS was just a part of).
After that, I would continue to occasionally run into commercial monitors that were amber, although most used green phosphors or white like the ADM-3 family and the DEC-VT100 [1].
Notably, I had access to the University of Illinois PLATO time sharing system in 1979. It used monochrome touch screen amber plasma display terminals at that time [2].
I can't call someone in India without looking up their timezone and figuring out if they are at work or still sound asleep. Time zones made sense when the only people we could talk to lived close by.
Why not just use one universal time? At least we would know what time to agree on when planing a call. If I already have to look up the time zone in India before I call, it wouldn't be any harder to look up when people in India go to work or have lunch.
While we are at it I think we should move to a decimal time system. 100 seconds in minute, 100 minutes in hour, and 10 hours in a day. Naturally the second would be a bit shorter; the new seconds would be .864 current seconds. Then meetings could be scheduled in tenths of an hour, 0.2 hrs or 0.5 hrs etc.
We'd have to give this new world wide system a name, so that old time wouldn't be confused with new ones. I suggest saying something like 5.00-T8T (which stands for Todd8 Time) perfect!
I tinkered with circuits as a
kid in the 60’s and subscribed to Popular Electronics back then—it was may favorite magazine when I was 16 years old.
I always viewed electronics as only a hobby, kind of like being a Ham Radio enthusiast and went to college to be a mathematician instead. However, I had a great elective that covered how to build electronic apparatus for scientists. After all the years of Math, it awakened my old interest in electronics and I stayed in college for a second degree in EE.
Popular Electronics was a hobby magazine and it was a lot of fun. On the other hand, a book like this one is more like what one learns when studying for an engineering degree. It teaches at a level where you can really understand the circuits you see and gives you the ability to put together your own, not just wire up projects someone else designed. I wish the author good luck it and look forward to future chapters. It could be a nice complement to Paul Horowitz‘a The Art of Electronics.
By the way, I know that many HN readers are computer scientists. That’s what I ended up being, but having a deeper understanding of electronics than most of the other software guys has opened many doors for me.
https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/food/leftover-rice-b...