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[Editor's note: Though this story is nearly 5 years old, it seems to provide a nice summary of some of the various capabilities that vim offers. There is much more detail in the linked article than in this excerpt. Hopefully, in reading through that article newcomers will gain perspective and long-time-users may happen upon something useful they'd never seen before.]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://ismail.badawi.io/blog/2014/04/23/the-compositional-nature-of-vim/

I use vim. I've used vim since I started programming; the very first program I wrote – hello world in C, following along a cprogramming.com tutorial – was typed out in vim, inside a cygwin environment on Windows. Naturally, at first it was hard and intimidating. I didn't know how to do anything, least of all edit text. I learned about insert mode and normal mode. I learned about navigating using hjkl, and deleting the current line with dd, and saving and quitting with :wq, and for a long time that was it.

Over time I learned more and more. I learned that I could copy the current line with yy, and paste it somewhere with p. This meant that yyp duplicated the current line! I learned that I could indent the current line with >>, and also that I could indent the next 5 lines with 5>>. I learned that gg jumped to the top of the file. I learned that I could jump to line 34 with 34G. I also learned a strange incantation – I could write %s/foo/bar/g to replace all occurrences of foo with bar in the whole file. I used this all the time, and vim felt really powerful!

I went on like this for years. What I'm trying to get at is that I never really took the time to learn how vim worked. I had no clue about the big picture. I didn't know any concepts. Even though I used vim for hours each day, and I felt like I was constantly improving and learning new things, and my peers in university thought me knowledgeable enough to come to me with their vim questions, really I was just getting by on ad-hoc memorization.

The power of composition

There's a combinatorial effect here. If I know about o operators, m motions and t text objects, I can do up to o * (m + t) different things. Every new operator I learn lets me do up to m + t new things, and every motion or text object I learn lets me do up to o new things. Once you internalize vim's language for editing text, then not only does editing text efficiently become easier, but you also start learning at a much faster rate, as every new thing you learn interacts with all the things you already know.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Carlos O'Donell - The GNU C Library version 2.30 is now available

The GNU C Library
=================

The GNU C Library version 2.30 is now available.

The GNU C Library is used as *the* C library in the GNU system and in GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux as the kernel.

The GNU C Library is primarily designed to be a portable and high performance C library. It follows all relevant standards including ISO C11 and POSIX.1-2017. It is also internationalized and has one of the most complete internationalization interfaces known.

The GNU C Library webpage is at http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/

Packages for the 2.30 release may be downloaded from:
http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/libc/
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libc/

The mirror list is at http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Nitrous oxide – or laughing gas – is a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times as harmful as carbon dioxide. Much of it is released by human activity, for example from fertilizers and in vehicle and industrial exhaust. But there are natural sources of nitrous oxide, too.

For a long time, scientists had little idea of all the processes which lead to the formation of nitrous oxide or their magnitude. Now, a team of geomicrobiologists, headed by Professor Andreas Kappler and Dr. Caroline Schmidt, from the University of Tübingen’s Center for Applied Geoscience has identified an important source of nitrous oxide which is harmful to the environment.

The team discovered that it is not solely bacterial activity which causes laughing gas formation – it is also due to chemical processes in coastal marine sediments. This source may well be responsible for the production of up to one quarter of all nitrous oxide formation.

[...] "Previously, it was assumed that nitrous oxide was mainly created as an intermediate product in the conversion of nitrate by bacteria in typical coastal marine sediments," says Andreas Kappler. However, this did not explain the full extent of the formation of laughing gas.

[...] This study showed that chemical denitrification is responsible for a considerable part of nitrous oxide production. Denitrification refers to the microbial conversion of nitrogen bound in nitrate into molecular nitrogen and nitrous oxide. "The raw materials for chemodenitrification, ferrous iron and nitrite, are formed by microbial processes in the sediment," explains Caroline Schmidt.

However, microbes play no part in the conversion to nitrous oxide. The chemical reaction takes place spontaneously. "Laughing gas is produced and released extremely quickly," Schmidt says. The extent to which laughing gas is formed as a result of this reaction could explain its mysterious origin.

Otte JM, Blackwell N, Ruser R, Kappler A, Kleindienst S, Schmidt C. 2019. Cause and effects of N2O formation by nitrite-induced (chemo)denitrification in coastal marine sediment. Scientific Reports, 31st of July 2019, https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47172-x

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

July was world's hottest month on record, World Meteorological Organization says

The latest data from the World Meteorological Organization shows the month of July "at least equalled if not surpassed the hottest month in recorded history" — and it followed the hottest June ever, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday.

The UN chief told reporters that "this is even more significant because the previous hottest month, July 2016, occurred during one of the strongest El Niño's ever," which was not the case this year.

An El Niño is a natural warming of the ocean that once it interacts with the atmosphere often warms up the globe and changes rainfall and temperature patterns, making some places wetter and some places drier.

Guterres said the latest weather data, including temperature-shattering records from New Delhi and Anchorage to Paris, Santiago, Adelaide, Australia and the Arctic Circle, means the world is on track for the period from 2015 to 2019 "to be the five hottest years on record."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Got a horrifying foreign superbug? You may have more than one

The sad tale of a US resident who fell ill while traveling abroad has prompted an ominous warning from health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—that is, that the most horrifying, highly drug-resistant infections known to health experts tend to travel in packs.

The patient who prompted the warning was traveling in Kenya in the late summer of 2018 when a cerebral hemorrhage struck. The brain bleed landed the traveler in a hospital there for a month, during which time doctors performed a variety of procedures. Those included placing a feeding tube and inserting a breathing tube into the neck. The patient encountered several complications during the treatments, including sepsis, pneumonia, and a urinary tract infection, requiring courses of potent antibiotic and anti-fungal medications.

In September, the severely ill patient was medically evacuated to an acute-care hospital in Maryland. There, doctors found that the patient had become infected with several of the most dreaded multi-drug-resistant bacteria. These include oxacillinase-48-like-producing carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae and the New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-producing carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Both germs are notoriously difficult to treat and can be deadly.

The patient was put in a private room with contact precautions to keep the germs contained. But in consultation with infectious-disease experts at the CDC, doctors decided to investigate further. They tested for yet another dastardly pathogen: the fungus Candida auris.

[...] Still, the case offers a cautionary tale, the CDC experts say. In a report released Thursday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, they write:

This case highlights the importance of a high level of suspicion for C. auris in persons admitted to US health care facilities with a history of health care abroad, even if C. auris is not known to be widespread in that location.

Co-colonization with C. auris and other frightening pathogens appears common, they add. And early identification of C. auris is critical to keeping it from spreading further.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Blood test is highly accurate at identifying Alzheimer's before symptoms arise

Up to two decades before people develop the characteristic memory loss and confusion of Alzheimer's disease, damaging clumps of protein start to build up in their brains. Now, a blood test to detect such early brain changes has moved one step closer to clinical use.

Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report that they can measure levels of the Alzheimer's protein amyloid beta in the blood and use such levels to predict whether the protein has accumulated in the brain. When blood amyloid levels are combined with two other major Alzheimer's risk factors -- age and the presence of the genetic variant APOE4 -- people with early Alzheimer's brain changes can be identified with 94% accuracy, the study found.

The findings, published Aug. 1 in the journal Neurology, represent another step toward a blood test to identify people on track to develop Alzheimer's before symptoms arise. Surprisingly, the test may be even more sensitive than the gold standard -- a PET brain scan -- at detecting the beginnings of amyloid deposition in the brain.

Such a test may become available at doctors' offices within a few years, but its benefits will be much greater once there are treatments to halt the disease process and forestall dementia. Clinical trials of preventive drug candidates have been hampered by the difficulty of identifying participants who have Alzheimer's brain changes but no cognitive problems. The blood test could provide a way to efficiently screen for people with early signs of disease so they can participate in clinical trials evaluating whether drugs can prevent Alzheimer's dementia.

Schindler SE, Et. Al. High precision plasma amyloid-β 42/40 predicts current and future brain amyloidosis. Neurology, August 1, 2019 DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000008081

Original Submission

NPC-131072 writes:

From The New York Times (archive):

Jeffrey E. Epstein, the wealthy financier who is accused of sex trafficking, had an unusual dream: He hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch.

Mr. Epstein's vision reflected his longstanding fascination with what has become known as transhumanism: the science of improving the human population through technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Critics have likened transhumanism to a modern-day version of eugenics, the discredited field of improving the human race through controlled breeding.

Mr. Epstein attracted a glittering array of prominent scientists. They included the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark; the theoretical physicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking; the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and best-selling author; George M. Church, a molecular engineer who has worked to identify genes that could be altered to create superior humans; and the M.I.T. theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for AnonymousLuser:

Four ways blockchain could make the internet safer, fairer and more creative

The internet is unique in that it has no central control, administration or authority. It has given everyone with access to it a platform to express their views and exchange ideas with others instantaneously. But in recent years, internet services such as search engines and social media platforms have increasingly been provided by a small number of very large tech firms.

On the face of it, companies such as Google and Facebook claim to provide a free service to all their users. But in practice, they harvest huge amounts of personal data and sell it on to others for profit. They're able to do this every time you log into social media, ask a question on a search engine or store files on a cloud service. The internet is slowly turning into something like the current financial system, which centrally monitors all transactions and uses that data to predict what people will buy in future.

This type of monitoring has huge implications for the privacy of ordinary people around the world. The digital currency Bitcoin, which surfaced on the internet in 2008, sought to break the influence that large, private bodies have over what we do online. The researchers had finally solved one of the biggest concerns with digital currencies—that they need central control by the companies that operate them, in the same way traditional currencies are controlled by a bank.

The core idea behind the Bitcoin system is to make all the participants in the system, collectively, the bank. To do this, blockchains are used. Blockchains are distributed, tamper-proof ledgers, which can record every transaction made within a network. The ledger is distributed in the sense that a synchronised copy of the blockchain is maintained by each of the participants in the network, and tamper-proof in the sense that each of the transactions in the ledger is locked into place using a strong encrypting technique called hashing.

More than a decade since this technology emerged, we're still only beginning to scratch the surface of its potential. People researching it may have overlooked one of its most useful applications—making the internet better for everyone who uses it.

[...] Help stamp out hate
[...]Never forget a password again
[...]Vote with your phone
[...]No more tech companies selling your data

Citation: Four ways blockchain could make the internet safer, fairer and more creative (2019, July 12) retrieved 27 July 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-07-ways-blockchain-internet-safer-fairer.html

Original Submission

[Editor's note: We generally try to provide balanced coverage of a story. This interview is "straight from the horse's mouth" and is, therefore, going to contain the biases of the interviewee. Nonetheless, we thought the story interesting enough that we wanted to put it out to the community to discuss. --martyb]

canopic jug writes:

Roy Schestowitz over at Techrights has an informal, follow-up interview with e-waste recycler Eric Lundgren about his ordeal with Microsoft. Lundgren spent time incarcerated as a result of his efforts to re-use old Wintel computers and keep them out of the landfill. He is now finally out of prison.

"The judge didn't understand the difference between a "Restore CD" and a "License"," he complained, "and Microsoft convinced the judge that the "Restore CD" was of equal value and functionality to a new MSFT OS w. new license! I was honestly dumbfounded.. I kept waiting for someone to get it in court .. Instead – The judge threw out all of my expert witness' testimony and only kept Microsoft's testimony.."

[...] Lundgren was sort of tricked if not blackmailed. It was the old trick of plea 'bargain' that was leveraged against him. "They threatened me with 47 Years in Prison," he told us. "So my only choice was to plea-bargain.. I told them I would ONLY plead guilty to "Restore CD Without License" but then Microsoft convinced the judge to value a Restore CD at the SAME VALUE as a Full Microsoft OS w. License!"

Earlier on SN:
Microsoft's Full Response to the Lundgren Counterfeiting Conviction (2018)
California Man Loses Appeal in Copyright Infringement Case (2018)
'E-Waste' Recycling Innovator Faces Prison for Trying to Extend Life Span of PCs (2018)

Original Submission

"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Shae Erisson's blog - Open Source Hardware Hearing Aid Part 1

My mother got hearing aids a few years ago. About a month later, she lost one. Insurance said if she wanted a replacement, she could pay them many thousands of dollars or she could wait a year.

That seemed incredibly expensive. I haven't done much electronics, but digital signal processing doesn't seem that expensive? I started diving in, the parts for a hearing aid looked like they couldn't possibly cost more than $500, probably closer to $100. A friend of mine was in a medical device software job, and told me human testing starts at about half a million dollars.

No way I can get that kind of money, so I gave up on that idea.

Years later, I found an affordable open source hearing aid

A few weeks ago, I found an open source hardware hearing aid called Tympan. For only three hundred dollars US you can buy a white 3D printed case that holds a Teensy 3.6 with some additional audio processing hardware. If you've previously done Arduino development, the Teensy is similar, and can use the same tools.

So I bought one!

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.wired.com/story/electric-ford-f150-pulls-a-train-friction-physics/

In a recent stunt, a Ford crew hitched an all-electric F-150 pickup truck to a freight train filled with 42 more F-150s. Then a driver hit the throttle, and the pickup truck towed the 1.3 million-pound train. This raises some interesting questions. How hard is it for a truck to pull a train? Is that even possible? Could a normal truck do this? Of course it's an impressive feat—but the real limiting factor is friction.

Let's start with a more idealized situation. That's what we do in physics—when something is potentially complicated, we make the scenario less complicated to make sure we are on the right track.

So, what would it take to pull a giant train in the case of zero friction? The answer is that any tiny force would move the train. Even an ant could move it. Yes, this is true—it just seems impossible because you've never encountered a situ­ation with zero friction.

[...] If I put in a truck coefficient of friction of 0.7 and the masses of both the truck and the train, then the coefficient of friction between the train and the rails would have to be as low as 0.0049. Yes, that's tiny. But really, trains need to have low friction. That's what makes them so awesome and able to transport massive amounts of cargo over great distances. But could any truck do this train pull? Based on this calculation, it's all about the mass of the pulling vehicle and the friction between the tires and ground. So just about any truck could do this.

Oh, what about torque and power and stuff like that for the electric F-150? Yes, you need that too. But if you don't have friction, you don't have anything. Also, here is one of my favorite demos. Even a child can move a heavy car. Here is my daughter (when she was only 7) pulling the family car.[*] If you get low enough friction you can get anything to move.

[*] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbTCW9CVHLA

Original Submission

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/da-pennebaker-dead-documentary-legend-was-94-817392
This quote describes a fraction of his work, the full obit has much more detail and links.

In his widely praised documentary Dont Look Back (Pennebaker said he left out the apostrophe in the first word on purpose), he followed Dylan during his 1965 tour of England as the musician was making the eventful transition from an acoustic folk singer to an electric rock act.

"I was never interested in educating people about Dylan. ... What I wanted to do was just be present when Dylan enacted his life and show you what he deals with and what interests him," he once said.

Regarding Dylan's reaction to the film, Pennebaker told Time in 2007: "He saw it out in Hollywood at a dreadful screening. Afterward, he said, 'We'll have another screening and I'll write down all of the things we have to change.' Of course, that made me a little gloomy. The next night, we assembled again and he sat in the front with this yellow pad. At the end of the film, he held up the pad and there was nothing on it. He said, 'That's it.'"

For The War Room, an Oscar nominee for best documentary, Pennebaker and Hegedus examined Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign against incumbent George H.W. Bush. Since the filmmakers didn't have access to Clinton himself, the project focused on the political strategies orchestrated by campaign manager James Carville and communications director George Stephanopoulos.

War Room is credited with making stars out of the two. Carville has had guest appearances in a number of films and TV shows (The People vs. Larry Flynt, Old School, Mad About You) and was the political advisor to Hillary Clinton during her 2008 presidential campaign, and Stephanopoulos hosts ABC's This Week and is the co-host of Good Morning America.

To check out Pennebaker's work, watch his first film, the five-minute short "Daybreak Express" (1953), in which he turned grubby elevated trains in NYC into art https://vimeo.com/16674798

Or, try this version of Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYajHZ4QUVM which I believe is from "Dont Look Back".

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://thenewstack.io/pipe-how-the-system-call-that-ties-unix-together-came-about/

It's an everyday command in the life of developers, sysadmins, and Unix lovers everywhere. So it's remarkable to remember that Unix's pipe command was implemented in a single day, representing not only a great moment in computing history, but also a uniquely important moment for its profound impact on the culture of Unix.

And its[sic] change the way we programmed ever since.

[...] In fact, it was more than 50 years ago that Doug McIlroy, who headed Bell Labs' famous "Computing Techniques Research Department" from 1965 through 1986, wrote, "We should have some ways of coupling programs like garden hose." This was 1964 — he'd pecked the words out on a typewriter — saying this method would let programmers "screw in another segment when it becomes necessary to massage data in another way."

[...] McIlroy acknowledged that pipes "was one of the only places where I very nearly exerted managerial control over Unix, was pushing for those things." McIlroy remembered that yes, he'd kept bringing it up internally at various points over the next nine years, until finally one day in 1973, Ken Thompson had said "I'm going to do it."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://news.yahoo.com/ap-sources-boeing-changing-max-184231846.html

Boeing is working on new software for the 737 Max that will use a second flight control computer to make the system more reliable, solving a problem that surfaced in June with the grounded jet, two people briefed on the matter said Friday.

When finished, the new software will give Boeing a complete package for regulators to evaluate as the company tries to get the Max flying again, according to the people, who didn't want to be identified because the new software hasn't been publicly disclosed.

The Max was grounded worldwide after crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed a total of 346 people.

Use of the second redundant computer, reported Thursday by the Seattle Times, would resolve a problem discovered in theoretical problem simulations done by the Federal Aviation Administration after the crashes. The simulations found an issue that could result in the plane's nose pitching down. Pilots in testing either took too long to recover from the problem or could not do so, one of the people said.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Ohio Woman Hospitalized, Undergoes Partial Amputations after Catching Infection from Dog Saliva:

The last thing Marie Trainer remembers is feeling sick and laying down on the couch. The Stark county wife and mother woke up from a coma ten days later with both arms and legs partially amputated.

"When I opened my eyes I didn't know where I was," said Marie. "It was very hard to find out that they had to remove my legs and my arms....very hard to cope with."

Marie and her husband, Matthew Trainer, had just returned home from a vacation in the Caribbean.

They thought it was the flu because Marie felt nauseous and had a bad backache. But then suddenly her temperature spiked and plummeted.

[...] Aultman Hospital's critical care team began aggressive treatments, but within hours Marie was developing sepsis[*] and her condition continued to deteriorate.

[...] Blood tests and cultures at both Aultman Hospital and the Cleveland Clinic confirmed the surprising diagnosis of capnocytophaga[*].

[...] The organism causes dozens of large blood clots, that restrict blood flow and lead to necrosis[*] and gangrene[*]. Doctors repeatedly removed dozens of clots from Marie's limbs, trying to save them, but too much damage was already done to the tissue.

Without the amputations, doctors told the family Marie would die.