This golden oldie has some dust on it. Looking for an appraisal.

The Picard Maneuver@startrek.website to Antique Memes Roadshow@lemmy.world – 913 points –
49

I used to (and sometimes still do) use the mouse cursor rather than my finger

I don't remember the last time I saw a big ol' loading bar, honestly. Maybe a small one in steam?

SSDs have made it a rarity for me.

Downloads. SSD doesn't help much there.

But then you get a download rate and watching the bar is pointless

I've had ones that don't show a rate, and it's maddening. Usually something like downloading an MMO through a launcher.

Brew and yum and apt do this in ascii.

EDIT I don’t know about Pacman. I don’t use arch.

I literally used this method while stuck in the Ticketmaster queue for Taylor Swift tickets.

The meme leaves out the part where the progress bar starts over again, completes, starts over, completes, repeating ad nauseam, rendering the progress bar element completely devoid of meaningful information.

But that model is filled with exactly the information the comic guy is looking for. Things are still running

Microsoft are so bad at showing progress.

You know after saying it out loud Windows 11 makes sense now.

This is a joke: Fun thing: players don’t trust a smooth loading bar. The stutters and pauses show you that the load is ‘biting’. I’ve worked on games where we artificially faked it.

Article: the above is not a joke

I once worked on an infrastructure-critical financial application, that was super time sensitive as in, when the user clicked "calculate", it was critical the they got the results back ASAP.

We worked really hard to ensure that the app would work 100% of the time, as well as that the underlying infrastructure would leave plenty of headroom to be able to a ridiculous amount of queries at once, and still return the correct result in less than 100 ms 95% of the time.

Then, we were asked to artificially insert a 3-5 second sleep function, because focus groups revealed that people had a hard time trusting results that appeared faster than that...

Although, later on, we discovered that, instead of doing the calculations all at once, we could show the user the intermediary results as he was typing in the information. Then when he had typed in the last number, the fact that the result was already on screen would be less jarring, not to mention he could double check the math as he went along.

I obsessively pick words above/under the bar to compare against.

I used to put the nose over and walk away. Nowadays I take a screenshot Ctrl+win+s

Second row has left hand, but third row has right hand. Don't know why I noticed that, but I did.

His hand is flipped, with the nail towards the screen, because he is an inhuman degenerate.

It's still useful just to make sure it didn't freeze.

What other lies have we been fed?!

The second player controller isn't actually connected to anything.

If it makes you feel any better the reason is that building a loading bar that matches your intuition is a superhuman task. It's much much easier to simply fake it and the program will finish whenever it finishes

3 more...

Hahaha, I haven't seen this meme before but I did this yesterday.