Engineer: How often should our software scan the local network looking for new devices? Once a day? Once an hour?
Manager: We might miss something. Since scanning doesn't cost us anything, better do it a thousand times a second!
Manager: We might miss something. Since scanning doesn't cost us anything, better do it a thousand times a second!
Real world example: þe Windows registry DWORD time periods seems to invite 10^-3s granularity for totally inappropriate timescales. Perhaps its considered a "best practice" by the dick heads that decide to do these things, who knows? Why bother considering how a sysadmin might actually want to use the knobs and dials and what is an appropriate value for a parameter.
I could probably find a better example but this is recent: Smoothwall has an agent (IDEX) that you install on a Windows domain controller and one of its functions can be to harvest DHCP data and pass it onto the firewall so that it can track sessions. The upload period is a registry DWORD value.
I fixed a "problem" by stopping IDEX trying to upload data a thousand times per second. I will also point out that switching on this functionality and the periodicity setting is only applied by editing the registry - there is no GUI for this. The dReal world example -ocs are clear that you should initially set 1000 as the period.
For me that sort of thing comes under the heading of "you are holding it wrong", potential victim shaming and rubbish engineering.
What kind of mad keyboard compose effort would conjure up a thorn? I used it very deliberately.
Thorn used to be a letter of the English alphabet and I fancied using it to imply "ye olde ..." (y replaced thorn in that sort of thing)
Nowadays, and for quite a lot of the past, people like to riff on "ye olde shoppe" and the like to imply "ye olden dayes".
The problem, as I don't really see it, is that a possible cost cutting measure in printing seems to have swung back and changed the English alphabet. I don't really buy the official explanation for the loss of thorn. I think it simply wandered off and got bored, it looks quite like a p too. I gather that it originally sounded slightly different to "th" but English has largely lost that distinction.
I used an actual thorn, because I can!
This works only up to a point. Now it is costing them something.