I find it fascinating how many people in here are all about drawing linear analogies, of how long it took to reach one milestone, and therefore how long it would take to "hack" a more current firmware and put their past bets on how longit would take on display, and that they were right - and...
I have two aspects to add.
- First, we as humans like linear progression very, very much. Complex issue solving, at the contrary, very seldomly follows a linear path though - especially if there is only a select group of people working on it. There are people out there ("futurists") who extrapolate different (exponential - because investors like exponential growthcurves) groths in industries into a linear model of how the future will look like, and every one of them I've whitnessed so far had a little of that scam artist swagger to them.
- In short, forecasting timeframes is hard.
- Second, there is a logical fallacy called the "reference systems". Lets take this as an excample. When SciresM posted, that he had an exploit or TZ on 2.x and would start to probe 3.x very soon, the first estimate that people produced were that it would probably take another 4-6 months (probably after the executer release thats scheduled in spring). It took two days - because it turned out, that the same exploit worked on both systems. Now, 4-6 months was an educated guestimate based on how long it took for the first ones to pop up in public, but the reference system was wrong - as in "that would be the time it probably would take to exploit TZ on the next higher revision".
In closing - humans most of the time are extremely bad and judging timeframes - if their predictions hit, more often than not (and we are talking about a binary problem, not management being able to outsource, or cut corners, or ship pre solved..
) it comes down to sheer luck.
The reason I'm telling you this story is - that making time frame predictions is about the Nr.1 think most people in here seem to be engaged in. And this strikes me as strangely irrational - every time, im reading threads in here.
Thought I'd at least mention it.
)
