Difference between revisions of "612: Estimation"
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When moving or copying files in Windows, a dialog box opens to inform the user of how many of the files being moved have been moved with an estimate of how long the rest of the files should take. However, this estimate is often subject to seemingly random and extreme changes from an amount of seconds to one of hours. | When moving or copying files in Windows, a dialog box opens to inform the user of how many of the files being moved have been moved with an estimate of how long the rest of the files should take. However, this estimate is often subject to seemingly random and extreme changes from an amount of seconds to one of hours. | ||
| − | The joke in the comic is the idea that this feature was actually purposefully implemented and that the person who did so actually talks like that. In the comic, he tells some friends over the phone how long it will take for him to arrive at their meeting point. However, like with | + | The joke in the comic is the idea that this feature was actually purposefully implemented and that the person who did so actually talks like that. In the comic, he tells some friends over the phone how long it will take for him to arrive at their meeting point. However, like with Windows's estimation feature, he quickly changes his estimate multiple times from the extremes of days to seconds. |
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
Revision as of 06:08, 5 June 2013
| Estimation |
 Title text: 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. |
Explanation
When moving or copying files in Windows, a dialog box opens to inform the user of how many of the files being moved have been moved with an estimate of how long the rest of the files should take. However, this estimate is often subject to seemingly random and extreme changes from an amount of seconds to one of hours.
The joke in the comic is the idea that this feature was actually purposefully implemented and that the person who did so actually talks like that. In the comic, he tells some friends over the phone how long it will take for him to arrive at their meeting point. However, like with Windows's estimation feature, he quickly changes his estimate multiple times from the extremes of days to seconds.
Transcript
- Man: I'm just outside town, so I should be there in fifteen minutes.
- Man: Actually, it's looking more like six days.
- Man: No, wait, thirty seconds.
- The author of the Windows file copy dialog visits some friends
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I've experienced this more strongly while installing programs rather than transferring files, and the "connection lost" part is not exclusively from Microsoft. 108.162.212.196 22:06, 3 January 2014 (UTC)
I think there needs to be some explanation on what "per-file overhead" is, for those who don't know - myself, for instance. Codefreak5 (talk) 22:12, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
- It's the time spent looking up the destination folder, adding an entry for the file in that folder (a folder is an index of file names and locations, not a physical division of the disk), and recording metadata such as the creation date and owner. Basically, it's the time it would take to move the file to a different folder on the same disk, minus the time it would take to delete the file (bypassing the Recycle Bin). Promethean (talk) 06:08, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
In fairness, I wonder if we should mention that this is a really hard problem to solve. it's only a little bit easier than the extremely hard problem given in 1425: Tasks. User: 00N8 (talk) 00:02, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
