performance optimization

A short Microsoft promo comparing classic Teams with the rewritten new Teams side by side, claiming faster startup and better performance. The new version is shown taking around nine seconds to launch.

A short side-by-side recording by Jake Archibald of the same animation demo running in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Servo WebRender nightlies on a 60Hz display. It shows the smoothness difference of GPU-based rendering.

A short demo showing slow 2D drawing in the Windows 7 GUI compared with XP. It attributes the slowdown to the display driver model lacking hardware accelerated GDI.

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

Casey Muratori captures CygnusEd Professional running on an Amiga 2000, showing how smoothly it scrolled text. He notes the real effect is better on a period CRT.

A one-minute clip of Rochus Keller performing as a one-man band: slap bass with the left hand, Rhodes and lead guitar with the right, and drums with the feet.

A very short clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation's 'Peak Performance' in which Picard says it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. It is a single quotable moment about how outcomes are not fully in your control.

A short scene from Star Trek TNG season 2, episode 'Peak Performance', in which Picard tells Data that it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. He says that is not a weakness but life.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.

A Microsoft Research demo from TechFest 2012 of a lab touch system that lets viewers feel the effect of different input latencies, down to about 1 ms. It shows how much more responsive dragging feels compared with typical 100 ms touch delay.

The earliest existing concert video of Kraftwerk, from a 1970 performance shortly after the band formed. It shows the band in its original setup and the audience's reactions.

A one-minute clip of slime mold placed on a map with food at the cities around Tokyo, growing a network that approximates the Tokyo-area railway system.

A 1967 live film of Tom Lehrer performing his patter song "The Elements" in Copenhagen, reciting the chemical elements to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune. It is a short, polished example of his satirical piano-and-voice style.

A short side-by-side demo of a large image loading over a slow connection in JPEG, progressive mozjpeg, JPEG XL and AVIF. It shows how each codec renders partial data.

A short parody ad about iOS 4.0 running slowly on the 3G iPhone, made by a disappointed Apple customer.

A one-minute NVIDIA research demo of foveated rendering for VR using SMI eye tracking. It renders at full detail only where the eye is looking, matching the physiology of human vision.

The official music video for Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt, from his American Recordings era, filmed late in his life. It is a stark, emotional performance of the song.

A live 2007 performance of Todd Snider's song 'Statistician's Blues' at the Great American Music Hall. The song satirizes statistics and how readily people believe them.

Johnny Cash's live performance of A Boy Named Sue at San Quentin in 1969, a comic country song about a man named Sue seeking revenge on his father.

Oracle Red Bull Racing follows a single front suspension bolt through its life, from sketch and drawing through machining, testing, assembly and racing.

A one-minute clip of Peter Norvig saying that Google found programming contest success correlates negatively or poorly with job performance. The description links to a blog post discussing it.

The original Broadway cast performs 'The Internet Is For Porn' from the musical Avenue Q, with press-reel footage synced to the live performance.

A short live performance of Tim Minchin's comedic song about skepticism, from his DVD 'So Live'. It argues that open-mindedness shouldn't go so far that your brain falls out.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robot performing a gymnastics and parkour routine, using optimization-generated motions and a model predictive controller.

A 2012 parody dub that splices clips of Barack Obama speaking into a performance of Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe'. It is a short comedic mashup built entirely from re-ordered snippets of his real speech.

An SNL Weekend Update sketch from 1988 in which Kevin Nealon reports from the All-Drug Olympics and weightlifter Phil Hartman pulls his arms off.

The Floppotron plays a cover of Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams using an orchestra of old computer hardware such as floppy drives, hard drives and scanners, driven by microcontrollers. It is a short music performance rather than an explanation.

A Top of the Pops performance of The Wurzels' 1976 novelty hit Combine Harvester (Brand New Key). It is a West Country English comic cover of a pop song.