We’ve all spent hours—maybe even days—of our lives cursing the slow crawl of the dreaded progress bar. But did you ever stop to think about how much worse it might be if the bar wasn’t there in the first place. Fortunately, thanks to one grad student’s genius idea back in the 80s, we’ll never have to find out.
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GIFs are a blast. They can teach you how to knit
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Even though our Internet speed is light years faster than what it was before YouTube, it still seems like videos don’t load as fast as they should. Even on YouTube or Vimeo or Netflix or any streaming video website worth a damn, you run into hang ups and a stubbornly stuck progress bar for no apparent reason. Less satiable websites trap you in buffering purgatory. WHY? It doesn’t make sense! The only reasonable explanation is that the lemmings behind a website who drag the progress bar have mechanical failures every single time a video loads. It’s the only thing that makes sense. [Vincent Broquaire via Laughing Squid]
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Nintendo’s Wii U has faced complaints over slow loading and switching between menus since launch, but the company has promised a pair of updates will help the situation. Tonight it posted a video on YouTube (embedded after the break) that shows off the difference before and after the April update side by side. Showing off how quickly it can return to the home menu from a game of New Super Mario Bros. U, the updated console is ready to go in eight seconds, compared to the current software’s 20-second delay. There’s no mention of the other update to improve the speed of launching software, but hopefully that will be shown off soon as well. More than halving the main menu’s load time is nothing to sneeze at, although it’s still not exactly a snappy experience. We’ll see if these tweaks — once they arrive — do anything to improve the console’s position while it waits for the improved software lineup President Satoru Iwata is expecting.
Filed under: Gaming, HD, Nintendo
Source: Nintendo (YouTube)
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