I run BOINC on a couple of pretty old machines so the
To_Completion value on chunks from ClimatePrediction.net is always well over 300 hours.

Next to the Report_Deadline value, which is in form of a date, this seems ... well, silly.

I see two solutions to this non-problem: ;-)

1. Make it optional whether the program should display Report_Deadline as a date or a count-down with HHH:MM:SS.

2. Make it optional whether the program should display To_Completion as it is now, or as a column called ETA as a date.

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If you don't recycle, you're throwing it all away.

Hi Mappo

If ETA means estimated time available or estimated time allocation, that's really what the report deadline means.

At CPDN I don't think we would want the Report Deadline column to become a countdown. Some members overrun the climate model deadline. The project servers will still accept overdue model data, but we want members to have a realistic idea of how much time the model still has left before the deadline, or how seriously overdue it is. Most people have a more accurate concept of long time periods in years, months and days than in hours, minutes and seconds.

I'm not sure whether models past their deadline would show the countdown (or countup) time to/past completion as a positive or negative value. This could cause confusion. So the deadline value needs to be static.

If ETA means estimated time available or estimated time allocation, that's really what the report deadline means.

ETA is estimated remaining time for completion. Acronym comes from the transport industry: Estimated Time of Arrival.

The estimated time of arrival or ETA is a measure of when a vehicle, aircraft, cargo, emergency service or computer file is expected to arrive at a certain place. [...] ETA is also used metaphorically in situations where nothing actually moves physically, as in describing the time estimated for a certain task to complete (e.g. work undertaken by an individual; a computation undertaken by a computer program; or a process undertaken by an organization).

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1. Make it optional whether the program should display Report_Deadline as a date or a count-down with HHH:MM:SS.

This would probably not make much sense, especially with deadlines in over few tens of hours. (Or maybe indeed?)

2. Make it optional whether the program should display To_Completion as it is now, or as a column called ETA as a date.

BoincView is fortunately displaying the ETA also as a (sliding) date/time value and it is really much better comparable with the deadline date.

But this was only made possible, because BoincView took rather maximalistic approach (plenty of different values in hideable columns), in contrary to BoincManager's minimalistic approach (just the really necessary stuff). (IIRC BOINC devs expressed themselves few weeks ago against introducing additional hideable columns into the manager.)

Peter