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NASA Plans Crewed Moon Mission For February

1 month 2 weeks ago
NASA aims to launch its first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years, as early as February. The 10-day Artemis II mission will send four astronauts on a lunar flyby to test systems, paving the way for future Moon landings under the Artemis program. The BBC reports: Lakiesha Hawkins, Nasa's acting deputy associate administrator said it would be an important moment in the human exploration of space. "We together have a front row seat to history," she told a news conference this afternoon. "The launch window could open as early as the fifth of February, but we want to emphasize that safety is our top priority." Artemis Launch Director, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson explained that the powerful rocket system built to take the astronauts to the Moon, the Space Launch System (SLS) was "pretty much stacked and ready to go." All that remained was to complete the crew capsule, called Orion, connected to SLS and to complete ground tests. The Artemis II launch will see four astronauts go on a ten-day round trip to the Moon and back to the Earth. The astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, of Nasa and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, will not land on the Moon, though they will be the first crew to travel beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. The lead Artemis II flight director, Jeff Radigan explained that the crew would be flying further into space than anyone had been before. "They're going at least 5,000 nautical miles (9,200Km) past the Moon, which is much higher than previous missions have gone," he told reporters. Further reading: NASA Introduces 10 New Astronaut Candidates

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Japanese city passes two-hours-a-day smartphone usage ordinance

1 month 2 weeks ago
Symbolic gesture aims to help citizens sleep. Next: Doing something about people who walk while using their phones

The city council in the Japanese city of Toyoake has passed an ordinance that symbolically limits recreational use of smartphones to just two hours each day.…

Simon Sharwood

The first rule of liquid cooling is 'Don't wet the chip.' Microsoft disagrees

1 month 2 weeks ago
Redmond suggests ‘Microfluidics’ – hair-thin channels etched on silicon to let coolants flow

Electronics don’t play nicely with most liquids, which is why liquid cooling in the datacenter is often considered a little dangerous. Microsoft, however, has found a way to dispel such worries with a scheme that sees liquids flow across the surface of chips.…

Simon Sharwood

CodeSOD: Across the 4th Dimension

1 month 2 weeks ago

We're going to start with the code, and then talk about it. You've seen it before, you know the chorus: bad date handling:

C_DATE($1) C_STRING(7;$0) C_STRING(3;$currentMonth) C_STRING(2;$currentDay;$currentYear) C_INTEGER($month) $currentDay:=String(Day of($1)) $currentDay:=Change string("00";$currentDay;3-Length($currentDay)) $month:=Month of($1) Case of : ($month=1) $currentMonth:="JAN" : ($month=2) $currentMonth:="FEB" : ($month=3) $currentMonth:="MAR" : ($month=4) $currentMonth:="APR" : ($month=5) $currentMonth:="MAY" : ($month=6) $currentMonth:="JUN" : ($month=7) $currentMonth:="JUL" : ($month=8) $currentMonth:="AUG" : ($month=9) $currentMonth:="SEP" : ($month=10) $currentMonth:="OCT" : ($month=11) $currentMonth:="NOV" : ($month=12) $currentMonth:="DEC" End case $currentYear:=Substring(String(Year of($1));3;2) $0:=$currentDay+$currentMonth+$currentYear

At this point, most of you are asking "what the hell is that?" Well, that's Brewster's contribution to the site, and be ready to be shocked: the code you're looking at isn't the WTF in this story.

Let's rewind to 1984. Every public space was covered with a thin layer of tobacco tar. The Ground Round restaurant chain would sell children's meals based on the weight of the child and have magicians going from table to table during the meal. And nobody quite figured out exactly how relational databases were going to factor into the future, especially because in 1984, the future was on the desktop, not the big iron "server side".

Thus was born "Silver Surfer", which changed its name to "4th Dimension", or 4D. 4D was an RDBMS, an IDE, and a custom programming language. That language is what you see above. Originally, they developed on Apple hardware, and were almost published directly by Apple, but "other vendors" (like FileMaker) were concerned that Apple having a "brand" database would hurt their businesses, and pressured Apple- who at the time was very dependent on its software vendors to keep its ecosystem viable. In 1993, 4D added a server/client deployment. In 1995, it went cross platform and started working on Windows. By 1997 it supported building web applications.

All in all, 4D seems to always have been a step or two behind. It released a few years after FileMaker, which served a similar niche. It moved to Windows a few years after Access was released. It added web support a few years after tools like Cold Fusion (yes, I know) and PHP (I absolutely know) started to make building data-driven web apps more accessible. It started supporting Service Oriented Architectures in 2004, which is probably as close to "on time" as it ever got for shipping a feature based on market demands.

4D still sees infrequent releases. It supports SQL (as of 2008), and PHP (as of 2010). The company behind it still exists. It still ships, and people- like Brewster- still ship applications using it. Which brings us all the way back around to the terrible date handling code.

4D does have a "date display" function, which formats dates. But it only supports a handful of output formats, at least in the version Brewster is using. Which means if you want DD-MMM-YYYY (24-SEP-2025) you have to build it yourself.

Which is what we see above. The rare case where bad date handling isn't inherently the WTF; the absence of good date handling in the available tooling is.

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Remy Porter