On Thu, 6 May 2010, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
you may rail about the stupidity of those developers as much as you want. apparently unlike you, they live in the real world where the only guarantee which tcp provides is that the data stream is intact - *if* it arrives.
"Mr. Newton, your notions about gravity are of no use to those of us in the real world where heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects." An earmarks of a sham argument is "we live in the real world".
timeouts as a workaround for shortcomings of the tcp/ip stack under real-world conditions are a perfectly reasonable approach,
"Tailgating and cutting across multiple lanes of traffic as a workaround for the shortcomings of highways under real-world conditions are a perfectly reasonable approach." It is important to grasp that an action that may seem to be beneficial in empirical testing may in fact be quite harmful, not just to other agents but also ultimately to oneself; and furthermore that the benefits are more illusory than real. In the highway example, there are agents called "police officers" whose function includes issuing traffic tickets, thus inflicting lesser harm (a fine and points on one's driving license) as a pedagogical attempt to avoid the greater harm of a mass collision. The benefit -- and demerit -- of open standards is that there are no police officers. Open standards depend upon voluntary compliance. Closed standards, through their patents and licenses, can (and do!) enforce compliance. It's also important to grasp that what one things are "shortcomings" may in fact be there for a reason; and that when you do something bad to "workaround a shortcoming" you may be sabotaging something important.
just like keep-alive signals in higher-level stateful protocols to prevent timeouts.
The difference is that in higher level stateful protocols, both the timeouts and the keepalives are defined in the specification, along with the rules that both must follow. The problem is with ad-hoc actions based upon incomplete or misunderstood empirical evidence. -- Mark -- http://panda.com/mrc Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote. _______________________________________________ Imap-uw mailing list [email protected] http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
