You don't always get an experience point when somebody upvotes your posts - see Voting/Experience System for more details

On the subject of software that lies. I just elected to decompress an NTFS drive. I deselected the "compress this drive" option and clicked "apply". The pop-up progress window tells me "About 39703 days and 4 hrs remaining".

In the time it took to type this response to this point (circa 25 seconds), that figure reduced to "About 39652 days and 0 hrs remaining".

What is your best estimate of how long this process will really take?

What is your best estimate of how long this process will really take?

19398 seconds :)

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $first = 39703 * 86400 + 4 * 3600;
my $second = 39652 * 86400;
my $diff = 25;
my $rate = ($first - $second) / $diff;
my $estimated_duration = int($first / $rate);
my $estimated_finish_time = scalar localtime(time + $estimated_duratio
+n);

print "Estimated duration: $estimated_duration seconds\n";
print "Estimated finish time: $estimated_finish_time (if we start now)
+\n";
[download]

$ perl buk.pl 
Estimated duration: 19398 seconds
Estimated finish time: Tue Dec 29 16:22:14 2009 (if we start now)
[download]

*chuckles* Speaking of software that lies...

points at http://www.xkcd.com/612/

--
Tommy

Nice try

See you Tuesday 16:22:14 McDarren you'll have to wait till then your ++ or -- !

My guess is that it's already finished!

....then let it go ..... :-).... maybe this was all a clever plot to aggravate you at Christmas.. :-)

Maybe it was my clever plot to see who would respond, And how :)

... anything with the word impossible in it, attracts me like a moth to the candle.... :-)..... merry christmas

---

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku

From Voting/Experience System:

The authors of the nodes receive a certain random amount of XP based on the vote

and:

25% chance of gaining 1 XP every time you vote on a node

among others...

I've sometimes seen it happen that I've gotten 1 vote but gained 2 XP. I've noticed this at times that I've kept a close eye on noderep xml ticker. I used to think that what I was seeing was actually 3 votes—2 up and 1 down—which would show as delta 1 vote up but, with some help from rand, wound up being delta 2 XP.

More recently I've decided that the XP calculations are fuzzy. This is just another reason to ignore them. Would it be possible to have the XP Nodelet tell me how many votes I have but not my changes in XP? That would be nice.

Yes.

Within the last year (IIRC), I made it into the saints list, so yes, it is possible to make it into the saints list.

--MidLifeXis