You're happy until 30 minutes later when the progress bar is still getting asymptotically closer to the end, and you come to suspect that the only thing that didn't crash was the progress bar.

>when the progress bar is still getting asymptotically closer to the end

That, my friend, is an impressive command of the English language.

Thank you for teaching me the word asymptotically! [0]

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/asymptotically

I think most people that have done a CS degree would at least know the word. My cs101 class talked about asymptotic notation.

Not CS but any study of limits in math, perhaps with differential equations. And it’s a useful term generally, much more likely to come up in conversation than “subtrahend” or “mantissa” but not nearly as much as “tangent.”

And that must be why I have yet to hear it, as I never took CS.

At least it didn't say "orthagonal". Don't know why, but that word pops up here way too often.

I am reminded of a webcomic, that i fail to locate at this moment, that reminded me of the practice of placing something next to a progress bar, like say during a Windows 95 install, to check if anything is actually happening.

This is the comic you're thinking of. http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/02/19/when-i-install-a-so... This was one of the comics that convinced me to add them to my RSS feed. I have not been disappointed since.

It's a blank page that says "Loading..." Is that the joke...?

edit: I started browsing around their site, and when I returned to that page via the back button, the actual comic was there.

I removed them from same recently because I felt I could no longer relate to the jokes, or some such.

That's so brilliant because it was true. (Nailed it, pixel perfect)

I do that whenever I have to wait on a progress bar. I zoom in with whatever accessibility options there are, then when a pixel is 3-5mm I put my mouse cursor at the end of the bar and wait.

I don't use the zoom, but yeah, parking the cursor right at the progress bar to see if it's advanced is useful if only to amuse myself. :)

Wow, I thought I was the only one.

To save time in the future, bear in mind any time you think you are the only person that does or notices something: you aren't. This is due to the fact that people are all running on the same physical architecture, with very similar cultural and social ecosystems, plus the law of large numbers. Note that this does not apply to edge cases such as people engaged in activities or domains with a very small number of participants...

Classic!