On Dec 7, 2007 12:10 PM, Dan Rue <<a href="mailto:drue@therub.org">drue@therub.org</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Sorry, John. I meant "lets" as in the community of smart people that<br>create and use these things, not you personally.<font color="#888888"><br></font></blockquote></div><br>No apology needed--I think you and I are on the same page about this.
<br><br>A couple of thoughts come to mind from the "billion-second timeout" with AOLserver:<br><br>- Having a timeout of anything more than about an hour is silly. Is anyone really going to wait that long?<br>- Any server worth its salt would let you set a flag (
e.g. timeout of -1) to indicate no timeout<br>- Again they're not using time_t to refer to specific system events, but instead some hypothetical ((very!) distant) future event<br>- Software should be developed with an eye on its boundary conditions,
e.g. "I am using a 16-bit int for this field, so we had better not have more than about 65,000 different planes in the air...".<br>- Recurring issues like this make me think that some sort of software engineer certification might be a good idea. Or maybe bringing back the pillory.
<br><br>J<br>