On 2014-04-19 09:00, Gwillim Law wrote:
On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 10:43 AM, <random832@fastmail.us <mailto:random832@fastmail.us>> wrote:
A) I'm not convinced either of the applications you named need old historical offsets either. Make a case for the property systems you mentioned requiring measuring how many hours and minutes old something is.
You might have to know which of two events in different countries happened first. For example, the legacy of an estate might depend on who died first.
Or who was born first, either in the case of twins, or relatives of the same degree born close together. I have distant sibling nieces whose first children were born maybe a day or a few days apart, as the birth announcements were emailed some unknown time after the events and gave no details, unlike traditional print announcements. I have known companies who had hash generated employee id collisions, where employees who happened to have exactly the same name and birth date were hired on the same date in distant divisions, and there were obviously no existence or collision handling checks, or tie breaking provisions, built into the systems. Murphy knows there will be cases when unlikely events will occur on the same date or at the same time. I have fixed systems where "will never happen" took from six days to six months to occur after release: never seen a system with a "will never happen" design decision where "never" was more than six months between release and fix dates! -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis