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Comment Re:Manual transmissions and traffic (Score 1) 185

In fact, the best thing to do is to use the gaps between cars to absorb speed differences so as to allow ALL traffic to flow more smoothly

I agree with you, and I find that this is easier to do in a manual because the acceleration is instantaneous. I have found that I don't have to accelerate as hard if the response is immediate, versus delayed. I don't have to brake as hard because I start slowing as soon as I back off the gas.

With most automatics, the off-pedal cruising speed is 20 to 25 mph, which means that driving any slower than that requires riding the brake. From behind, a slow, steadily moving automatic appears the same as one which is stopping, or stopped. So they create a situation in which drivers behind a steady 15mph automatic vehicle have a harder time estimating traffic speed - which leads to the inevitable traffic accordion.

Comment Re:This is why I warn people to run LOCAL (Score 1) 103

Many years ago, when Motorola was in buyout talks with Google, they used Google docs extensively. One can only wonder if Google got a better deal because they were able to read Motorola's internal discussions. I don't know if they used Google docs for the discussions, but I do know there were quite a few people at the company who expressed no concern for the possibility that Google docs could leak proprietary information.

Comment Slam your mouth shut (Score 4, Funny) 103

I swear to God, if I ever meet someone in the flesh who tells me something or someone has been slammed, blasted, destroyed, torched, trashed or grilled, I'm gonna punch them in the face.

It's impossible to read any headline without those toddler English-level verbs used and abuse all the fucking time these days. It's really annoying!

Comment Manual transmissions and traffic (Score 4, Interesting) 185

One of my vehicles has an automatic transmission, and the other, a manual. The car with the automatic transmission has about twice the horsepower of the manual, but drives as if it's twice as heavy.

What I've noticed is that when driving the manual in heavy traffic, I use the brakes much less than with the automatic; one pedal both brakes and accelerates. Because I can keep the engine in its power band when crawling along in traffic, I get instant acceleration when traffic speeds up again. But with the automatic, the "delay, downshift, overaccelerate" conniption fit of the automatic transmission often allows other drivers the space to cut in front of me.

Comment How else would Windows Hello work? (Score 2) 98

And does M$ think they can mandate what ports manufacturers put on their PC.s
I remember them saying that LapTops had to have a camera.

This article claims that the camera requirement exists to support Windows Hello authentication. How would Microsoft's Windows Hello or Apple's Face ID work without a camera? Or what other means of quickly authenticating the user to the operating system and to the external passkey/password store would you recommend instead?

Comment It'd make low-end laptops more expensive (Score 1) 98

There are no downsides to this.

The only downside I can think of is that low-end Windows laptops could become a lot more expensive to support display and 40 Gbps on all ports. This could drive laptop makers toward an operating system with even more restricted functionality: ChromeOS.

Comment String length API unchanged? Facepalm. (Score 1) 103

unless there is a discovery in calculation of length of a string.

Incidentally, there was such a discovery. 'It's not wrong that "[facepalming man with brown skin emoji]".length = 7' by Henri Sivonen came out in September 2019. It explains the difference among code units, code points, and extended grapheme clusters, the difference among UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, the difference among JavaScript, Python 3, and Rust length semantics, and the difference among storage, display width, and arbitrary quotas that are roughly fair across languages.

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