Window In The Skies: Why Everyone Is Going To Mars This Month

July 21, 2020 by Sven Gregori 51 Comments

Mars may not be the kind of place to raise your kids, but chances are that one day [Elton John]’s famous lyrics will be wrong about there being no one there to raise them. For now, however, we have probes, orbiters, and landers. Mars missions are going strong this year, with three nations about to launch their rockets towards the Red Planet: the United States sending their Perseverance rover, China’s Tianwen-1 mission, and the United Arab Emirates sending their Hope orbiter.

As all of this is planned to happen still within the month of July, it almost gives the impression of a new era of wild space races where everyone tries to be first. Sure, some egos will certainly be boosted here, but the reason for this increased run within such a short time frame has a simple explanation: Mars will be right around the corner later this year — relatively speaking — providing an ideal opportunity to travel there right now.

In fact, this year is as good as it gets for quite a while. The next time the circumstances will be (almost) as favorable as this year is going to be in 2033, so it’s understandable that space agencies are eager to not miss out on this chance. Not that Mars missions couldn’t be accomplished in the next 13 years — after all, several endeavors are already in the wings for 2022, including the delayed Rosalind Franklin rover launch. It’s just that the circumstances won’t be as ideal.

But what exactly does that mean, and why is that? What makes July 2020 so special? And what’s everyone doing up there anyway? Well, let’s find out!

Continue reading “Window In The Skies: Why Everyone Is Going To Mars This Month” →

Hyundai Makes Push Towards Fuel Cell Trucking

July 16, 2020 by Zoe Skyforest 102 Comments

Hyundai has begun shipping fuel-cell based heavy duty trucks to face off against battery-electric trucks in the commercial hauling market.

Battery electric vehicles, more commonly known as electric cars, have finally begun to take on the world in real numbers. However, they’re not the only game in town when it comes to green transportation. Fuel cells that use tanks of hydrogen to generate electricity with H₂O as the main byproduct have long promised to take the pollution out of getting around, without the frustrating charge times. Thus far though, they’ve failed to make a major impact. Hyundai still think there’s value in the idea, however, and have developed their XCIENT Fuel Cell truck to further the cause. Continue reading “Hyundai Makes Push Towards Fuel Cell Trucking” →

Will 2020 Be The Year Of Rust In The Linux Kernel?

July 15, 2020 by Sven Gregori 55 Comments

One problem with modern programming languages is the reach their overly enthusiastic early adopters have nowadays thanks to the internet. As a result, everyone else’s first encounter with them are oftentimes some crude, fanboyish endeavors to rewrite every single established software project in that shiny new language — just because — which may leave an off-putting taste behind. However, Rust certainly seems to have outgrown this state by now, and with its rising popularity within the general developer population, it’s safe to say it will stick around. Will it fully replace C one day? Probably not, but there’s a big chance for coexistence, and [Nick Desaulniers] got the ball rolling for that within the Linux kernel.

Now, before you storm off pledging your allegiance to C by finding a new operating system: nothing is happening yet. [Nick] simply tested the waters for a possible future of Rust within the Linux kernel code base, which is something he’s planning to bring up for discussion in this year’s Linux Plumbers Conference — the annual kernel developer gathering. The interesting part is [Linus Torvalds]’s respone on the LKML thread, which leaves everyone hoping for a hearty signature Rust rant akin to his C++ one disappointed. Instead, his main concern is that a soft and optional introduction of the support in the build system would leave possible bugs hidden, and therefore should be automatically enabled if a Rust compiler is present — essentially implying that he seems otherwise on board.

We’ll see what comes of it, but with Rust language team lead [Josh Triplett] stating that enhancements benefiting and advancing a kernel integration are certainly imaginable for Rust itself, we might see interesting collaborations coming up in the near future. If you don’t want to wait for that and use Rust already today in a user-land driver, check out this 35c3 talk. And if that doesn’t go far enough for you, here’s a whole (non-Linux) kernel written in Rust.

Don’t Wait, You Need To See Comet NEOWISE Right Now

July 14, 2020 by Tom Nardi 74 Comments

By now you’ve heard of NEOWISE, the most spectacular comet to visit our little corner of the galaxy since Hale-Bopp passed through over 20 years ago. But we’re willing to bet you haven’t actually seen it with your own eyes. That’s because up until now, the only way to view this interstellar traveler was to wake up in the pre-dawn hours; an especially difficult requirement considering a large chunk of the population has gotten used to sleeping-in over the last few months.

But things are about to change as NEOWISE begins a new phase of its trip through our celestial neck of the woods. Having come to within 44.5 million km (27.7 million miles) of the sun on July 3rd, the comet is now making its way back out of our solar system. Thanks to the complex dance of the heavens, that means that observers in the Northern Hemisphere will now be able to see NEOWISE in the evening sky just above the horizon.

NEOWISE is on a kind of “up and over” trajectory compared to the orbital paths of the planets. Get a better feel for it with JPL’s interactive solar dynamics tool.

While NEOWISE might be beating a hasty retreat from Sol right now, the comet it actually getting closer to us in the process. On July 22nd it will reach perigee, that is, the point in its orbit closest to Earth. On that evening the comet will be approximately 103 million km (64 million miles) away. Not exactly a stone’s throw, but pretty close in astronomical terms. The comet will appear to be getting higher in the sky as it approaches Earth, and should be visible with the naked eye between 10 and 20 degrees above the northern horizon.

Most estimates say that NEOWISE should remain visible until at least the middle of August, though it will be dimming rapidly. After that, you’re going to have to wait awhile for a repeat showing. Given the orbit of this particular comet, it won’t come around our way again for approximately 6,800 years, give or take a few lifetimes.

NASA will be hosting a NEOWISE live stream tomorrow afternoon where researchers will answer questions about this once in a lifetime celestial event, though we think you’ll get a lot more out of it if you just go outside and look up.

The Segway Is Dead, Long Live The Segway

June 30, 2020 by Tom Nardi 87 Comments

Before it was officially unveiled in December 2001, the hype surrounding the Segway Human Transporter was incredible. But it wasn’t because people were excited to get their hands on the product, they just wanted to know what the thing was. Cryptic claims from inventor Dean Kamen that “Ginger” would revolutionize transportation and urban planning lead to wild speculation. When somebody says their new creation will make existing automobiles look like horse-drawn carriages in comparison, it’s hard not to get excited.

There were some pretty outlandish theories. Some believed that Kamen, a brilliant engineer and inventor by all accounts, had stumbled upon some kind of anti-gravity technology. The kids thought they would be zipping around on their own Back to the Future hover boards by Christmas, while Mom and Dad were wondering what the down payment on a floating minivan might be. Others thought the big secret was the discovery of teleportation, and that we were only a few years out from being able to “beam” ourselves around like Captain Kirk.

Even in hindsight, you really can’t blame them. Kamen had the sort of swagger and media presence that we today associate with Elon Musk. There was a general feeling that this charismatic maverick was about to do what the “Big Guys” couldn’t. Or even more tantalizing, what they wouldn’t do. After all, a technology which made the automobile obsolete would change the world. The very idea threatened a number of very big players, not least of which the incredibly powerful petroleum industry.

Of course, we all know what Dean Kamen actually showed off to the world that fateful day nearly 20 years ago. The two-wheeled scooter was admittedly an impressive piece of hardware, but it was hardly a threat to Detroit automakers. Even the horses were largely unconcerned, as you could buy an actual pony for less than what the Segway cost.

Now, with the announcement that Segway will stop production on their eponymous personal transporter in July, we can confidently say that history will look back on it as one of the most over-hyped pieces of technology ever created. But that’s not to say Kamen’s unique vehicle didn’t have an impact. Continue reading “The Segway Is Dead, Long Live The Segway” →

Does PHP Have A Future, Or Are Twenty Five Years Enough?

June 29, 2020 by Ben James 54 Comments

In June, 1995, Rasmus Lerdorf made an announcement on a Usenet group. You can still read it.

Today, twenty five years on, PHP is about as ubiquitous as it could possibly have become. I’d be willing to bet that for the majority of readers of this article, their first forays into web programming involved PHP.

Announcing the Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0.

These tools are a set of small tight cgi binaries written in C.

But no matter what rich history and wide userbase PHP holds, that’s no justification for its use in a landscape that is rapidly evolving. Whilst PHP will inevitably be around for years to come in existing applications, does it have a future in new sites?

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What’s The Deal With Snap Packages?

June 24, 2020 by Tom Nardi 150 Comments

Who would have thought that software packaging software would cause such a hubbub? But such is the case with snap. Developed by Canonical as a faster and easier way to get the latest versions of software installed on Ubuntu systems, the software has ended up starting a fiery debate in the larger Linux community. For the more casual user, snap is just a way to get the software they want as quickly as possible. But for users concerned with the ideology of free and open source software, it’s seen a dangerous step towards the types of proprietary “walled gardens” that may have drove them to Linux in the first place.

Perhaps the most vocal opponent of snap, and certainly the one that’s got the most media attention, is Linux Mint. In a June 1st post on the distribution’s official blog, Mint founder Clement Lefebvre made it very clear that the Ubuntu spin-off does not approve of the new package format and wouldn’t include it on base installs. Further, he announced that Mint 20 would actively block users from installing the snap framework through the package manager. It can still be installed manually, but this move is seen as a way to prevent it from being added to the system without the user’s explicit consent.

The short version of Clement’s complaint is that the snap packager installs from a proprietary Canonical-specific source. If you want to distribute snaps, you have to set up an account with Canonical and host it there. While the underlying software is still open source, the snap packager breaks with long tradition of having the distribution of the software also being open and free. This undoubtedly makes the install simple for naive users, and easier to maintain for Canonical maintainers, but it also takes away freedom of choice and diversity of package sources.

Continue reading “What’s The Deal With Snap Packages?” →