Dear Mr Weiss,
I am afraid its all down to money - most things are.
Rick, can afford to be polite, he is a psychology Professor at Harvard and lives at
Pondside and does a bit of "Moonlighting" at AS to boost his income . I would guess (it is a guess, mind) he gets around $60 an hour from AS for the benefit of throwing a "few pearls before swine".
R2 is way down the social "heap" - I think he drills holes in toothbrush handles for a living and lives in a Chichester slum tenement. I doubt if AS pay him more than $3 an hour. He is rather bitter about this (and I do sympathise with him - slightly) and so his answers tend to be a bit "astringent" He has a heart of gold though. He looks after six orphans from the recent County Cricket wars and donates a large part of his income to the benevolent fund for retired al Qaeda operatives.
Turning now to your justified complaint about the 38 second bid lead time.
There is a simple explanation for this:
As you probably know Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is a stable reference frequency used for counting seconds. The frequency, or rate, of UTC is computed by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), based near Paris, France. The BIPM uses a weighted average from about 250 atomic clocks located in about 50 national laboratories to construct a time scale called International Atomic Time (TAI). Once TAI is corrected for leap seconds, it becomes UTC, or the official world time scale. NIST distributes a real-time version of UTC called UTC(NIST), a time scale referenced to atomic oscillators located in Boulder, Colorado, to the public through their time and frequency services. At its source, UTC(NIST) is kept in as close agreement as possible with other national and international standards (typically within a few nanoseconds).
Unfortunately, the guy in charge of the servers at AS HQ accidentally switched off the plug. So its back to the computer's own clock and as the following extract makes quite clear, accuracy cannot be guaranteed:
"When the PC is turned off, the software clock stops running and loses all of its time-of-day information. For this reason, a hardware clock is also necessary. The hardware clock is either a separate real-time clock or a RTC function integrated into the PC's chipset. The hardware clock is updated once per second and does not resolve to fractions of a second. Its timing accuracy is determined by the quality of the crystal oscillator it uses as its time base. A typical crystal usually is less than $1 in single quantities, with an initial frequency error of greater than ±20ppm, which will translate to greater than ±1.7 seconds per day. In actual operation, with temperature effects included, most hardware clocks gain or lose 5 to 15 seconds per day.
When the PC is turned off, the hardware clock runs from a battery. When the computer is turned back on, the software clock starts running again and sets itself (within 1 second) to the hardware clock. Although the hardware and software clocks are synchronized at power-up, they run at different rates and will gain or lose time relative to each other while the computer is running."
See quite logical really - the servers didn't quite catch up with "real" eBay time.
Paul
(Me, take the P*** ? Rick, how could you be so cruel? I'll never darken your doors again if you really think that)
