PMMail Update Plans II - Response

[Jonathan B. Bayer]

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On Fri, 10 Sep 1999 10:34:59 -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:

>Thursday, September 09, 1999, 7:17:24 AM, Anders wrote:
>>>>    Feh, I checked once every 30 seconds and am lamenting the fact that
>>>>TB! only checks once a minute.  :/
>>>Well, I'm even willing to compromise with myself on this one and change
>>>my suggestion to counting in 10 second increments instead of minutes. 
>>>That way, a count of 30,000 would translate into approx 3.5 days and
>>>you could still check your mail every 30 seconds.
>> I have no idea if it's possible - but why not have two settings. One
>> for value, and one for minutes or seconds (or hours, days - whatever)
>
>    I dunno if it is.  IIRC Bob said that how he achieved the delay was to
>open another thread which sent an alarm to the main thread in x seconds which,
>when it gets that alarm, opens a fetch thread.
>
>    The the alarm function is from the Windows API and the only resolution it
>has is in seconds it limits what Southsoft can do in terms of timing.

Well, that is totally bogus.  While a single call to the alarm function
may be limited to a short int (32767), there is nothing to prevent them
from putting in a simple loop to call the alarm function multiple
times.  This is something a first year programmer student can do with
his/her eyes shut.  

The C code for this would be something like:

Where: sec = total number of seconds to wait

    // Thread is started already

     min = sec / 60;
     for (x = 0; x <= min; x++)
    {
        if (sec < 60)
            DosSleep(sec);
        else
            DosSleep(60);
        sec = sec - 60;
    }
    // Now send the signal or message to the main thread


This is trivial.


JBB



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