Day: February 14, 2003

Scott Hanselman wonders:

My real question is, did God put these constants as a readonly field in a static constructor or a singleton pattern, or assuming parallel universes, a factory pattern?

Ingo points out some corrections and notes (absolutely hilarious). 

Some of the mysteries of the universe have been hard coded.  for example, here’s a one-line code snippet from some ugly parts of the Reality implemetation:

return 42;

Did God write tests first?

Russ points to a wicked VNC-like app for his Nokia Series 60 called Remote S60.  That’s really, really cool.

Ugh.  I just got back from a soda run at our local 7-11.  I ended up waiting in line for about five minutes because someone in front of me wrote a check.  It required both employees’ attention for several minutes.

I think they typed her number in about six times: five incorrectly, once correctly.  The clerk hadn’t figured things out by the time I left.

I didn’t know that 7-11 took checks.

They shouldn’t.

CNet:

That’s the conclusion two Cornell University computer scientists came to after finding that computer networks tend to be “selfish” when each tries to route traffic by the fastest pathway, causing that path to become congested and slow.

If the routers that direct the packets of data could be programmed with some altruism, the information might be able to reach its destination a little faster while allowing other packets to also move more quickly.

This is really interesting.  Sending packets down a route that is not neccesarily the fastest would result in better overall performance.  That’s awesome.  Where’s the altruism button on my router?

Seriously though, I think that more research in this area could definately help the traffic jam that is the internet.

Lets do more research and then apply that research to the next generation of Cisco (and other) routers, mmkay?

Dolly had lung cancer:

Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, was put down on Friday afternoon, after developing a progressive lung disease.

Dolly’s birth six-and-a-half years’ ago caused a sensation around the world. But as many sheep live to twice this age, her death will refuel the intense debate over the health and life expectancy of cloned animals.

The type of lung disease Dolly developed is most common in older sheep. And in January 2002, it was revealed that Dolly had developed arthritis prematurely. She was cloned using a cell taken from a healthy six-year-old sheep, and was born on 5 July 1996 at the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, Scotland.

<Insert moral, ethical, and scientific implications here/>