Magic Countdown: Difference between revisions

=== Real Life ===

* Attempt any file transfer in any version of Windows and watch the time remaining jump about like a nervous salmon in a particularly fast river. ''[[Lucky Star]]'' poked at this.

** The same principle applies to file downloading, especially a torrent, since the estimate for time remaining assumes that the current speeds will remain constant, which is almost never true.

*** Similarly, the "less than a minute" at the very end of the installation usually takes a couple of minutes.

** While Windows is pretty much a poster-child case, almost any OS can be guilty of this because predicting a transfer time is, for the most part, nondeterministic. The initial guess the OS gives you may just be how fast the files are transferring now with how big the total transfer is. However, file transfer times are not based on how fast the hard drive can actually work, but how many files it has to write. It's actually '''much''' faster to transfer a 4GB file than 10,000 files that equal 4GB. Coupled with the fact that the hard drive you're using is probably the only one and it's constantly in use because of things like swap file and caching etc., it's basically a good idea to never trust any file transfer timer regardless of the OS, file system, etc.

 

== Exceptions ==