I was able to parse the speed description, though I had to slow down to be sure I was capturing the intended meaning. Perhaps "20 percent slower to 100 percent faster" would work better.
# Steve Laura Creighton wrote: > It is also hard for people to process fractional numbers when they are > thinking about speed. '2 times the speed' feels a lot easier to > understand than '2.1' times the speed. And once you get to numbers > less than 1, things break down altogether. If you want to tell me > that something is slower, I don't expect to hear it as 'some number > less than 1' times the speed. I want a very hard break at the point > 0, and for you then to go about telling me how many times slower than > something that something else is. > > For most measurements, I would be happy if nobody mentioned the words > 'speed', 'faster' and 'slower' at all. What I am _really_ interested, > is a measurement of time. And I have a much easier time understanding > time quantities, which I am used to dealing with, than speed quantites > which rarely show up in life. > > So while I am always a bit hazy on what 'x times the speed' really means, > when you change this to 'this program runs in half the time, one > quarter of the time, twice the time, or even .8 of the time' I have a > much easier time of it. I'm used to measuring time, and I expect it to > be linear. I'm not used to measuring speed, and I keep worrying > 'is this linear'? 'is this logarithmic?' 'is this exponential?'. It > is only when I get to measure the actual times taken to do some sort > of task, say a benchmark, that I get any real sense of whether a change > seems to be a trivial small improvement, or a colossal major one. > > I wonder if others feel the same way. > > Laura > _______________________________________________ > [email protected] > http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/pypy-dev > > _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/pypy-dev
