Something Kelly Jeanne said today made me remember a screenshot that's been sitting on my desktop for three months.

I like to collect obviously stupid messages from software. Here's one I saw when I was transferring some mp3's from one hard disk to another:



I don't have so many mp3 files that it should take a year to copy them between two hard drives in the same computer.

Nearly all time estimates of file copies and transfers I've seen in Windows programs are wrong, sometimes absurdly so.

The file copy progress dialog in the Finder in Mac OS 8 (and maybe 9 and X; haven't dealt with those so much) is a wonderful example of how to do it right. That dialog was always really accurate and provided genuinely useful information.

Mac OS X makes me want a Macintosh again. Since I do all my work with ssh, cvs, and a web browser these days, I could probably make the switch without much fuss, assuming I could get a suitable VPN client to work and there's a usable version of Quicken there. And maybe I'd see less stupid software messages? Something to think about...