Timer slack for slacker developers

Application programmers can do things like increase timeouts for background threads or (often) avoid polling entirely. Lennart email talks about "stuff like closed source crap, and all kinds of other things you cannot fix." One very common novice programmer mistake is using polling where you don't need to.

The one use case that is intriguing is synchronizing application timers so that a lot of them fire at once, in order to save on wakeups. I honestly can't think of any good way to do this with the existing timeout APIs-- maybe someone else can.

All these comments about "slack" are making me think of this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bobdobbs.png