What does the word "quiet" mean in this paragraph?

[Peter Decker]

On 8/14/05, could ildg <could.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> The paragraph is as below, I mark the word quiet with *** ***.
> ___________________________________
> One problem with distributed applications is that if no data arrives
> over a long period of time, you need to wonder why. On one hand, it
> could be that the other program just hasn't had any information to
> send recently. On the other hand, the other program could have
> crashed. TCP handles this problem by allowing you to send an "Are you
> still alive?" message every so often to  ***quiet*** connections. The
> way is to call setKeepAlive() with a value of true.
> ___________________________________
> Please tell me what does the word "quiet" mean, Thank you~

It means that the remote application has sent any data recently: 'if
no data arrives over a long period of time'. We commonly say that two
programs 'talk' to each other, or that one program 'tells' the other
when it has received input. If these programs aren't 'saying'
anything, they're considered to be 'quiet'. The paragraph you quoted
is concerned with determining why the remote app hasn't 'said'
anything in a while: has it crashed, or is it really not getting any
data to relay.
-- 

# p.d.