612: Estimation
| 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 is displayed that estimates the time remaining for the transfer. The estimations, however, are often hilariously and woefully inaccurate, ranging from seconds to days, depending on the load of data the processor is crunching at any given moment. The cartoon illustrates this.
Transcript
- Cueball: I'm just outside town, so I should be there in fifteen minutes.
- Cueball: Actually, it's looking more like six days.
- Cueball: 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)
