Fascinating! 'Tis healthy to remember that technology can sometimes be used for intriguingly creative but basically useless purposes, and not just for one week a year in the Nevadan desert.
I'm new to HN, read the introduction at http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and found the concept really great but doubted that people really can restrain themselves from posting "funny" or "cool" stuff.
Then I find this. I'm not sure if I'm disappointed that those ambitious goals can't be met or if I'm thankful that someone pointed me at a funny video. Maybe both.
I think that guidelines suggest that it shouldn't only be funny or cute, there has to be something more. In this case it's a pretty clever form of advertising, plus it's related to Google Chrome...
I'm not quite clear on what's being 'tested' in these videos. The idea is give a practical visual comparison of really, really fast things to google chrome loading a web page.
Because it's so practical, you don't need a tesla coil to duplicate it yourself (and be disappointed). Go to google, search for pandora, and click on the first link. Okay, so clearly they're not talking about transfer/load/rendering times. Let's click refresh. Well that was quite a bit faster, wasn't it? But still no lightning bolt.
Cool video, but I'd be worried that users will be underwhelmed when they test it for themselves...
I don't! I think this video is absolutely awesome, and I deeply, deeply wish that I could trade in my current line of work to make these videos for a living.
That being said, I can't replicate Chrome's load times as seen in that video :)
The tedious parts of the job are left on the (proverbial) cutting room floor. Like construction projects, there's a lot of people just standing around waiting at a shoot.
Semi-agreed. If you look closely, the mouse pointer (which they use to activate Chrome) is positioned over the "Forward" button in the browser; it looks like they let a page load completely, navigate back to Google, then the speed test is how long it takes to rerender the page from the cache.
