Originally Posted by
Beckles
They're counting down to registration for a promotion, not launching the Space Shuttle, is it really that big of a deal?
To me it is. I use calipers to measure sewer pipe and think lipstick make pigs look beautiful.
/rant ON
Seriously, lots of time code code is copied from a page that someone thinks is working well and then is reused for something else where the timing may be more critical (not necessarily a space shuttle). What if this same code was used to start the beginning of some limited time opportunity. Some users may miss it by relying on the timer. There were also timer problems in the
LHW thread in the Hotel deals forum. The LHW is very time critical as the opportunity will probably exist only for minutes.
Programmers should understand how their code works and under which conditions it might not. In the case of the YouChoose promo timer the designer did not take into consideration the overhead involved in processing web pages and the way non-preemptive operating systems (e.g. WinDoz) work.
I hope by pointing this out to the Starwood IT team future problems can be avoided.
/rant OFF