Unfortunately, he's not the only one who has forgotten that.

These days the minute you are accused of anything, you're automatically guilty.

Now I have to like Twitter :(

Unless they are able to discover Extension Cord Technology!

That would be Sega actually...

Time Traveler

Sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree.

New Software does not make a new machine. Software simply changes the state that the existing machine is in, and only does so while it's running. The machine itself doesn't change. You turn the machine off, then back on, you're back at a known state. Run some software, the state changes.

In addition to that, what is it going to do with an already over stressed Air Traffic Control system?

In addition to that, it opens the door to a lot of customers that they would have never had before. As a small business, I can afford $50/month a lot easier then I can to plunk down $1,500 - $2, 500 at one time.

I know bad form to reply to your own posts...

here is a ton of games that shock the player:

http://www.electricshock.org/electric-shock-games.html

http://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Reaction-Reloaded-Shocking-Game/dp/B0006B2Q50

How is this "but with a different model from the manistream media companies"?

How is this:

Amazon, instead, has created 14 pilot shows, and is letting a cross section of customers in the U.S., UK, and Germany react to them to see which shows might be worth making more of.

different then this:

Every spring, traditional TV networks like ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox order dozens of pilots and show them to focus groups. Executives pick just a handful to make into series.

They both make pilots and show them to groups of people who provide feed back, and based on that feedback the people producing the TV shows decide which ones continue.

So again, how is Amazon doing it differently? Looks exactly the same to me.

Did you make it to Zapcon? (http://www.zapcon.com>)?

Definition of ASKANCE

1: with a side-glance : obliquely

2: with disapproval or distrust : scornfully

Guess that's the word of the day...

Well, they are not pointless. They let the user know "Something is happening, but I have no idea when it's going to be done.". If you don't do something like that, then the user thinks your app has locked up and they kill the application. It's called "User feedback".

Now on to the original theme of the story....

Progress bars shouldn't be based on time, they should be based on quantity of work. Typically when they do the marquee style of progress bar (where it just show animations, but no actual progress), it means the quantity is unknown. This happens in a lot of situations where the total number of steps to be processed is unknown due to the data, or the amount of time it would take to calculate the total number of items would take too long.

Progress bars should also be a different subject then Time Estimates as they are not the same. I have 100 things to process, so my progress is between 1 and 100. How long that takes depends entirely upon what I am processing. If I'm processing Invoices say, then how long it takes depends a lot on what is involved with the invoice (line items, calculations, other look ups).

Just because it took 10 seconds to process the last one doesn't mean it's going to take 10 seconds to process the next one. In order to determine how much time is left, what most people do is take the quantity left and multiply that by the average time it's taken so far. You could apply smoothing to the average (so it doesn't jump around a lot), but other then that, how else would you estimate the time? If the amount of time it takes to process items is fairly even, your estimate will be very accurate, if they are vastly different between items, then your estimate is going to jump all over the place and be wildly inaccurate.

Please define:

Better
Faster

As they have completely different meanings depending on context and what goals you have as a developer.

Seriously doubt that. The Atari ST has Calamus Desktop Publishing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamus_(DTP)). It was a fantastic DTP software way ahead of it's time.

What killed Atari is a lot of different things.

The ones that stick in my mind are

1) Not listening to it's customers
2) Slow to come out with new products, and when they did, they were minor upgrades to older products.
3) Lack of Marketing