6 ms·
> I often would use the mouse cursor to 'mark' the position of the loading bar (we really are spoiled for speed these days). This is just me, oh my gosh. I tho
by yokohummer7 7y ago
> I often would use the mouse cursor to 'mark' the position of the loading bar (we really are spoiled for speed these days).
This is just me, oh my gosh. I thought I was the only one who did that. But now I come to think about it, it can't be true.
It has been a really long time since I used that technique last time...
- johnchristopher 7y agoWhat ? I still do that at least once a week/month. Last time it was for the linux dropbox updater, last week. I am also a fan of using another window so I can use the mouse and still have a marker to monitor progress.
- TomMarius 7y agoToday everything goes so fast that it's faster to kill and restart if it's not visibly moving, IMHO
- yokohummer7 7y agoI guess what has changed is me, not the computing environment. When I was young, I easily grew impatient when things were going slow. Nowadays I still kinda feel nervous, but not to the point to warrant such bookkeeping methods.
- koolba 7y agoMy urge to measure everything has only grown with age. I don't chalk it up to nervousness though. I'd say it's driven by curiosity and and a desire to forecast.
- Swenrekcah 7y agoI do this all the time too, but unfortunately many processes today only go around in circls instead of showing the actual progress.
- woodrowbarlow 7y agoto be fair, "actual progress" is almost always a misnomer anyway.
- DoubleCribble 7y agoI find the Progress bar is usually about as accurate as the Time Remaining calculation. Both are better than nothing but more of a fiction than reality.
- wongarsu 7y agoWhen I implement progress bars I most often implement "pessimistic progress", so "considering all timeouts, worst case we are 46.5% (of the time) to some result", with an update every few hundreed milliseconds. As possible mix in data from completed subtasks. Nobody ever complains if the process suddenly speeds up because progress was made before the timeout, as long as your initial estimate wasn't absurd (looks at Windows Explorer). Even a naive progress bar counting down the 60s timeout is more informative and satisfying to watch than an endless spinner.
- delinka 7y agoAbsurd initial estimate? All of the estimates tend to be absurd. Done in 30s ... I mean 15min ... ah, 10s ... 1hr 7min ... Oh, come _on_ ...
- Nition 7y agoWindows 95/98 used to occasionally do some particularly insane estimates. I took this screenshot many years ago of copying a tiny NetHack install between drives: https://i.imgur.com/q7tc9R1.png https://i.imgur.com/q7tc9R1.png
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoVista, I think it was Vista, "fixed" that by adding an estimation pass first, that often took longer than the copy itself, and was almost as bad at estimating. It sometimes took much longer. The fix was far worse than the problem, yet it survived unchanged. It was so bad I ended up discovering Teracopy which was decent at estimation, and far faster at copying. Was a must-have until I migrated away from Windows.
- bump-ladel 7y agoA couple of weeks ago, I marked the (no)progress bar on a macOS update with a piece of surgical tape.
- james-skemp 7y agoThank you for posting a physical marker; I was afraid I was the only person that's done so. I've been known to use Post-its and the frame of my monitor as a marker. Both are much easier with how prevalent dual-monitors are these days.
- darkpuma 7y agoShit, I think I last used it last week! In my GUI wrapper for rsync while transferring some large files. It took about 45 minutes for one of the files.