[95] in Athena User Interface
Re: Startup Time.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Tibbetts)
Fri Jun 2 18:06:36 2000
Message-Id: <200006022206.SAA09175@hikari-no-ken.mit.edu>
To: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
cc: aui@MIT.EDU, tibbetts@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 02 Jun 2000 17:48:04 EDT."
<200006022148.RAA09689@No-Whammies.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 18:06:32 -0400
From: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
On 6/2 you wrote:
> As a general rule, humans get impatient if any operation takes about
> more than 10 seconds.
>
> On the I/S Athena survey, one of the more common complaints was that
> Athena took too long to start up (and that Netscape took too long to
> load). It does help a little if they have something interesting to
> watch.
Actually the GNOME people realized this and one of the more user
visible changes is a status bar & info box that pops up while you are
logging in.
> I am wondering how much of the time problem is going to be alleviated
> by hardware upgrades...all of the Sparc 4s are coming out this summer,
> right?
Thats why I tested on a Sparc 5. Further, we are planning our real
deploy for next August, when the slower Sparc 5's will be gone. There
is also the issue of labs that still have Sparc 4's around after they
leave clusters. The Indys might still be around though.
Fundamentally I think that calling on Moore's Law to save us should be
a last resort.
> On the happier side, it might not be so bad if the interface is
> considerably easier to use, even if there is a bit of a wait at the
> beginning.
There is also a question of how long a "standard" Athena user takes to
log in. I get the impression this is considerably longer, because many
(most?) frequent users have changed their window manager and other
things away from the defaults.
If it is really a show stopper I can make it more of a priority to
cut down the login time (ie, work on that before I work on other
things).
tibbetts
-*- http://www.mit.edu/~tibbetts -*- finger tibbetts@monk.mit.edu -*-
