They don't like it because you have to run an update twice a week to keep up with the latest exploits found in flash and java. IF oracle/adobe were generous enough to roll up an update this week for the new exploits.
And the boneheads at oracle kept insisting on rolling up whole new installers most of the time, that would only work if you had the previous version installed. (installer or updater make up your mind!) So you'd install vers 10, then 11, then 12, then 12.1, then 13, then 14, most of which were 55-56mb each. Idiots. Java needs to die in a fire. And I'll bring the marshmallows.
It's not entirely oracle and adobe's fault though really... they're just keeping it up because devs keep using it. I'll admit it, writing games in flash (or java) is pretty quick and easy. But quick-n-easy comes at a price, a price to the users
Apple's advanced 1969-era OS is "secure by design". It is immune from viruses, and there's no need to run a virus scanner.
Trojan != Virus for the love of god trolls, please learn this. I am sooo tired of hearing trojans being called viruses. They're both "malware", but that's where it ends.
Anyway, this is why Apple is getting really sick and tired of Flash and Java, they've been the top two security thorns in their side for the last decade. Feeding the Apple bashers and giving Apple a bad rap. Apple doesn't write the flash or java interpreters, they don't have much control over the code monkeys at oracle and adobe.
That is, even though they don't even get a chance to offer a password,
you sure you don't have PAM on? it's enabled by default on some systems, and gives them a different way to provide a password.
From looking at the logs though, it was always the same way here. (before I moved ports) Trying a very limited number of specific usernames and passwords. (looking for common services like www and daemon, as well as common usernames like admin and john) On the other hand, if they really are trying to brute-forcing you, you're being specifically targeted and should review your security immediately.
I probably should have been clearer. I mean image mirroring, not display mirroring. As in horizontal or vertical reflection of the image on the same display, not copying the image to a second display.
Like if you want to project onto an opaque screen from the back, so the audience sees it correctly from the front. You need to mirror horizontally otherwise the audience would see the image backward.
And we are still discussing the display in pivot mode?
OS X has a standard option in display preferences to rotate the display 90, 180, or 270 degrees. (no special software to install, that might come with a rotatable display, for windows os) It doesn't offer mirroring though, I was rather expecting to see that option. The rotation option is only available for external displays, not built-in. (imac and laptop) So you can rotate as long as you can find a way to physically rotate your display. (OS X does offer Negative however, which may have its uses on a projector)
I need to test on an Apple display to verify that it adjusts the sub-pixel kerning correctly when rotated. I'm expecting it to either adjust, or disable kerning. Those displays you can detach the foot and attach a vesa adapter, and that will hook to a vesa arm or wall mount in any of the four standard rotations.
oookay, science done. Result: Apple fails!:P Sub-pixel kerning continues, but does not adjust for the new pixel orientation. pictures. That "W" is on the screen right side up. The two 0 deg show it with the display at 0 degrees. The display is then told to rotate 90 degrees, and an averaging picture (with pixie) is taken as well as another digital camera pic.
Look carefully at 90_deg_avg.png at the/\ part of the bottom of the W, visible on the right. Both the / and the \ are on the TRAILING edge of the pixel, which should cause them to have a blue tint, but one is red and one is blue, indicating incorrect SPK. If the W were on its side on the 0 degree picture, both of those edges would have a blue tint to them, a bit like you see on 0_deg_avg.png when you look at the right pocket on the upper left of the W, it's all blue. Or when you compare the right side of the leftmost / and the leftmost \ strokes, again they are both correctly blue despite being opposite slopes. I guess I have a bug to report;)
And I'd still like to hear from someone with deeper Windows OS experience that can comment on sub-pixel kerning support.
it renders fine if your OS is smart enough to do the sub-pixel kerning intelligently.
Do those exist?
Depends on the OS, and on the display. OS X does an incredible job, as long as it's familiar with the sub-pixel arrangement on the display. If you look at black text on a white background, it looks impossibly sharp. Take a VERY close look and you may notice a slight red tint on left edges and blue tint on right edges. That's the kerning at work. Black font on white background, is rendering the diagonals of the vector-based fonts on a sub-pixel level.
That works with any Apple display, and with many non-apple displays. (requires direct or DVI though I think, so it can identify the monitor, does not work over VGA) Unfortunately, the HP display I have hooked it to right now it's not aware of, so it renders "normally".:(
I don't have any of that specific experience with other operating systems such as Windows. Considering MS doesn't manufacture their own displays, they may have never decided to bother with it?
Meteors and ICMBs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) both travel on "ballistic" trajectories. I.E. when they're coming down, they don't change speed or course under their own power. This makes it very easy (relatively, for people that do it for a living) to track their point of origin. This would clearly be coming from space, not from another continent.
What interests me the most here is why wasn't this all over the news? We see posts about twice a year talking about the next "near miss" we're going to have. So what happened with this one? Didn't they catch it? Or did they catch it, realize it was going to hit, and decide not to tell anybody? It would be a lot more interesting to find out details on it being known, covered up, and an intercept attempted. (and possibly successfully)
Continuing on that tangent, hollywood tells us from Independence Day "and turn one dangerous falling object into many?" In other words, blowing it up doesn't immediately lower it's total combined mass, so is it a good idea or a bad idea? I suppose if you start with something massive enough to get through the atmosphere and hit dirt, if you have a chance to blow it up into say a dozen smaller pieces that have a good chance of burning up in the atmosphere, that'd be a good option. Even if you busted it up it up into say four smaller pieces, their surface area to mass ratio goes way up and the four that make it to the ground should have burned off more mass and impact with less energy than the original one would have.
But rather than trying to play an armchair quarterback, I'm just askin' the questions, I'll leave answering those questions to the "rocket scientists".
I got a "debranded" one ("famous maker") on sale recently. two actually, one and a spare, $80 ea. 23" 1080. they only weigh a few pounds, light enough to safely set on top of my closed laptop when i get home. Plug in ext cabled and go. No need for a tower.
They're probably a good deal cheaper nowadays. I bet you can find one like it for more like $60-65 nowadays.
I'm willing to bet the article isn't accurate, and the driver had Cerebral Palsy, not Epilepsy. Epileptics are banned from driving almost everywhere.
The house I am currently living in was hit by a packard at speed when an epileptic lied to get his license renewed. He seized half a block up the road, blew a stop sign, and came up onto the grass and hit my house whilst foaming at the mouth.
I know two people with CP that have moderately modified cars for driving.
I thought it was interesting that there were two paths that would do this, both of which are a reasonably likely response in a panic situation -- tap the button a zillion times, or try to mash it into the engine compartment.
I'd say those two cover the reaction of almost any panicking driver.
it's also because a momentary switch fails closed a lot more than open. If it fails closed, 4 seconds later the car shuts off, you don't even need to do anything. (getting the car started again will be a challenge for your dealership to figure out) If the contacts are getting intermittent, you can probably still manage a series of brief presses if you hammer it enough. So it actually covers ~95% of the possible failure path.
nah, they are probably playing the "Razor Scam". Sell you the main product for cheap, break-even, or even at-a-loss, then gouge you with the consumables it uses all the time, at a great markup. See also "printer ink cartridge scam".
So I'd expect the gadget itself to sell reasonable, but then these "pods" will go for $10 ea, and contain about a nickel's worth of hydrogen. And maybe a DRM chip to prevent you from refilling it.
A "solution good for the consumer" would be rechargeable pods, that you can simply fill to the line with water and then plug into the wall, where they split some water and generate some hydrogen to recharge themselves. (and either store the oxygen in the cell too, or maybe vent it outside, or pressurize some O2 cylinders you can sell back to your local airgas co?) Though they'd take awhile to recharge. I suppose it may generate O2 slowly enough to not be a hazard.
The only non-cheap part of the system is the membrane for the cell or the catalyst for the recharger.
Maybe I'm just being pessimistic about it. But I think the biggest challenge in fuel-cell technology right now is the big players in the market that will find serious new competition in fuel cells. Look at the rechargeable battery industry. When you threaten to dump a new product on the market with a much higher energy density and lower cost than the alternative they're offering, they tend to freak out. I haven't seen any public account of pressure and sabotage from those groups on fuel cell tech, but I'd expect it's happening, on a significant scale, even if out of the current public eye.
That reminds me, I recall reading a year or so ago that someone came up with a way to convert natural gas to H and 2O in the cell, and that made it powerable directly from natural gas. Imagine that, a computer that runs on a little cylinder like a 20gram CO2 from your pellet gun, full of natural gas. Fuel cells are cool. Wish we used them more.
He wanted a chance to convert Luke for his own purposes (overthrowing the Emperor and taking control) which may not have been possible had Luke been captured by ground troops.
I believe his motivation would be more of thinking he was the only one capable of catching a budding jedi. He'd much rather capture him than risk him escaping, or worse yet, be killed by an orbital bombardment.
Though one wonders why when he spots the Flacon taking off, why he doesn't radio the fleet above him, to capture the escaping ship at all cost. He just looks at it as it leaves, and is like... crap. and turns away. Like he's the only one that can lay a finger on Luke.
pera Turbo is a system where the browser basically hijacks you connection and routes it over an Opera-controlled server. It's that server that then obtains the website content for you and compresses it. It's the only way technically to accomplish that, at the price of essentially giving yourself a man-in-the-middle attack. It's not very funny
And when you live in a small village in africa and an hour of smartphone use could cost a day's pay, you get mighty thankful for that compression. These aren't the sorts of people that do online banking and are worried about MitM. Many of them are very happy to exchange email with friends and relatives in another village, and text compresses very nicely.
Just because it's not the right feature for you doesn't mean there isn't a significant sized group that really appreciates it.
When you see that drop in speed, and sigh and say "oh great now it's hit a slow spot, this is gonna take all morning" and walk away, will be about the time it pops back up to speed again, having just completed the only concentration of slow work.
trying to use a graph to estimate a folder copy is about as accurate as looking at a stock and trying to figure out when to sell. What you've seen in the past doesn't have to have any bearing on what's about to happen, or what lay ahead in general.
I've made quite a few progress bars in my time over the last 24 or so years of programming, and I've tackled this problem in a variety of ways.
There are two fundamental problems. (1) How much is there to do? and (2) how long does each of those things take to do?
(1) can't always be known. Sometimes it's impossible to even make an educated guess. That's what those "barberpole" bars are all about. "We really have no clue how long this is going to take."
(2) you'll usually at least have a guestimate on.
From there it's just very easy math, figuring out how much time has elapsed and what percentage of work has been done. Figuring out when to change from barberpole to a reasonably useful bar depends on when you figure you've done enough of the work to start getting accurate guesses on (2).
I think the problem that's causing people the frustration is when (1) isn't anywhere near expected. Maybe there's 15 subfolders in that folder, and you've already got 14 of them copied. The last one shouldn't take too long, right? Unless it's the folder with the raw video in it. And in that case you may be stuck at "about a minute remaining" for the next hour.
The only way to prevent that is to do a more thorough investigation of the amount of work to do. (if possible... and sometimes it's just plain not possible) When you drag and drop a folder on a mac to start a copy, you'll get a "preparing to copy...". And that's what it's doing. It's building a complete list of Things To Do. Once the copy gets started, it will almost immediately give you an accurate estimate. But the penalty is you had to wait for it to start. Sometimes I don't want to wait for it to count how many 4k files are in that huge node tree and just get started and I will use ditto instead of Finder. It may get done with the copy before Finder has even started.
Windows seems to take the other approach for file copies, and that's what's earned it that notorious "about a minute remaining" for an hour reputation. But the file copies start immediately, no time is wasted. So in the end, it copies faster.
So, pick your poison. Do you want it done as fast as possible, or keep you better informed? You can't have all of both. You can have one, the other, or a compromise.
As for the bars themselves... a script I wrote at work that gets a lot of use is my disk cloner. It does a file copy using ditto, which provides NO estimates, but is very fast. I could simply wait for it to get going, and then simply do the work/time estimate. But I found that wasn't accurate. It takes a lot longer to copy 100mb worth of 40k files than to copy one 100mb file. So what I ended up doing is displaying two progresses. One goes on an estimate of how long it's taken from start to now, divided by amount copied so far. The other considers only the amount done in the last ten seconds. The two numbers tend to bounce around a bit. It's not a bar, both display time to complete (15 minutes left) as well as an estimated time of completion (4:25 pm)
Sometimes they are pretty close. Sometimes not. When it runs into a folder of tiny files, the windowed estimate gets longer, and when it hits big files, it gets shorter. It bounces around quite a bit. The overall estimate is a lot more stable. It's been my observation that the windowed estimate is more accurate at the start of the copy, and the overall estimate is more accurate in the middle. Near the end, the windowed time is more accurate. So, the person running the script can place their expectations wherever they want to.
I considered displaying an average of the two estimates instead. It would simplify things for the users. That may be the best way to go. When a customer calls and wants to know when it will be done, we usually say it will be between the low estimate and the high estimate, whichever is which. (either could be the current low estimate)
The final problem is when there are several discre
Macro viruses were annoying also. For awhile Word/Excel gave you only one check box in security prefs, to pop a dialog when a document contained macros. (you could not disable them, only turn on the dialog)
Then when the user opened a doc with a macro (or more often, a virus) it would pop and give just TWO options... (A) open and run macros, or (B) do not open.
Gotta love microsoft for that one. Took them insane ages to add the (C) Open with macros disabled. Until then we had to deal with the "but I HAD to open it" people. But then I could continue to bash on them for not having a "flush macros" button anywhere, and the ability to create a "hidden" macro, and every macro virus creator's all-time-favorites, the "run on open" and "copy macro to other closed document" options. But that's drifting somewhat OT.
Sometimes you get people who only care about getting their job done. I had to deal with a couple that flat out told me they didn't care if it had a virus in it or not, they needed to open it, and come hell or high water, they were going to open it. Sort of a "reports are my job, dealing with viruses is your job" kind of attitude.
And then the virus traffic detection tags the machine and tells the switch to turn off her port and we get lots of waaaaah.
"You have the latest flash virus. Have you opened any Word documents lately?"
"Of course! I use Word all day."
(scans hdd, finds the one in email that started it)
"Did you open this?"
"Of course I did. It's the weekly report."
"Didn't it WARN you there may be a virus?"
"Yes it opened up a box I hadn't seen before. But I needed to see the report, so I clicked the Open Anyway button."
"Didn't you get the memo last week about not clicking Open Anyway?"
"Of course I read the memo. But I need to read that report. I had to open it."
aaaand this is why this doesn't work anywhere near as well as Adobe says it will. No matter how many times you tell them to call you and NOT open it anyway, they still will. And you'll be at her desk again. Maybe later today even. Because she opened it anyway, because she "had to". (speaking from experience here)
The only reasonably effective way to implement this is with a policy that is system-wide, that allows administrators to disable the Open Anyway button for the users that can't be trusted with it. (which will be most of them)
It's a matter of priorities. If you're lost in the wilderness, you work on obtaining (1) shelter, (2) water, and (3) food. in that order. It doesn't do you any good to have a good food and water supply if you freeze to death.
If you want a resume bullet or experience, that's what workstudy and unpaid apprenticeships are for. This was supposed to be offering financial reward. And I'm sure it also factored in the bullets, but I think they assigned the bullets too much value.
I think if I was on a big project and found someone that gave me a way to save at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in my budget, they'd get a lot more than 6k and a handshake. More like 20k and a job offer.
Can they not use lower power wifi so that their signal does not extend that far beyond the school? Typically in these cases we have more than 1 AP connected together but all of them with lower transmit power so that the signal does not go far.
If conditions are right, I can have a contact with someone on CW running 5 watts, on the other side of the globe.
Such is the sensitivity of tuned circuits. For untuned interference, like your cell phone trying to interfere with your TV, rejection is great. But when you're specifically tuned to receive a frequency, you've got such a high sensitivity to that specific frequency, (and very high rejection of any other frequencies) that a cricket fart of a signal a long ways away can sound like a lightning strike on your house, if it's on the same frequency you're straining to hear.
They're a little better off than my CW example, being on a high frequency that's mainly line-of-sight, for which surrounding mountains would be a pretty effective shield, but still their receivers are just incredibly sensitive at their design frequencies. They just can't have anything anywhere near them or you will be all they can hear. It'd be like trying to listen to someone talking to you from a table at the other end of the restaurant, while you are seated right next to a table full of loud party animals. You'd have no chance.
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They don't like it because you have to run an update twice a week to keep up with the latest exploits found in flash and java. IF oracle/adobe were generous enough to roll up an update this week for the new exploits.
And the boneheads at oracle kept insisting on rolling up whole new installers most of the time, that would only work if you had the previous version installed. (installer or updater make up your mind!) So you'd install vers 10, then 11, then 12, then 12.1, then 13, then 14, most of which were 55-56mb each. Idiots. Java needs to die in a fire. And I'll bring the marshmallows.
It's not entirely oracle and adobe's fault though really... they're just keeping it up because devs keep using it. I'll admit it, writing games in flash (or java) is pretty quick and easy. But quick-n-easy comes at a price, a price to the users
Trojan != Virus for the love of god trolls, please learn this. I am sooo tired of hearing trojans being called viruses. They're both "malware", but that's where it ends.
Anyway, this is why Apple is getting really sick and tired of Flash and Java, they've been the top two security thorns in their side for the last decade. Feeding the Apple bashers and giving Apple a bad rap. Apple doesn't write the flash or java interpreters, they don't have much control over the code monkeys at oracle and adobe.
with those settings, interactive passwords will be disabled but not tunneled. pam must be disabled to prevent tunneled passwords.
you sure you don't have PAM on? it's enabled by default on some systems, and gives them a different way to provide a password.
From looking at the logs though, it was always the same way here. (before I moved ports) Trying a very limited number of specific usernames and passwords. (looking for common services like www and daemon, as well as common usernames like admin and john) On the other hand, if they really are trying to brute-forcing you, you're being specifically targeted and should review your security immediately.
what's an easy way to set up port knocking?
I probably should have been clearer. I mean image mirroring, not display mirroring. As in horizontal or vertical reflection of the image on the same display, not copying the image to a second display.
Like if you want to project onto an opaque screen from the back, so the audience sees it correctly from the front. You need to mirror horizontally otherwise the audience would see the image backward.
OS X has a standard option in display preferences to rotate the display 90, 180, or 270 degrees. (no special software to install, that might come with a rotatable display, for windows os) It doesn't offer mirroring though, I was rather expecting to see that option. The rotation option is only available for external displays, not built-in. (imac and laptop) So you can rotate as long as you can find a way to physically rotate your display. (OS X does offer Negative however, which may have its uses on a projector)
I need to test on an Apple display to verify that it adjusts the sub-pixel kerning correctly when rotated. I'm expecting it to either adjust, or disable kerning. Those displays you can detach the foot and attach a vesa adapter, and that will hook to a vesa arm or wall mount in any of the four standard rotations.
oookay, science done. Result: Apple fails! :P Sub-pixel kerning continues, but does not adjust for the new pixel orientation. pictures. That "W" is on the screen right side up. The two 0 deg show it with the display at 0 degrees. The display is then told to rotate 90 degrees, and an averaging picture (with pixie) is taken as well as another digital camera pic.
Look carefully at 90_deg_avg.png at the /\ part of the bottom of the W, visible on the right. Both the / and the \ are on the TRAILING edge of the pixel, which should cause them to have a blue tint, but one is red and one is blue, indicating incorrect SPK. If the W were on its side on the 0 degree picture, both of those edges would have a blue tint to them, a bit like you see on 0_deg_avg.png when you look at the right pocket on the upper left of the W, it's all blue. Or when you compare the right side of the leftmost / and the leftmost \ strokes, again they are both correctly blue despite being opposite slopes. I guess I have a bug to report ;)
And I'd still like to hear from someone with deeper Windows OS experience that can comment on sub-pixel kerning support.
Depends on the OS, and on the display. OS X does an incredible job, as long as it's familiar with the sub-pixel arrangement on the display. If you look at black text on a white background, it looks impossibly sharp. Take a VERY close look and you may notice a slight red tint on left edges and blue tint on right edges. That's the kerning at work. Black font on white background, is rendering the diagonals of the vector-based fonts on a sub-pixel level.
That works with any Apple display, and with many non-apple displays. (requires direct or DVI though I think, so it can identify the monitor, does not work over VGA) Unfortunately, the HP display I have hooked it to right now it's not aware of, so it renders "normally". :(
I don't have any of that specific experience with other operating systems such as Windows. Considering MS doesn't manufacture their own displays, they may have never decided to bother with it?
Meteors and ICMBs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) both travel on "ballistic" trajectories. I.E. when they're coming down, they don't change speed or course under their own power. This makes it very easy (relatively, for people that do it for a living) to track their point of origin. This would clearly be coming from space, not from another continent.
What interests me the most here is why wasn't this all over the news? We see posts about twice a year talking about the next "near miss" we're going to have. So what happened with this one? Didn't they catch it? Or did they catch it, realize it was going to hit, and decide not to tell anybody? It would be a lot more interesting to find out details on it being known, covered up, and an intercept attempted. (and possibly successfully)
Continuing on that tangent, hollywood tells us from Independence Day "and turn one dangerous falling object into many?" In other words, blowing it up doesn't immediately lower it's total combined mass, so is it a good idea or a bad idea? I suppose if you start with something massive enough to get through the atmosphere and hit dirt, if you have a chance to blow it up into say a dozen smaller pieces that have a good chance of burning up in the atmosphere, that'd be a good option. Even if you busted it up it up into say four smaller pieces, their surface area to mass ratio goes way up and the four that make it to the ground should have burned off more mass and impact with less energy than the original one would have.
But rather than trying to play an armchair quarterback, I'm just askin' the questions, I'll leave answering those questions to the "rocket scientists".
I got a "debranded" one ("famous maker") on sale recently. two actually, one and a spare, $80 ea. 23" 1080. they only weigh a few pounds, light enough to safely set on top of my closed laptop when i get home. Plug in ext cabled and go. No need for a tower.
They're probably a good deal cheaper nowadays. I bet you can find one like it for more like $60-65 nowadays.
it renders fine if your OS is smart enough to do the sub-pixel kerning intelligently.
I'm willing to bet the article isn't accurate, and the driver had Cerebral Palsy, not Epilepsy. Epileptics are banned from driving almost everywhere.
The house I am currently living in was hit by a packard at speed when an epileptic lied to get his license renewed. He seized half a block up the road, blew a stop sign, and came up onto the grass and hit my house whilst foaming at the mouth.
I know two people with CP that have moderately modified cars for driving.
I'd say those two cover the reaction of almost any panicking driver.
it's also because a momentary switch fails closed a lot more than open. If it fails closed, 4 seconds later the car shuts off, you don't even need to do anything. (getting the car started again will be a challenge for your dealership to figure out) If the contacts are getting intermittent, you can probably still manage a series of brief presses if you hammer it enough. So it actually covers ~95% of the possible failure path.
nah, they are probably playing the "Razor Scam". Sell you the main product for cheap, break-even, or even at-a-loss, then gouge you with the consumables it uses all the time, at a great markup. See also "printer ink cartridge scam".
So I'd expect the gadget itself to sell reasonable, but then these "pods" will go for $10 ea, and contain about a nickel's worth of hydrogen. And maybe a DRM chip to prevent you from refilling it.
A "solution good for the consumer" would be rechargeable pods, that you can simply fill to the line with water and then plug into the wall, where they split some water and generate some hydrogen to recharge themselves. (and either store the oxygen in the cell too, or maybe vent it outside, or pressurize some O2 cylinders you can sell back to your local airgas co?) Though they'd take awhile to recharge. I suppose it may generate O2 slowly enough to not be a hazard.
The only non-cheap part of the system is the membrane for the cell or the catalyst for the recharger.
Maybe I'm just being pessimistic about it. But I think the biggest challenge in fuel-cell technology right now is the big players in the market that will find serious new competition in fuel cells. Look at the rechargeable battery industry. When you threaten to dump a new product on the market with a much higher energy density and lower cost than the alternative they're offering, they tend to freak out. I haven't seen any public account of pressure and sabotage from those groups on fuel cell tech, but I'd expect it's happening, on a significant scale, even if out of the current public eye.
That reminds me, I recall reading a year or so ago that someone came up with a way to convert natural gas to H and 2O in the cell, and that made it powerable directly from natural gas. Imagine that, a computer that runs on a little cylinder like a 20gram CO2 from your pellet gun, full of natural gas. Fuel cells are cool. Wish we used them more.
I believe his motivation would be more of thinking he was the only one capable of catching a budding jedi. He'd much rather capture him than risk him escaping, or worse yet, be killed by an orbital bombardment.
Though one wonders why when he spots the Flacon taking off, why he doesn't radio the fleet above him, to capture the escaping ship at all cost. He just looks at it as it leaves, and is like... crap. and turns away. Like he's the only one that can lay a finger on Luke.
And when you live in a small village in africa and an hour of smartphone use could cost a day's pay, you get mighty thankful for that compression. These aren't the sorts of people that do online banking and are worried about MitM. Many of them are very happy to exchange email with friends and relatives in another village, and text compresses very nicely.
Just because it's not the right feature for you doesn't mean there isn't a significant sized group that really appreciates it.
When you see that drop in speed, and sigh and say "oh great now it's hit a slow spot, this is gonna take all morning" and walk away, will be about the time it pops back up to speed again, having just completed the only concentration of slow work.
trying to use a graph to estimate a folder copy is about as accurate as looking at a stock and trying to figure out when to sell. What you've seen in the past doesn't have to have any bearing on what's about to happen, or what lay ahead in general.
I've made quite a few progress bars in my time over the last 24 or so years of programming, and I've tackled this problem in a variety of ways.
There are two fundamental problems. (1) How much is there to do? and (2) how long does each of those things take to do?
(1) can't always be known. Sometimes it's impossible to even make an educated guess. That's what those "barberpole" bars are all about. "We really have no clue how long this is going to take."
(2) you'll usually at least have a guestimate on.
From there it's just very easy math, figuring out how much time has elapsed and what percentage of work has been done. Figuring out when to change from barberpole to a reasonably useful bar depends on when you figure you've done enough of the work to start getting accurate guesses on (2).
I think the problem that's causing people the frustration is when (1) isn't anywhere near expected. Maybe there's 15 subfolders in that folder, and you've already got 14 of them copied. The last one shouldn't take too long, right? Unless it's the folder with the raw video in it. And in that case you may be stuck at "about a minute remaining" for the next hour.
The only way to prevent that is to do a more thorough investigation of the amount of work to do. (if possible... and sometimes it's just plain not possible) When you drag and drop a folder on a mac to start a copy, you'll get a "preparing to copy...". And that's what it's doing. It's building a complete list of Things To Do. Once the copy gets started, it will almost immediately give you an accurate estimate. But the penalty is you had to wait for it to start. Sometimes I don't want to wait for it to count how many 4k files are in that huge node tree and just get started and I will use ditto instead of Finder. It may get done with the copy before Finder has even started.
Windows seems to take the other approach for file copies, and that's what's earned it that notorious "about a minute remaining" for an hour reputation. But the file copies start immediately, no time is wasted. So in the end, it copies faster.
So, pick your poison. Do you want it done as fast as possible, or keep you better informed? You can't have all of both. You can have one, the other, or a compromise.
As for the bars themselves... a script I wrote at work that gets a lot of use is my disk cloner. It does a file copy using ditto, which provides NO estimates, but is very fast. I could simply wait for it to get going, and then simply do the work/time estimate. But I found that wasn't accurate. It takes a lot longer to copy 100mb worth of 40k files than to copy one 100mb file. So what I ended up doing is displaying two progresses. One goes on an estimate of how long it's taken from start to now, divided by amount copied so far. The other considers only the amount done in the last ten seconds. The two numbers tend to bounce around a bit. It's not a bar, both display time to complete (15 minutes left) as well as an estimated time of completion (4:25 pm)
Sometimes they are pretty close. Sometimes not. When it runs into a folder of tiny files, the windowed estimate gets longer, and when it hits big files, it gets shorter. It bounces around quite a bit. The overall estimate is a lot more stable. It's been my observation that the windowed estimate is more accurate at the start of the copy, and the overall estimate is more accurate in the middle. Near the end, the windowed time is more accurate. So, the person running the script can place their expectations wherever they want to.
I considered displaying an average of the two estimates instead. It would simplify things for the users. That may be the best way to go. When a customer calls and wants to know when it will be done, we usually say it will be between the low estimate and the high estimate, whichever is which. (either could be the current low estimate)
The final problem is when there are several discre
Deal with psychopaths much do you? It's not healthy to have that many cope-links on hotkey.
I dunno, that might be NSFW ?
Macro viruses were annoying also. For awhile Word/Excel gave you only one check box in security prefs, to pop a dialog when a document contained macros. (you could not disable them, only turn on the dialog)
Then when the user opened a doc with a macro (or more often, a virus) it would pop and give just TWO options... (A) open and run macros, or (B) do not open.
Gotta love microsoft for that one. Took them insane ages to add the (C) Open with macros disabled. Until then we had to deal with the "but I HAD to open it" people. But then I could continue to bash on them for not having a "flush macros" button anywhere, and the ability to create a "hidden" macro, and every macro virus creator's all-time-favorites, the "run on open" and "copy macro to other closed document" options. But that's drifting somewhat OT.
Sometimes you get people who only care about getting their job done. I had to deal with a couple that flat out told me they didn't care if it had a virus in it or not, they needed to open it, and come hell or high water, they were going to open it. Sort of a "reports are my job, dealing with viruses is your job" kind of attitude.
And then the virus traffic detection tags the machine and tells the switch to turn off her port and we get lots of waaaaah.
"So what's wrong with it?"
"You have the latest flash virus. Have you opened any Word documents lately?"
"Of course! I use Word all day."
(scans hdd, finds the one in email that started it)
"Did you open this?"
"Of course I did. It's the weekly report."
"Didn't it WARN you there may be a virus?"
"Yes it opened up a box I hadn't seen before. But I needed to see the report, so I clicked the Open Anyway button."
"Didn't you get the memo last week about not clicking Open Anyway?"
"Of course I read the memo. But I need to read that report. I had to open it."
aaaand this is why this doesn't work anywhere near as well as Adobe says it will. No matter how many times you tell them to call you and NOT open it anyway, they still will. And you'll be at her desk again. Maybe later today even. Because she opened it anyway, because she "had to". (speaking from experience here)
The only reasonably effective way to implement this is with a policy that is system-wide, that allows administrators to disable the Open Anyway button for the users that can't be trusted with it. (which will be most of them)
It's a matter of priorities. If you're lost in the wilderness, you work on obtaining (1) shelter, (2) water, and (3) food. in that order. It doesn't do you any good to have a good food and water supply if you freeze to death.
If you want a resume bullet or experience, that's what workstudy and unpaid apprenticeships are for. This was supposed to be offering financial reward. And I'm sure it also factored in the bullets, but I think they assigned the bullets too much value.
I think if I was on a big project and found someone that gave me a way to save at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in my budget, they'd get a lot more than 6k and a handshake. More like 20k and a job offer.
If conditions are right, I can have a contact with someone on CW running 5 watts, on the other side of the globe.
Such is the sensitivity of tuned circuits. For untuned interference, like your cell phone trying to interfere with your TV, rejection is great. But when you're specifically tuned to receive a frequency, you've got such a high sensitivity to that specific frequency, (and very high rejection of any other frequencies) that a cricket fart of a signal a long ways away can sound like a lightning strike on your house, if it's on the same frequency you're straining to hear.
They're a little better off than my CW example, being on a high frequency that's mainly line-of-sight, for which surrounding mountains would be a pretty effective shield, but still their receivers are just incredibly sensitive at their design frequencies. They just can't have anything anywhere near them or you will be all they can hear. It'd be like trying to listen to someone talking to you from a table at the other end of the restaurant, while you are seated right next to a table full of loud party animals. You'd have no chance.