• ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    1 day ago

    I remember when Netscape (the browser) back in the late 90s or thereabouts came up with the “innovation” of having a progress bar that would go left to right, and when it got all the way to the right it would reverse and go in the other direction. The whole thing would just go back and forth until the action was done – not a “progress” bar at all, just a “well, maybe something is happening, it’ll be done when it’s done” animation. Later replaced by the ingenious shit going around in a circle that is ubiquitous today, that creates no illusions of it being a progress indicator at all.

    • X@piefed.worldEnglish
      35·
      1 day ago

      They could say “the connection is probably lost,” but it’s more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.

    • SorryQuick@lemmy.ca
      41·
      1 day ago

      But really it’s just how it will always be. How do you estimate transfer speed? Use the disk speed / bandwidth limit? Can’t do that since it’s shared with other users/processes. So at the beginning there is literally zero info to go off of. Some amount of per-file overhead also has to be accounted for since copying one 100gb file is not the same as copying millions of tiny files adding up to 100gb.

      Then you start creating an average from the transfer so far, but with a weighted average algorithm, since recent speeds are much more valued, but also not too valued. Just because you are ultra slow now doesn’t mean it will always be slow. Maybe your brother is downloading porn and will hog the bandwidth all day, or he’ll be done in a few seconds.

      So to put it simply, predicting transfer time is pretty much the same as predicting the future.

      • Eheran@lemmy.world
        2·
        12 hours ago

        Transfer speed on discs was and is almost exclusively a matter of file size, so it should be easy to estimate a much better time than the dumb “total bytes / current speed” that constantly fluctuates since file sizes are not all identical.

      • tetris11@feddit.ukEnglish
        5·
        19 hours ago

        I like rsync’s progress: speed and files left

        I detest the needless line chart windows 10 had

  • rekabis@lemmy.ca
    59·
    1 day ago

    Back in the day (mid/late 90s), any download on Internet Explorer had a “file transfer” pop-up with an animation involving a planet (the Internet) sending flying sheets of paper (the download) to a Manila folder (the computer’s file system).

    I legit had one client ask me why they couldn’t make the download go faster my moving the planet closer to the folder, or vice versa.

    I recall just sitting there for a number of seconds while my poor brain tried to grasp just how badly out-of-whack their interpretation of the universe was.

    Spoiler alert: they were a very poor client, and refused to relinquish an entire raft of very poorly thought out or even entirely wrong concepts of computing and the Internet. They were also credulous AF, and while I could have made an arseload of money correcting what they did on a weekly or even daily basis, I just didn’t want that kind of headache.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      42·
      1 day ago

      “On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” – Charles Babbage, discovering what Technical Support would be dealing with a century or more later.

    • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today
      3·
      1 day ago

      You should have chosen the money, and retired early. You make a shell company doing whatever, that just drains your built up money. You pay yourself benefits, you kick back and relax, doing whatever bullshit job you invented as the CEO of fuckaround.inc

  • gabor_legrady@lemmy.orgEnglish
    5·
    23 hours ago

    As a developer I hate these values and estimates, but I also agree that there is no good way to calculate the future. The honest would be “working” - but everyone asks for percentages and estimates.

    • Johanno@feddit.org
      5·
      20 hours ago

      You could write “estimating” for about a minute or so and then give a reasonable estimation.

      I made once a download estimate infinity. Suspended the pc and over 20 hours later turned it on again. Since it calculated 20 hours no download it assumed it would take infinity to download it all