Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, to wit, a working model.
People tend to forget that we don't harness energy states, we harness differences in energy states. The difference in temperature drives a thermocouple, a difference in pressure drives a piston, a difference in voltage drives an electric circuit. A chunk of iron with a temperature of X is useless if its stuck in an environment that is also at X.
There is an argument that AIDS can be thought of as a symptom of severe selenium deficiency that has been triggered by the HIV virus. A recently retired geography prof, Harry Foster, has been doing some interesting work on the subject (his website is at www.hdfoster.com). The summary is: a few brazil nuts a day is a good thing for your immune system, if you aren't allergic to them.
I've always tended to get really nasty colds, a couple a year. Since I started chowing down on the brazil nuts 10 months ago, I've been pretty much free of them. Just don't eat too many (two a day is safe), or you risk selenium poisoning.
What I don't see is any mention of whether she is printing onto silicon wafers. If its silicon wafers, then this is just a PR opportunity by a university. Presumably her patent application will become visible in another year and we'll be able to tell.
I once had a colleague who insisted on using the following style for blockless-if statements:
if( condition )
statement
I figure you should either replace the above with
if( condition ) statement or make it into a block as below.
if( condition ) {
statement
}
The colleague's approach (which she learned from her father, a university prof who probably never had to maintain somebody else's code) was just waiting for somebody to add a second statement (similarly indented) that really needed to be in a block to work correctly. Yep, it happened.
But in general, any reasonably skilled programmer should be able to either find or write a pretty-printer that will transform code to the desired brace alignment.
I believe its more important that your coding convention deal with issues like how are exceptions/errors handled (I really hate code that spends 90% of its time checking return codes), how much complexity is tolerable in a single function (having ported somebody else's functions that were several thousand lines long), how arguments are passed (Oracle's C functions for accessing blobs are a wonderful example of what not to do, something like 12 arguments to read a range of data), and unit testing.
The situation is probably uglier than writing C structs directly to a file.
If their codebase was in C++, its likely that they used the default object serialization to read/write their files.
It would be easy to implement, it would guarantee that all the necessary data got properly saved and restored. It would be a maintenance nightmare in the long term.
Slashdot Mirror
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, to wit, a working model.
People tend to forget that we don't harness energy states, we harness differences in energy states.
The difference in temperature drives a thermocouple, a difference in pressure drives a piston, a difference in voltage drives an electric circuit.
A chunk of iron with a temperature of X is useless if its stuck in an environment that is also at X.
There is an argument that AIDS can be thought of as a symptom of severe selenium deficiency that has been triggered by the HIV virus. A recently retired geography prof, Harry Foster, has been doing some interesting work on the subject (his website is at www.hdfoster.com). The summary is: a few brazil nuts a day is a good thing for your immune system, if you aren't allergic to them.
I've always tended to get really nasty colds, a couple a year. Since I started chowing down on the brazil nuts 10 months ago, I've been pretty much free of them. Just don't eat too many (two a day is safe), or you risk selenium poisoning.
What I don't see is any mention of whether she is printing onto silicon wafers. If its silicon wafers, then this is just a PR opportunity by a university. Presumably her patent application will become visible in another year and we'll be able to tell.
I once had a colleague who insisted on using the following style for blockless-if statements:
if( condition )
statement
I figure you should either replace the above with
if( condition ) statement
or make it into a block as below.
if( condition ) {
statement
}
The colleague's approach (which she learned from her father, a university prof who probably never had to maintain somebody else's code) was just waiting for somebody to add a second statement (similarly indented) that really needed to be in a block to work correctly. Yep, it happened.
But in general, any reasonably skilled programmer should be able to either find or write a pretty-printer that will transform code to the desired brace alignment.
I believe its more important that your coding convention deal with issues like how are exceptions/errors handled (I really hate code that spends 90% of its time checking return codes), how much complexity is tolerable in a single function (having ported somebody else's functions that were several thousand lines long), how arguments are passed (Oracle's C functions for accessing blobs are a wonderful example of what not to do, something like 12 arguments to read a range of data), and unit testing.
The situation is probably uglier than writing C structs directly to a file. If their codebase was in C++, its likely that they used the default object serialization to read/write their files. It would be easy to implement, it would guarantee that all the necessary data got properly saved and restored. It would be a maintenance nightmare in the long term.
Can Geckos climb on polished conductive surfaces, say a piece of chrome?