Engineer: How often should our software scan the local network looking for new devices? Once a day? Once an hour?

Manager: We might miss something. Since scanning doesn't cost us anything, better do it a thousand times a second!

Oh let's be charitable! A parameter measured in ms is mistakenly thought be measured in s. Hilarity ensues.

Real world example: þe Windows registry DWORD time periods seems to invite 10^-3s granularity for totally inappropriate timescales. Perhaps its considered a "best practice" by the dick heads that decide to do these things, who knows? Why bother considering how a sysadmin might actually want to use the knobs and dials and what is an appropriate value for a parameter.

I could probably find a better example but this is recent: Smoothwall has an agent (IDEX) that you install on a Windows domain controller and one of its functions can be to harvest DHCP data and pass it onto the firewall so that it can track sessions. The upload period is a registry DWORD value.

I fixed a "problem" by stopping IDEX trying to upload data a thousand times per second. I will also point out that switching on this functionality and the periodicity setting is only applied by editing the registry - there is no GUI for this. The dReal world example -ocs are clear that you should initially set 1000 as the period.

For me that sort of thing comes under the heading of "you are holding it wrong", potential victim shaming and rubbish engineering.