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Sun Unleashes Strongest Solar Flare of 2025

2 months ago
New submitter UsRanger175 shares a report from Space.com: The sun erupted in spectacular fashion this morning (Nov. 11), unleashing a major X5.1-class solar flare, the strongest of 2025 so far and the most intense since October 2024. The eruption peaked at 5 a.m. EST (1000 GMT) from sunspot AR4274, which has been bursting with activity in recent days. The blast triggered strong (R3-level) radio blackouts across Africa and Europe, disrupting high-frequency radio communications on the sunlit side of Earth. This outburst is the latest in a series of intense flares from AR4274, which also produced an X1.7 flare on Nov. 9 and an X1.2 on Nov. 10. Those flares were accompanied by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that could combine and impact Earth overnight tonight, possibly triggering strong (G3) geomagnetic storm conditions and widespread auroras, according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. The CME released today could also join the party as it speeds toward Earth at 4.4 million mph. NOAA predicts the CME could impact Earth around midday on Nov. 12. With this third CME added to the mix, it's possible that we could experience severe (G4) geomagnetic storm conditions.

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BeauHD

CodeSOD: Historical Dates

2 months ago

Handling non-existent values always presents special challenges. We've (mostly) agreed that NULL is, in some fashion, the right way to do it, though it's still common to see some sort of sentinel value that exists outside of the expected range- like a function returning a negative value when an error occurred, and a zero (or positive) value when the operation completes.

Javier found this function, which has a… very French(?) way of handling invalid dates.

Private Function CheckOraDate(ByVal sDate As String) As String Dim OraOValDate As New DAL.PostGre.DataQuery() Dim tdate As Date If IsDate(sDate) Then Return IIf(OraOValDate.IsOracle, CustomOracleDate(Convert.ToDateTime(sDate).ToString("MM-dd-yyyy")), "'" & sDate & "'") Else '~~~ No Date Flag of Bastille Day Return CustomOracleDate(Convert.ToDateTime("07/14/1789").ToString("MM-dd-yyyy")) End If End Function

Given a date string, we check if it is a valid date string using IsDate. If it is, we check if our data access layer thinks the IsOracle flag is set, and if it is, we do some sort of conversion to a `CustomOracleDate", otherwise we just return the input wrapped in quotes.

All that is sketchy- any function that takes dates as a string input and then returns the date in a new format as a string always gets my hackles up. It implies loads of stringly typed operations.

But the WTF is how we handle a bad input date: we return Bastille Day.

In practice, this meant that their database system was reporting customers' birthdays as Bastille Day. And let me tell you, those customers don't look a day over 200, let alone 236.

For an extra bonus WTF, while the "happy path" checks if we should use the custom oracle formatting, the Bastille Day path does not, and just does whatever the Oracle step is every time.

.comment { border: none; } [Advertisement] Keep the plebs out of prod. Restrict NuGet feed privileges with ProGet. Learn more.
Remy Porter

China's EV Market Is Imploding

2 months ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: In China, you can buy a heavily discounted "used" electric car that has never, in fact, been used. Chinese automakers, desperate to meet their sales targets in a bitterly competitive market, sell cars to dealerships, which register them as "sold," even though no actual customer has bought them. Dealers, stuck with officially sold cars, then offload them as "used," often at low prices. The practice has become so prevalent that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to stop it. Its main newspaper, The People's Daily, complained earlier this year that this sales-inflating tactic "disrupts normal market order," and criticized companies for their "data worship." This sign of serious problems in China's electric-vehicle industry may come as a surprise to many Americans. The Chinese electric car has become a symbol of the country's seemingly unstoppable rise on the world stage. Many observers point to their growing popularity as evidence that China is winning the race to dominate new technologies. But in China, these electric cars represent something entirely different: the profound threats that Beijing's meddling in markets poses to both China and the world. Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China's EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China's car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it "just hasn't erupted yet." To bypass government censorship of bad economic news, market analysts have opted for a seemingly anodyne term to describe the Chinese car industry's downward spiral: involution, which connotes falling in on oneself.

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BeauHD