Tuesday, March 16, 2010

progress bars and stress

so i just have had the 3rd experience of the week when I want to carry out a routine task on some Win* box and it decides it needs to run a massive update and
to make matters worse, this locks out other activities
but the straw that broke this camel's back is the
progress bar

the example of the service pack update for vista will suffice to show what a load of stress this causes - the bar is in %age complete - but there are 3 seperate phases and you are given no indication of their relative longevities nor does the bar actually
move linearly w.r.t time in any fashion (not even relativistic) so if you go away for what ought to be enough time (e.g. cup of tea or watch a movie) you come back and inevitably either something finishes 10 times earlier, so you now have to go to the next step, or else it still has a full 3-day test match (cricket) to go ....

this is like being in a travel warzone when the train/plane is late and the announcements are intermittent and noisy (or in a language you don't speak)...

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