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Comment Re:66 BAUD (Score 2) 90

"baud" , named after Émile Baudot, is bits per second, not bytes.

The baud rate is a measure of 'symbols' per second, where a symbol might be more than one bit, in which case the baud rate is lower than the bit rate. It's a form of compression, where a single state change on a wire can supply more bits, something regularly used by dial-up modems in the good old days.

Submission + - How Ants May Save You from Future Traffic Jams

gdm writes: A study published in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives investigates how ants avoid traffic jams, the results of which could be used to control autonomous vehicles. Quoting the abstract:

The results show that ants adopt specific traffic strategies (platoon formation, quasi-constant speed and no overtaking maneuvers) that help avoid jam phenomena, even at high density.

Scientific American comments on the research:

They found that the ants don’t jam because they travel in groups of three to 20 that move at nearly constant rates while keeping good distances between one another—and they don’t speed up to pass others. Human drivers at rush hour are hardly inclined to follow such rules.

The Scientific American article points out that humans generally are

maximizing the interests of individuals, [whereas] self-driving cars [...] could have more cooperative programming.

It concludes by quoting a mathematical physicist (not involved in this specific study) from the University of Tokyo:

Today’s drivers can learn at least one thing from ants to avoid causing a traffic jam, Nishinari says: don’t tailgate. By leaving room between their car and the one ahead of them, drivers can absorb a wave of braking in dense traffic conditions that would otherwise be amplified into a full-blown “phantom” traffic jam with no obvious cause.

So it seems if we were less greedy when confronted with traffic, perhaps we could all get home sooner.

Comment Re:Roaming in EU (Score 1) 107

I recently spent a month in the UK, and for that subscribed to GiffGaff (https://www.giffgaff.com/). For 20 UKP (a discount from 25 because I was referred by a friend) I got "unlimited" data, text and calling in the EU. In reality, that's 20 gigs unrestricted data, then it's throttled. With no WiFi where I was staying, I tethered a laptop and tablet. I ended up using about 15 gigs of data, including a trip over to Belgium, where everything still worked.

As a Canadian, these are excellent prices, but I'm sure you could do better.

g

Comment Re:Unix systems had it first (Score 1) 67

> Unix don't currently ever return 23:59:60 as a valid time for any normal time related system call

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. If you look at the contents of struct tm, as returned by various time-related calls, you'll see:

                      int tm_sec; /* Seconds (0-60) */

That's 60, and not 59, for a reason. If leap seconds are added at midnight in your time zone, then you could see the 60.

g

Comment Re:hate to nitpick but... (Score 1) 216

Actually, not understanding the script probably cost a bit of time.

That regex is a very lame attempt to strip a path from a filename, leaving just the name part (the basename). However, it assumes firstly that if you have a backslash to start, every other delimiter would be a backslash, or conversely on forward slashes. Seeing Windoze allows both (mixed), that's a clue.

Apart from that, there's an error: if you match in the second part of the regex (after the `or' | ), the replacement should be \2, since \1 is not defined then (first part not matched). So if you match on the second part you get an empty string.

So, the thing to do is to match on the first part: give it any character(s) (the .+) then a backslash, then something other than a backslash, which will be replaced by the "something other". So "x\/a/b/c/d" -> "/a/b/c/d", and you have a root based path, which can be a bit easier to work with.

gdm@shrdlu.kw.net

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