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[Banter] What is the worst software you have used for its price?
free_electron:
--- Quote from: nctnico on May 22, 2022, 02:37:16 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on May 22, 2022, 06:30:39 am ---
--- Quote from: free_electron on May 22, 2022, 05:02:29 am ---I did something similar at lecroy booths. take the timebase knob, spin it fast left, fast right, fast left and repeat that like 10 times. Then walk away while the scope goes nuts zooming in and out and displaying that dreaded "triggering..." with the slowly crawling progress bar at the bottom.
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Ah, the good ol' "let's do computation in the UI event handler" antipattern. Causes the events to be queued, slowing down everything. Drives me crazy.
This is not new, and was well known and common in the 8-bit era already, especially games. It saddens me to hear that even LeCroy fell into this easily avoided UI trap...
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The problem is most likely much deeper and may even be intentional. What I have seen on Windows based equipment from several brands is that the CPU load is low even when the equipment is doing heavy processing tasks (like math or analysis). It looks more like they are trying to keep the CPU cool on purpose. The slow UI response can also be a hold-off mechanism.
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if i take my old hp infiniium running a 150MHz pentium 1 and windows 95 and 4 meg of ram and spin that timebase button the screen refresh is instantaneous , like an analog scope.
Those lecroy machines have windows 7 , 8 core cpu's with hyperthreading and 64 gigs of ram. you give the timebase knob a couple of fast spins and you will hear the cpu fan go into overload and the thing crawl slower than a drunk snail. those machines are not oscilloscopes. they are very fast digitizers and the rest is don on the pc. Rohde & Schwarz , tek and Hewlettagilentkeypackardsight do all that stuff on custom hardware. the OS is only there for the GUI : well known platforms with a friendly face for the user.
tom66:
--- Quote from: free_electron on May 22, 2022, 08:11:05 pm ---if i take my old hp infiniium running a 150MHz pentium 1 and windows 95 and 4 meg of ram and spin that timebase button the screen refresh is instantaneous , like an analog scope.
Those lecroy machines have windows 7 , 8 core cpu's with hyperthreading and 64 gigs of ram. you give the timebase knob a couple of fast spins and you will hear the cpu fan go into overload and the thing crawl slower than a drunk snail. those machines are not oscilloscopes. they are very fast digitizers and the rest is don on the pc. Rohde & Schwarz , tek and Hewlettagilentkeypackardsight do all that stuff on custom hardware. the OS is only there for the GUI : well known platforms with a friendly face for the user.
--- End quote ---
It's just bad software design.
The Rigol scopes get a lot of flak for buggy software, but their DS1000Z series, for instance, has a single-core 600MHz ARM CPU running the show. The UI is snappy and responsive, not quite analog-scope speed, but not far behind. It doesn't need a fast CPU if the software is designed well. Heck, even the first-gen iPhone had a similar processor, and it did animations and touchscreen pinch-and-zoom, etc. feeling super responsive throughout.
We trialed a $20k Tek scope for a while and the interface would often freeze for 1-2 seconds periodically while the scope was doing...something in the background. That's just unacceptable. The scope shouldn't do that. It speaks to poor software design; a lack of parallelism and priority. Anything taking more than 100ms immediately feels 'laggy' to users. It wasn't the only reason to discard that scope, but it was a significant one.
T3sl4co1l:
--- Quote from: free_electron on May 21, 2022, 05:15:14 pm ---Paintshop pro after it was borged by Corel. Installer became crap , spyware , bloatware , now totally unusable. Same happened to Microfx Designer. Corel borged it and ran it into ground.
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I still use PSP7 regularly... very lightweight, still easier to use than GIMP, and clearly made with low RAM and slow CPUs in mind; feels like such a flex to preview a Gaussian filter on a 10Mpx image. ;D
Tim
T3sl4co1l:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on May 22, 2022, 06:30:39 am ---
--- Quote from: free_electron on May 22, 2022, 05:02:29 am ---I did something similar at lecroy booths. take the timebase knob, spin it fast left, fast right, fast left and repeat that like 10 times. Then walk away while the scope goes nuts zooming in and out and displaying that dreaded "triggering..." with the slowly crawling progress bar at the bottom.
--- End quote ---
Ah, the good ol' "let's do computation in the UI event handler" antipattern. Causes the events to be queued, slowing down everything. Drives me crazy.
--- End quote ---
Even my Tek TDS460 has -- besides the annoyingly slow-to-respond menus -- an occasional bug which, I suspect goes something like: user input is interrupt triggered, and the front panel encoders go crunchy sometimes. So just sliding a cursor around can freeze the UI requiring a power cycle. (Fortunately the power button -- which is also a soft button itself -- does not go through the same front-panel interface, so it doesn't have to be re-plugged.)
HP/Agilent 100% made the best 80s-00s equipment. I'd take a HP54xxx over anything TDS -- the 460 just happened to be available last time I went shopping. Which to be clear, has been quite a while. I've certainly gotten more than my worth from it.
But as for GUI programs, the sheer number of them that handle input or computation in the message thread... yeah, absurd. No excuses. :palm:
--- Quote from: tom66 on May 22, 2022, 08:14:34 pm ---We trialed a $20k Tek scope for a while and the interface would often freeze for 1-2 seconds periodically while the scope was doing...something in the background. That's just unacceptable. The scope shouldn't do that. It speaks to poor software design; a lack of parallelism and priority. Anything taking more than 100ms immediately feels 'laggy' to users. It wasn't the only reason to discard that scope, but it was a significant one.
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Was this recently?
Like, GUIs aren't even the hard part... you've got gigasamples in the ass end of the thing, just... ask someone once in a while if it feels good to use?! Bring in a consultant FFS just to check the UI, accessibility features (don't forget colorblindness!), etc. Graphic designer even, maybe, make it nice and shiny and responsive. These are basic things, like, two bit web designers handle this stuff...
Tim
free_electron:
--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on May 23, 2022, 12:38:54 am ---
--- Quote from: free_electron on May 21, 2022, 05:15:14 pm ---Paintshop pro after it was borged by Corel. Installer became crap , spyware , bloatware , now totally unusable. Same happened to Microfx Designer. Corel borged it and ran it into ground.
--- End quote ---
I still use PSP7 regularly... very lightweight, still easier to use than GIMP, and clearly made with low RAM and slow CPUs in mind; feels like such a flex to preview a Gaussian filter on a 10Mpx image. ;D
Tim
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i also still use that one. i think 9 was the last version before corel . and the companion program "aftershot". There's another tool from back then : ACDsee
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