I love how he quotes that paper, and yet the paper concludes: "Although our results could be used to enhance progress bars system-wide, there are many cases wh

I love how he quotes that paper, and yet the paper concludes: "Although our results could be used to enhance progress bars system-wide, there are many cases where modifying progress behavior seems inappropriate. In general, processes with known static completion conditions and stable progress are not good candidates – standard progress bars can visualize these effectively and accurately. In addition, these types of processes tend to be less affected by pauses or other negative progress behavior (sufficiently so that they are frequently accompanied by accurate time estimates). Examples of this type of process include copying a file to disk..." Although I'm more inclined to think the paper is wrong about file copies rather than Atwood.