Estimating/forecasting download completion time

Question

We\'ve all poked fun at the \'X minutes remaining\' dialog which seems to be too simplistic, but how can we improve it?

Effectively, the input is the set of downloa

Answer 1

I've considered this off and on, myself. I the answer starts with being conservative when computing the current (and thus, future) transfer rate, and includes averaging over longer periods, to get more stable estimates. Perhaps low-pass filtering the time that is displayed, so that one doesn't get jumps between 2 minutes and 2 days.

I don't think a confidence interval is going to be helpful. Most people wouldn't be able to interpret it, and it would just be displaying more stuff that is a guess.