So RAW to my knowledge for an extended test (threshold, Interval) you have to let the interval go by to be able to make the first roll. Some intervals are fairly decent 1 minute, 1 day, 1 week ect. ect.

My Main question here is, Say I'm making a program where the interval is 3 months. How many hours out of the day am I programming for? my interpretation of RAW leads me to believe that your supposed to be spending the entire interval doing the task, but this isn't practical. especially in the case of a 3 month project. So I am going to assume I am wrong.

Someone please clarify this for me.

A 'day' is assumed to be 8 working hours.

Judicious use of Long Haul and/or a Sleep Regulator can quite literally make the days go faster.

Agreed; it's amazing how much time a truly skilled hacker with a sleep regulator can save if he rushes the interval and uses edge to downgrade or negate a glitch if it comes up.

I also suppose that if you score double hits needed to reach the threshold in one roll you can halve the time.

I agree with the others, 'day' means 8 hours, not 24 and month means 30 'days' not 720 hours.

Now for some fun stuff :)

Ok, let us tackle a big bad program, an autosoft.

Lets take a look, interval 6 months... well, may as well rush that and take a chance that we'll have to burn edge, so 3 months.

Now then, that is 90 days, each of which is 8 hours, so we have 720 hours worth of work to do, better get cracking.

Now then, assume we have sleep regulator (who doesn't?), that means we can work for 45 hours out of every 48 (Long haul doesn't jive well with sleep regulators, so better to just run on that.) So, 720/45=16 intervals, which are 2 days each, so a total of 32 days. Now then, put in a point of edge to the test and you just might be able to get it in one go (threshold 8), but certainly by the second one. So, it takes you 32-64 days to do 6-12 months worth of work. I'd say not bad at all.

Now, one interesting thing is that it never says just how much attention you need to put forth on this. Depending on how generous your GM is you may be able to do this as a 'background' task, perhaps leaving you distracked in the real world, but otherwise able to walk around and do basic things that don't require too much attention (Similar to walking around while reading a book in AR). All in all, this makes personally programed programs a much more reasonable thing, as you could put out rating 6 hacking programs at a rate of one every 6-11 days (May even be able to play SR online while your doing it :P)

I thought if you burn edge on a task you cannot use edge again for the same attempt. Like you cannot use twice on the same test.

SR4 pg. 68 (german reference). One point per test, the example given shows exactly that you may not buy extra dice and avoid the glitch at the same time.

Hmm, your right. Weird though, I know I've seen an example they made where you can spesificly use edge twice in one thing, ah well, thanks for pointing that out.

Your best bet would be to have a mage friend summon a spirit for you every day and guard you, the spirit can negate the glitches that come up via guard, and you can spend edge for dice.

Thanks for all the replies guys! The task doesn't seem as daunting as a I first envisioned.

I've been working on a house rule to bring this more in line with reasonableness... Here's what I have:

Extended Test Intervals:
1 Day = 8 hours
1 Week = 40 hours
1 Month = 160 hours
3 Months = 480 hours

No character can use one skill more than 10 + (lower of Willpower or Intuition) hours in a day. This time includes but is not limited to learning (for increasing the skill) and using the skill for an extended test. If the character wishes to press past this time the player rolls a Willpower + Intuition Test and adds the hits to the number of hours the character can use the skill for that day, however when doing this treat that interval as “Rushing the Job” (see SR4 p 59) without actually halving the interval.

Using this rule I would not allow a player to use the "Rushing the Job" option to half the time for the extended test as working more than 8 hours in a day is already rushing the test. A character would make the skill test when she has amassed the required hours of work. Spending Edge to half the time would still be allowed.

-D