{"id":3551,"date":"2012-02-01T20:23:41","date_gmt":"2012-02-01T10:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=3551"},"modified":"2012-02-01T20:23:41","modified_gmt":"2012-02-01T10:23:41","slug":"aside-indeterminate-measurements-and-false-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2012\/02\/01\/aside-indeterminate-measurements-and-false-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"Aside \u2013 Indeterminate measurements and false hope"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Percentage-Complete1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3557\" title=\"Percentage Complete\" src=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Percentage-Complete1.jpg\" alt=\"Percentage Complete\" width=\"508\" height=\"131\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Percentage-Complete1.jpg 508w, https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Percentage-Complete1-300x77.jpg 300w, https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Percentage-Complete1-500x128.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 508px) 100vw, 508px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to suggest that we should specify that &#8220;percentage complete&#8221; estimates \u2013 be they progress bars or sliders or any other representation, visual or textual, need a defined unit of measurement to them.<\/p>\n<p>And we should define that unit of measurement as a <em>maybe<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>That is, if a piece of software reports that it is 98% complete at something, that&#8217;s 98 maybes out of a 100.<\/p>\n<p>I perhaps, should mention, that I&#8217;m not thinking of NetWorker when I make this case. Indeed, it&#8217;s actually springing from spending 4+ hours one day monitoring a backup job from one of NetWorker&#8217;s competitors. A backup job that for the entire duration was at &#8230; 99% complete.<\/p>\n<p>You see, in a lot of software, progress indicators just aren&#8217;t accurate. This lead to the term &#8220;Microsoft minute&#8221;, for instance, to describe the interminable reality bending specification of time remaining on file copies in Microsoft operating systems. Equally we can say the same thing of software installers; an installer may report that it&#8217;s 95% complete with 1 minute remaining for anywhere between 15 seconds and 2 hours \u2013 or more. It&#8217;s not just difficult to give an upper ceiling, it&#8217;s indeterminate.<\/p>\n<p>I believe that software which can&#8217;t measure its progress with sufficient accuracy shouldn&#8217;t give an actual percentage complete status or time to complete status without explicitly stating it as being an <em>estimate<\/em>. To fail to do so is an act of deceit to the user.<\/p>\n<p>I would also argue that <em>no software<\/em>\u00a0can\u00a0measure its process with sufficient accuracy, and thus <em>all<\/em>\u00a0software should provide completion status as an <em>estimate<\/em>\u00a0rather than a hard fact. After all:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Software cannot guarantee against making a blocking IO call<\/li>\n<li>Software cannot guarantee that the operating system will not take resources away from it<\/li>\n<li>Software cannot guarantee that a physical fault will not take resources away from it<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In a real-time and fault-tolerant system, there is a much higher degree of potential accuracy. Outside of that \u2013 in regular software (commercial or enterprise), and on regular hardware\/operating systems, the potential for interruption (and therefore, inaccuracy) is too great.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t personally think it&#8217;s going to hurt interface designers to clearly state whenever a completion estimate is given that it&#8217;s an estimate. Of course, some users won&#8217;t necessarily notice it, and others will ignore it &#8211; but by blatantly saying it, they&#8217;re not implicitly raising false hope by citing an indeterminate measurement as accurate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;d like to suggest that we should specify that &#8220;percentage complete&#8221; estimates \u2013 be they progress bars or sliders or&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,12,13],"tags":[729],"class_list":["post-3551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aside","category-general-technology","category-general-thoughts","tag-percentage-complete"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-Vh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}