Well, I more often find myself thinking "I need to get to [some address], on a map it's right around this intersection, I wonder which stop is the closest". That's almost always the initial problem you face when you're about to go somewhere with a public transport system you're not intimately familiar with. Only after this do things like "which station should I change trains at?" factor in.
Add to this that may times public transport systems will have a stop/station named "Something Street" which is actually not on Something Street but rather it's ~50m from one end of Something Street and is only named Something Street because that's where Something Street meets the street that the bus/train/tram runs on and the stop you really wanted was two stops earlier which is called "Random Park" and happens to be on a street parallel to Something Street (and right next to the place you're going to).
Much of Trek is also little more than space western and this is exactly how Roddenberry originally sold it too.
While it was pitched that way it actually dealt heavily with various political and ethical issues. That was what made it great, sure there was technobabble and bits of "space western" mixed in but overall it was speculation about the future and the present.
The "new trek" is just action movies IN SPACE which makes it "sci-fi" in the eyes of Hollywood.
Seriously, if you're still using tables for layout you probably shouldn't be doing web development.
Tables are horrible to work with yet I still see horribly hacked-up amateurish table-based layouts that are almost impossible to modify and work with cranked out by developers who should either consider that HTML has changed since 1999 or stick to writing server-side code.
Based on my experience I suspect you also never use <!DOCTYPE> tags, use deprecated elements, nest your elements in nearly unparseable ways and don't quite grasp how to write even basic JavaScript (I'm not claiming to be a JS expert but the incredibly poor quality of JS that some people with CS degrees and 10+ years of experience come up with makes me wonder how they have jobs in the first place).
Except the UI for GIMP is a pain to work with. Photoshop's UI may not be perfect but it's a lot better than GIMP's UI.
GIMP suffers from having a UI designed by programmers, what it really needs is a complete UI redesign (and it needs to be the default UI for the latest and greatest version, not some GIMP-with-a-decent-UI fork that's two versions behind and suddenly doesn't get updated anymore).
In fact, it needs a UI which is not just almost as good as Photoshop's, it needs to be good enough that an experienced Photoshop user's initial reaction to it is "Huh, this is different but I like it" (right now it's closer to "Why is this user interface such a mess? Why should I take the time to learn this?").
Oh yeah, because double NAT always works so well, especially when the end-user's precious uPnP is no longer a viable option.
There will be a lot more issues with CGNAT than with end-user-controlled NAT (just another example: services which assume "one user = one IP", works fine when your home connection is shared with one or two others, doesn't work so well when you're sharing an IPv4 address with dozens of other users).
Well, if Adobe thought they had real competition they'd probably feel the need to be competitive, one way to do that is by having cheaper and less restrictive licensing.
That said, I think Apple would do a better job, Aperture is downright reasonably priced and IMHO the UI for Aperture is better than Lightroom (not that it doesn't have its flaws, I'm just talking about the general workflow).
I'd say a lot of Adobe CS users are just as locked to Adobe's software as Windows users many times are.
However, this could change quickly if someone decided to put a lot of effort (and money) into developing a viable alternative to Adobe's software (especially Photoshop, while there are currently alternatives on the market Photoshop is definitely the baseline that other software is compared to).
I really wouldn't mind if say, Apple and Autodesk both decided to take a stab at creating their own Photoshop competitors. They both understand the target user to some degree.
Well, it depends on whether you're uploading something which others can see and also whether the persons you've filmed/photographed are clearly the subjects in your video/photo or just random people who happened to be there.
If you stick a camera in someone's face and then upload it for the world to see then yeah, you need permission. If it's a newsworthy event, a celebrity/politician or simply that the person was in the background when your friend did something funny then you don't need permission to upload it.
Here in Sweden you're allowed to photograph or film anyone in public as long as you aren't specifically harassing them. Publishing photos on the other hand...
Well, the Russian Air Force definitely doesn't have the same readiness that the US Air Force has but AFAIK they should still be able to keep several Il-78 tankers in the air which should be plenty to give their strategic bombers protection (officially they have something like 15 - 20 tankers and even considering the poor shape that parts of the Russian military is in at least half of those should be operational). As for the strategic bombers themselves, both the Tu-95 and the Tu-160 have an operational range in excess of 10,000 km without refueling. I suspect they'd still hurry up and ferry aircraft eastward (if they haven't already started doing so just in case, one of the reasons the conflict in Georgia in 2008 went the way it did was because the Russians had a considerable number of troops ready not far from the border).
Then there's the matter of ground-based AA sites, most of North Korea's AA is around Pyongyang, the DMZ and the area just north of the DMZ, what they've got in the north of the country is little more than a token force and the combat readiness of a their equipment seems to be a lot worse than it is for Russia. There's also the fuel and ammunition issue that I mentioned, waging a long-range air war would definitely be costly for the Russians but they could do it, the North Koreans on the other would quickly run out of fuel with small chances of getting more. Combine this with the fact that a large part of the North Korean fleet is made up of planes so old they are just barely capable of carrying air-to-air missiles and I just find it hard to believe they'd stand much of a chance of doing serious damage before Russia strikes back. Admittedly North Korea does have a few S-300-derived SAM launchers but Russia has close to a thousand S-300 launchers as well as a few S-400-equipped battalions, including one stationed near Vladivostok.
I don't doubt that in terms of lost aircraft and soldiers a war with North Korea could easily be more costly for Russia than for the US but I suspect if it did happen the Russians could still do a lot of damage quickly. There's also the political side of things, if it did happen Russia would probably like to occupy a decent-sized chunk of North Korea before the international community intervenes in any way to avoid having a US ally right on their doorstep (I doubt the international community would side with North Korea but from Russia's perspective it'd be better to at least already have their own "peacekeepers" controlling North Hamgyong rather than UN/US forces within spitting distance of the current border).
Of course, I'm just speculating but I just don't see North Korea standing a chance against any of their neighbors in a all-out conventional conflict, were it not for the ROK being a US ally that would probably be their best shot, Russia and China are both capable of hitting them way too hard if North Korea tries anything though I doubt either one really wants to get involved in a war with North Korea precisely because it would be the kind of war that's less about precision strikes and more about taking out large amount of troops, equipment and infrastructure. To be honest I think the risk of a war on the Korean peninsula turning into another Iraq or Vietnam is slim, they have no strong allies like Vietnam and culturally and politically the situation in Iraq was completely different (North Korea's neighbors are a lot more stable than the Iraq and any power vacuum in a conquered North Korea could be dealt with more like Germany post-WWII, a de-juchefication similar to the sometimes overly pragmatic de-nazification of Germany would probably be the way to go).
Even Russia's old gear is more modern than the vast majority of North Korea's gear. North Korea's best fighter is the MiG-29, of which they have 40, it's a downgraded export model at that. The Russians by comparison have more than 200 MiG-29 fighters, many of which have been or are being upgraded with modern hardware. In total the Russians have almost 700 fighters and interceptors, all of which are superior to anything the North Koreans have. On top of this they have close to 150 bombers (mostly Tu-22M bombers but a healthy complement of strategic bombers as well (Tu-95 and Tu-160)).
If North Korea did strike Russia I suspect the Russians would quickly establish air superiority and use their bomber fleet to flatten any North Korean attempts at advancing or defending. Not to mention that while Russia has no problem finding fuel for its aircraft, tanks and other vehicles the North Koreans have a lot of their much-feared artillery placed in the southern parts of the country, with Russian air superiority and barely any fuel I doubt they'd be able to execute any major troop movements.
On top of this are geographical considerations, the land border between North Korea and Russia is something like 20 km long and in order to move troops trough it you pretty much have to have air superiority, in my opinion it would be nearly impossible for North Korea to mount any kind of advance through the narrow corridor north to Vladivostok. In fact, I think it is likely that the Russians would be able to push the North Koreans back beyond the border pretty quickly once they establish air superiority, they can effectively hinder nearly all troop movements by the North Koreans and just use air power to minimize resistance since the North Koreans have nothing worth mentioning to counter the Russians with (unless we're counting their aging MiG-21, F-5, F-6 and F-7 fighters which make up 400+ of their 500 or so fighters, not to mention that a very large portion of their air force is grounded due to poor maintenance (for some plane types I believe it's more than 50% of the planes which are estimated to be completely useless, not that an F-5 with nothing but a cannon is very useful anyway these days)).
"Jävel/Djävel" means devil or demon so not exactly "motherfucker" but then I've never heard anyone who has Swedish as his/her native language call anyone a "mammaknullare" (I suspect mainly because in Swedish culture insulting someone's mother really isn't that big a deal while for some immigrants coming from cultures with a different view on this it seems like a good insult).
"Patient is an addict, faking symptoms in order to get painkillers."
This one actually happened to an old friend of mine. He had in the past had issues with substance abuse and it had made its way into his medical records. Fast forward a couple of years and shows up at the ER with a pretty nasty injury after chopping wood and they outright refuse to give him any painkillers except ibuprofen...
Took 24+ hours before he and several others were able to convince the doctors that he needed real pain relief.
Apple makes the absolute worst keyboards out there, nightmares from the chiclet age.
I actually like Apple's keyboards with scissor switches. The older clear and white plastic desktop keyboards were absolutely horrible though.
Of course, I like short key travel and low noise. Used to be a a Model M user (still have my old Model M hooked up to my home server) but I got extremely tired of the noise and the long key travel was an issue when typing a lot, felt like I had to use too much pressure which left my fingers feeling tired after a full day of coding.
Before I switched my main machine to a rMBP I was seriously considering a Matias Tactile Pro though (loved those old Apple keyboards) but they don't make one with a Swedish layout.
Well, MSDN does sometimes cover how to balance the wheels on your car, it's just that they either bury it as a random bare-bones example that's hard to find (and still requires you to dig through the docs and the internet to find how to build the real-world code and what bugs they forgot to mention) or they give you a way too generic solution which takes hours to sort through (sort of like describing how to balance the wheel on your car by giving you detailed instructions on every step of the process with the assumption that your car may just as well be an aircraft carrier or a helicopter and your "wheel" may actually be a propeller or a rotor, and of course that you don't understand what a wrench is or that it should be held and not forcefully inserted into your nose. Of course, they'll still leave out the part on balancing a wheel on a large truck which is what you actually want to do).
Metadata is key here, just having a huge pile of video is pretty pointless.
Even something as simple as GPS tracking and a voice interface that allows you to say "[voice command keyword] start tags party, new year's eve" and then later "[voice command keyword] stop tags party, new year's eve" would make things a lot easier. Two years later when preparing for your wedding to that amazing girl/guy you met at that new year's party you can just search the library for those tags.
The point of recording everything wouldn't be to sit around and look at what your bathroom walls looked like when you took a dump, it would be to able to find records of the interesting things you would otherwise have forgotten to record. There's a reason so many odd and interesting video clips come out of Russia, "everyone" has a dash cam there, a dash cam which is always running. Sure, 99% of the recorded video is totally and completely dull and boring and even the remaining 1% is mostly crap to most people but every now and then someone accidentally records something worth recording.
I first tried Blender back when it was a NaN product and not open source. I've downloaded and tried it every now and then since but most of my experience is with Maya and 3dsmax.
I'll agree with those who say that Blender has made huge steps forward. However, the UI feels, to me with experience from other 3D software, a lot like a "programmer UI". It's not just a UI for 3D graphics professionals, it's a UI for Blender-using 3D graphics professionals. That's the problem with it. If you know 3D graphics in general but are unfamiliar with Blender the learning curve can still be a PITA (not as bad as it used to be though, in the past it felt like you were starting over from scratch when going from 3dsmax or Maya to Blender).
The problem with those "99% in seconds and then an hour for the last 1%" progress bars is that a lot of times they are simply poorly designed even when factoring in that it's basically impossible to create a perfectly accurate progress bar.
I've seen this phenomena all too often with various software, installers of various "enterprise" software tend to be especially bad. First it copies files, after performing a few installs of the software you realize that the file copy task is always considered to be 95% of the work by the installer. Then it runs a bunch of heavily CPU-bound scripts that according to the progress bar are 5% of the work every time. Of course, even on a machine with dog-slow disk I/O and a pair of blazing fast multi-core CPUs these last 5% take 30+ minutes while the file copying rarely takes more than 2-3 minutes. At this point we can confidently say that whoever designed the progress bar wasn't just doing a poor job, this person clearly intended for the progress bar to work poorly. At some point during testing (like, the first time they tested the progress bar in usability testing) someone must have said "this thing is horribly inaccurate, at least change it so it's got a 50/50 file copying to install script ratio" and been told shut up.
As practical consideration, most of the world understands your sleep cycle.
Yet if you tell people that you actually need those eight hours of sleep to function properly you get ridiculed. Everyone expects you to function just fine on 5-6 hours per night, any more is seen by a lot of people as being a bit "lazy" (either going to bed "too early" or "sleeping in").
I'm not ashamed to say that anything less than seven hours per night on average completely messes me up, I can feel it the moment I wake up, I need more sleep or I will function poorly (a few months ago I wound up only getting 4-5 hours per night for a full week, by Friday I was completely useless at work, just staring at my monitor trying to force my brain to do work).
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect humans make it there and create permanent settlements the crime and war situations may change rapidly.
Speaking of which, I should finish reading Green Mars...
Well, I more often find myself thinking "I need to get to [some address], on a map it's right around this intersection, I wonder which stop is the closest". That's almost always the initial problem you face when you're about to go somewhere with a public transport system you're not intimately familiar with. Only after this do things like "which station should I change trains at?" factor in.
Add to this that may times public transport systems will have a stop/station named "Something Street" which is actually not on Something Street but rather it's ~50m from one end of Something Street and is only named Something Street because that's where Something Street meets the street that the bus/train/tram runs on and the stop you really wanted was two stops earlier which is called "Random Park" and happens to be on a street parallel to Something Street (and right next to the place you're going to).
But tablets and smartphones aren't minicomputers.
This sounds more like an attempt to return to the minicomputer era.
Perhaps you meant to say that the microcomputer fad is coming to an end? Of course, I doubt it's accurate to describe it as a fad...
Lule is also acceptable if trying to approximate how the name of the city is normally pronounced.
Much of Trek is also little more than space western and this is exactly how Roddenberry originally sold it too.
While it was pitched that way it actually dealt heavily with various political and ethical issues. That was what made it great, sure there was technobabble and bits of "space western" mixed in but overall it was speculation about the future and the present.
The "new trek" is just action movies IN SPACE which makes it "sci-fi" in the eyes of Hollywood.
Seriously, if you're still using tables for layout you probably shouldn't be doing web development.
Tables are horrible to work with yet I still see horribly hacked-up amateurish table-based layouts that are almost impossible to modify and work with cranked out by developers who should either consider that HTML has changed since 1999 or stick to writing server-side code.
Based on my experience I suspect you also never use <!DOCTYPE> tags, use deprecated elements, nest your elements in nearly unparseable ways and don't quite grasp how to write even basic JavaScript (I'm not claiming to be a JS expert but the incredibly poor quality of JS that some people with CS degrees and 10+ years of experience come up with makes me wonder how they have jobs in the first place).
Except the UI for GIMP is a pain to work with. Photoshop's UI may not be perfect but it's a lot better than GIMP's UI.
GIMP suffers from having a UI designed by programmers, what it really needs is a complete UI redesign (and it needs to be the default UI for the latest and greatest version, not some GIMP-with-a-decent-UI fork that's two versions behind and suddenly doesn't get updated anymore).
In fact, it needs a UI which is not just almost as good as Photoshop's, it needs to be good enough that an experienced Photoshop user's initial reaction to it is "Huh, this is different but I like it" (right now it's closer to "Why is this user interface such a mess? Why should I take the time to learn this?").
Oh yeah, because double NAT always works so well, especially when the end-user's precious uPnP is no longer a viable option.
There will be a lot more issues with CGNAT than with end-user-controlled NAT (just another example: services which assume "one user = one IP", works fine when your home connection is shared with one or two others, doesn't work so well when you're sharing an IPv4 address with dozens of other users).
Well, if Adobe thought they had real competition they'd probably feel the need to be competitive, one way to do that is by having cheaper and less restrictive licensing.
That said, I think Apple would do a better job, Aperture is downright reasonably priced and IMHO the UI for Aperture is better than Lightroom (not that it doesn't have its flaws, I'm just talking about the general workflow).
I'd say a lot of Adobe CS users are just as locked to Adobe's software as Windows users many times are.
However, this could change quickly if someone decided to put a lot of effort (and money) into developing a viable alternative to Adobe's software (especially Photoshop, while there are currently alternatives on the market Photoshop is definitely the baseline that other software is compared to).
I really wouldn't mind if say, Apple and Autodesk both decided to take a stab at creating their own Photoshop competitors. They both understand the target user to some degree.
Well, it depends on whether you're uploading something which others can see and also whether the persons you've filmed/photographed are clearly the subjects in your video/photo or just random people who happened to be there.
If you stick a camera in someone's face and then upload it for the world to see then yeah, you need permission. If it's a newsworthy event, a celebrity/politician or simply that the person was in the background when your friend did something funny then you don't need permission to upload it.
Here in Sweden you're allowed to photograph or film anyone in public as long as you aren't specifically harassing them. Publishing photos on the other hand...
Well, the Russian Air Force definitely doesn't have the same readiness that the US Air Force has but AFAIK they should still be able to keep several Il-78 tankers in the air which should be plenty to give their strategic bombers protection (officially they have something like 15 - 20 tankers and even considering the poor shape that parts of the Russian military is in at least half of those should be operational). As for the strategic bombers themselves, both the Tu-95 and the Tu-160 have an operational range in excess of 10,000 km without refueling. I suspect they'd still hurry up and ferry aircraft eastward (if they haven't already started doing so just in case, one of the reasons the conflict in Georgia in 2008 went the way it did was because the Russians had a considerable number of troops ready not far from the border).
Then there's the matter of ground-based AA sites, most of North Korea's AA is around Pyongyang, the DMZ and the area just north of the DMZ, what they've got in the north of the country is little more than a token force and the combat readiness of a their equipment seems to be a lot worse than it is for Russia. There's also the fuel and ammunition issue that I mentioned, waging a long-range air war would definitely be costly for the Russians but they could do it, the North Koreans on the other would quickly run out of fuel with small chances of getting more. Combine this with the fact that a large part of the North Korean fleet is made up of planes so old they are just barely capable of carrying air-to-air missiles and I just find it hard to believe they'd stand much of a chance of doing serious damage before Russia strikes back. Admittedly North Korea does have a few S-300-derived SAM launchers but Russia has close to a thousand S-300 launchers as well as a few S-400-equipped battalions, including one stationed near Vladivostok.
I don't doubt that in terms of lost aircraft and soldiers a war with North Korea could easily be more costly for Russia than for the US but I suspect if it did happen the Russians could still do a lot of damage quickly. There's also the political side of things, if it did happen Russia would probably like to occupy a decent-sized chunk of North Korea before the international community intervenes in any way to avoid having a US ally right on their doorstep (I doubt the international community would side with North Korea but from Russia's perspective it'd be better to at least already have their own "peacekeepers" controlling North Hamgyong rather than UN/US forces within spitting distance of the current border).
Of course, I'm just speculating but I just don't see North Korea standing a chance against any of their neighbors in a all-out conventional conflict, were it not for the ROK being a US ally that would probably be their best shot, Russia and China are both capable of hitting them way too hard if North Korea tries anything though I doubt either one really wants to get involved in a war with North Korea precisely because it would be the kind of war that's less about precision strikes and more about taking out large amount of troops, equipment and infrastructure. To be honest I think the risk of a war on the Korean peninsula turning into another Iraq or Vietnam is slim, they have no strong allies like Vietnam and culturally and politically the situation in Iraq was completely different (North Korea's neighbors are a lot more stable than the Iraq and any power vacuum in a conquered North Korea could be dealt with more like Germany post-WWII, a de-juchefication similar to the sometimes overly pragmatic de-nazification of Germany would probably be the way to go).
Even Russia's old gear is more modern than the vast majority of North Korea's gear. North Korea's best fighter is the MiG-29, of which they have 40, it's a downgraded export model at that. The Russians by comparison have more than 200 MiG-29 fighters, many of which have been or are being upgraded with modern hardware. In total the Russians have almost 700 fighters and interceptors, all of which are superior to anything the North Koreans have. On top of this they have close to 150 bombers (mostly Tu-22M bombers but a healthy complement of strategic bombers as well (Tu-95 and Tu-160)).
If North Korea did strike Russia I suspect the Russians would quickly establish air superiority and use their bomber fleet to flatten any North Korean attempts at advancing or defending. Not to mention that while Russia has no problem finding fuel for its aircraft, tanks and other vehicles the North Koreans have a lot of their much-feared artillery placed in the southern parts of the country, with Russian air superiority and barely any fuel I doubt they'd be able to execute any major troop movements.
On top of this are geographical considerations, the land border between North Korea and Russia is something like 20 km long and in order to move troops trough it you pretty much have to have air superiority, in my opinion it would be nearly impossible for North Korea to mount any kind of advance through the narrow corridor north to Vladivostok. In fact, I think it is likely that the Russians would be able to push the North Koreans back beyond the border pretty quickly once they establish air superiority, they can effectively hinder nearly all troop movements by the North Koreans and just use air power to minimize resistance since the North Koreans have nothing worth mentioning to counter the Russians with (unless we're counting their aging MiG-21, F-5, F-6 and F-7 fighters which make up 400+ of their 500 or so fighters, not to mention that a very large portion of their air force is grounded due to poor maintenance (for some plane types I believe it's more than 50% of the planes which are estimated to be completely useless, not that an F-5 with nothing but a cannon is very useful anyway these days)).
I've actually seen non-swedes try to use variations of it as an insult directed at swedes. They tend to get confused by the lack of reaction...
"Skiten" is "the shit". "Skit" is "shit".
"Jävel/Djävel" means devil or demon so not exactly "motherfucker" but then I've never heard anyone who has Swedish as his/her native language call anyone a "mammaknullare" (I suspect mainly because in Swedish culture insulting someone's mother really isn't that big a deal while for some immigrants coming from cultures with a different view on this it seems like a good insult).
I always saw BeOS as AmigaOS done right.
"Patient is an addict, faking symptoms in order to get painkillers."
This one actually happened to an old friend of mine. He had in the past had issues with substance abuse and it had made its way into his medical records. Fast forward a couple of years and shows up at the ER with a pretty nasty injury after chopping wood and they outright refuse to give him any painkillers except ibuprofen...
Took 24+ hours before he and several others were able to convince the doctors that he needed real pain relief.
Apple makes the absolute worst keyboards out there, nightmares from the chiclet age.
I actually like Apple's keyboards with scissor switches. The older clear and white plastic desktop keyboards were absolutely horrible though.
Of course, I like short key travel and low noise. Used to be a a Model M user (still have my old Model M hooked up to my home server) but I got extremely tired of the noise and the long key travel was an issue when typing a lot, felt like I had to use too much pressure which left my fingers feeling tired after a full day of coding.
Before I switched my main machine to a rMBP I was seriously considering a Matias Tactile Pro though (loved those old Apple keyboards) but they don't make one with a Swedish layout.
Well, MSDN does sometimes cover how to balance the wheels on your car, it's just that they either bury it as a random bare-bones example that's hard to find (and still requires you to dig through the docs and the internet to find how to build the real-world code and what bugs they forgot to mention) or they give you a way too generic solution which takes hours to sort through (sort of like describing how to balance the wheel on your car by giving you detailed instructions on every step of the process with the assumption that your car may just as well be an aircraft carrier or a helicopter and your "wheel" may actually be a propeller or a rotor, and of course that you don't understand what a wrench is or that it should be held and not forcefully inserted into your nose. Of course, they'll still leave out the part on balancing a wheel on a large truck which is what you actually want to do).
Metadata is key here, just having a huge pile of video is pretty pointless.
Even something as simple as GPS tracking and a voice interface that allows you to say "[voice command keyword] start tags party, new year's eve" and then later "[voice command keyword] stop tags party, new year's eve" would make things a lot easier. Two years later when preparing for your wedding to that amazing girl/guy you met at that new year's party you can just search the library for those tags.
The point of recording everything wouldn't be to sit around and look at what your bathroom walls looked like when you took a dump, it would be to able to find records of the interesting things you would otherwise have forgotten to record. There's a reason so many odd and interesting video clips come out of Russia, "everyone" has a dash cam there, a dash cam which is always running. Sure, 99% of the recorded video is totally and completely dull and boring and even the remaining 1% is mostly crap to most people but every now and then someone accidentally records something worth recording.
I first tried Blender back when it was a NaN product and not open source. I've downloaded and tried it every now and then since but most of my experience is with Maya and 3dsmax.
I'll agree with those who say that Blender has made huge steps forward. However, the UI feels, to me with experience from other 3D software, a lot like a "programmer UI". It's not just a UI for 3D graphics professionals, it's a UI for Blender-using 3D graphics professionals. That's the problem with it. If you know 3D graphics in general but are unfamiliar with Blender the learning curve can still be a PITA (not as bad as it used to be though, in the past it felt like you were starting over from scratch when going from 3dsmax or Maya to Blender).
The problem with those "99% in seconds and then an hour for the last 1%" progress bars is that a lot of times they are simply poorly designed even when factoring in that it's basically impossible to create a perfectly accurate progress bar.
I've seen this phenomena all too often with various software, installers of various "enterprise" software tend to be especially bad. First it copies files, after performing a few installs of the software you realize that the file copy task is always considered to be 95% of the work by the installer. Then it runs a bunch of heavily CPU-bound scripts that according to the progress bar are 5% of the work every time. Of course, even on a machine with dog-slow disk I/O and a pair of blazing fast multi-core CPUs these last 5% take 30+ minutes while the file copying rarely takes more than 2-3 minutes. At this point we can confidently say that whoever designed the progress bar wasn't just doing a poor job, this person clearly intended for the progress bar to work poorly. At some point during testing (like, the first time they tested the progress bar in usability testing) someone must have said "this thing is horribly inaccurate, at least change it so it's got a 50/50 file copying to install script ratio" and been told shut up.
As practical consideration, most of the world understands your sleep cycle.
Yet if you tell people that you actually need those eight hours of sleep to function properly you get ridiculed. Everyone expects you to function just fine on 5-6 hours per night, any more is seen by a lot of people as being a bit "lazy" (either going to bed "too early" or "sleeping in").
I'm not ashamed to say that anything less than seven hours per night on average completely messes me up, I can feel it the moment I wake up, I need more sleep or I will function poorly (a few months ago I wound up only getting 4-5 hours per night for a full week, by Friday I was completely useless at work, just staring at my monitor trying to force my brain to do work).