What's up with the new spinning ASCII art in Microsoft installers?

(from http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ all of Star Wars as animated ASCII art)

Ok, well, not quite as bad as that <g>, but you've seen it:

| / - \ | / - \ |

When it cycles like that, it looks like a rotating line, straight out of DOS or our old VT100/220 terminal days.

I think the problem they're trying to solve is the progress bar will sit at zero forever while *something* happens. While the art is sort of old-school cute, I would prefer they fix the progress bar logic instead :)

The problem, which is by no means unique to Microsoft, is that installers often show progress by steps within the installer rather than some temporal measurement. The moving gloss/highlight on the progress bar in Vista is supposed to help show that something is still happening, but that's not always reliable these days, and (as far as I know) nothing shows in XP.

Back in the early VB days and Access, we used to do the half-scale progress bars. Set up a timer, then go to 50% complete, then 50% of the remaining time and 50% of that and so on until you hard coded 100% when your code was done. Not saying that’s any better…

Maybe progress bars need to go and be replaced by some other measurement of completeness of a process. Ideas?

Or, if ASCII art is the trend, I’ll go back to the enormous usenet .sig I had in college ;)