kean@mist.CS.ORST.EDU (Kean Stump) (04/21/89)
In article <1921@csuna.csun.edu> abcscnge@csuna.csun.edu (Scott Neugroschl) writes: >My SUBJECTIVE opinion is that the NeXT "feels" slow. You click on a program, >and the system goes away for what seems to be a long time. There is no >indication (cursor change) of "hang on, I'm working on it". The icon shows >up on the bottom, and then it takes a good 10-15 seconds for the app to launch. > >Scott "The Pseudo-Hacker" Neugroschl On Tuesday, a cube running 0.9 was shown to the campus NeXT user's group. I got a chance to play with it a little, and these are some of my impressions: 1) 0.9 is faster than 0.8. The cube we saw was running 0.9 off of the optical, and it was subjectively faster than 0.8 on a hard drive. 0.9 fixes a slight problem with the disk caching software (well, twice as many cache reads as necessary 8) ) that speeds up the disk access a little less than 2X the 0.8 speed. 0.9 also fixes a problem in the interrupt handler (?) that increases the response time to mouseclicks by a lot. I can't wait for my copy to arrive. 2) When you click on an icon to launch an application, the icon stays highlighted until the application is fully launched, and the mouse cursor changes to a spinning disk while the cube is doing something, so you know that it is doing something, and not just hung. 3) The volume and brightness keys repeat when you hold them down. Yeah! 4) The filesystem is not the same as 0.8, just like the release notes warned. 'Till later.....kean ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oregon State University Kean Stump College of Oceanography kean@cs.orst.edu Corvallis, Oregon {tektronix,hp-pcd}!orstcs!kean "These aren't even MY opinions!" {tektronix,hp-pcd}!orstcs!shatter!kean -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer) (04/21/89)
In article <1921@csuna.csun.edu> abcscnge@csuna.csun.edu writes: >My SUBJECTIVE opinion is that the NeXT "feels" slow. You click on a program, >and the system goes away for what seems to be a long time. There is no >indication (cursor change) of "hang on, I'm working on it". ... Several points: - 0.8 is not performance tuned. In 0.8 the idea was to get a working, stable system out to various hands to start development and get back comments/bug reports. 0.9 fixes some of the bugs, includes almost all of the final functionality, incorporating a lot of the comments we got back for 0.8. 1.0 will concentrate on performance and fixing bugs. - 0.9 does provide feedback on app-launch; icons light up until the app is running. The icons in the dock also have a visual indication (three-dots) indicating whether they're running or not. Also a lot of the apps themselves make use of the "busy" cursor to indicate their status. Ali Ozer, NeXT Developer Support aozer@NeXT.com
bdiscoe@tybalt.caltech.edu (Ben W. Discoe) (04/21/89)
In article <1921@csuna.csun.edu> abcscnge@csuna.csun.edu (Scott Neugroschl) writes: > >My SUBJECTIVE opinion is that the NeXT "feels" slow. You click on a program, >and the system goes away for what seems to be a long time. There is no > >I realize that there's a log of grafix going on, but that could be offloaded >onto the 56000 (at least partially). My opinion is just that for a 25MHz >machine with 8MB RAM, it feels really slow. I don't know, maybe its the >optical drive... > "Slow" ??!! It feels like swimming in molasses!!! Looks like NeXT made the same mistake the Macs made - No Graphics Coprocessor - On a computer with a visual user interface, this is DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB. Not Smart. Stupid. It's not the optical drive's fault - all our cubes are on hard drives and they are SLOOOOOWWWW!!! For crying out loud, there's even a noticeable wait for MENUS to come up! And I sure hope that "Stealth" flight prog is NO indication of REAL graphics speed, because I've seen faster graphics on a COMMODORE #$%^!! 64!!! #ifdef IF_YOU_ARE_OPEN_TO_THE_TRUTH This is reason #3 why there is STILL no personal computer that matches the Amiga in graphics power/versatility. #endif Really, I asked the NeXT people if the DSP chip would be doing any graphics support - The guy-in-a-suit demonstrator didn't even know, but the technical person they had said she doubted it. COME ON NeXT - WAKE UP!!! ---Ben "The Amiga is God" Discoe No Joke, guys. No Smileys. Not Funny.
wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) (04/21/89)
I still haven't seen the 0.9 version of the O/S yet, but in 0.8 the subjective feel of the cube was substantially better when running from the winchester as opposed to the optical disk. System tuning is supposed to be substantially improved in 0.9, so the performance gap of the optical disk may hopefully diminish. Bill