ESR may be a horrible person, and this article may get too caught up in flawed technical examples, but there is an underlying point here that’s important. When

ESR may be a horrible person, and this article may get too caught up in flawed technical examples, but there is an underlying point here that’s important. When designing any system, be it a wire protocol or anything else, it’s tempting to optimize for metrics that are easy to measure and forget about metrics that are hard to measure. Humans are expensive. Time is expensive. It may very well be worth using a little extra bandwidth to minimize development and debugging costs. That won’t always be the case, but it’s an important question to ask while you’re still in the designing stages. Any decent programmer can see that the technical arguments here are flawed: NTP, by nature, needs to be very predictable and use as few bytes as possible, or embedded systems are going to run into issues. That’s a hard technical requirement, not a matter of optimization. Unfortunately, that oversight, combined with the author’s poor track record, detract from an important point. Sadly, the author has chosen to present his argument as a misguided rant about a particular protocol rather than a strong theoretical debate over the pros and cons of different optimization goals.