On Dec 7, 2007 12:10 PM, Dan Rue <drue at therub.org> wrote: > Sorry, John. I meant "lets" as in the community of smart people that > create and use these things, not you personally. > No apology needed--I think you and I are on the same page about this. A couple of thoughts come to mind from the "billion-second timeout" with AOLserver: - Having a timeout of anything more than about an hour is silly. Is anyone really going to wait that long? - Any server worth its salt would let you set a flag (e.g. timeout of -1) to indicate no timeout - Again they're not using time_t to refer to specific system events, but instead some hypothetical ((very!) distant) future event - 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...". - 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. J -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20071207/5a45be0e/attachment.htm