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Comment Re:Interesting design (Score 1) 247

From the exploded views I've seen, the swash plates have races above and below the rollers on the connecting rods, so that the pistons can only move according to the curve on the plates. The pistons cannot lift off from the swash plates.

As for roller wear, we already have rollers on valve lifters and rockers as used on engines with camshafts, and wear is not a concern there given proper lubrication and maintenance (change the oil per the recommended schedule). Wear on the swash plates might be an issue, but again something that has already been addressed on crankshafts or eccentric shafts (on Wankel engines), where journal wear isn't much of a concern with proper lubrication.

Comment Re:Only the air is free (Score 4, Informative) 26

If you RTFA, you will find out that the scheme will be funded by a new windfall tax on banks and other megacorps, i.e. those directly profiting from inflation. Those corporations can then choose to cut their margins and avoid the windfall tax, or not do that and pay the tax.

Comment Re:Another nail in the coffin. (Score 2) 140

It's indeed optional -- assuming that unchecking it in settings does actually disable the feature. However, I had not known about this feature until reading it here, so I checked my search settings, and found that it was turned on. FWIW, Firefox never prompted me if I wanted to turn it on when I upgraded. So I'd say that any claims by Mozilla that the feature is off by default come from a spox who doesn't have all of the details or are deliberately misleading.

Comment Re:now this is news for nerds (Score 1) 172

Normally USB has a limit for keyboard (and other HID (Human Interface Device) gear) of 1000Hz, because the lowest polling rate you can specify is 1ms.

It's possible to go higher with a special driver, which is what Razor are doing.

And that's really the root of the problem, having to poll the device because, last I checked, USB doesn't do interrupts (maybe a new standard does, IDK). If gaming freaks want immediate response to their key and mouse button presses, they should use PS/2 ports.

Comment Re: Hypersonic flight is the application du jour (Score 1) 131

In the 1970s we had this thing called Sprint, an anti-ballistic missile designed to intercept re-entry vehicles as they dropped into the atmosphere. It could accelerate to Mach 10 in five seconds, which was necessary because the RVs only left a window of a few seconds before it reached its target. So, not only is it possible, but we've had the capability for a long time.

Comment (! smart) TVs (Score 5, Interesting) 170

I visited Dad this summer and while there he asked me to look at a TV in his house that could not receive OTA signals. It was an LG smart TV, maybe four or five years old, with built-in wifi. It errored out whenever I tried to do the automatic channel scan. Some online searches mentioned that it required Internet access (?!?) in order to do the channel scan, so I hooked it up to my cellphone's hotspot, but it still produced the same error after that. Further investigation showed that LG decomissioned the servers that the TV needed to download a region file before it'd run the channel scan.

This, having a non-upgradeable embedded computing device dependent on the grace and goodwill of its manufacturer, is why I don't intend to buy a smart TV ever. The issue with these Samsung TVs, while not as bad, still represent a loss of service for owners.

Comment Re:Balanced Ternary (Score 2) 164

There was some experiment in ternary logic in the beginning of computer history, but it made circuit more complex, so it stopped soon.

Per the Wikipedia page to which you linked, balanced ternary "cuts down the carry rate in multi-digit multiplication, and the roundingâ"truncation equivalence cuts down the carry rate in rounding on fractions. The one-digit multiplication table has no carries in balanced ternary, and the addition table has only two symmetric carries instead of three." And because integers in balanced ternary have a self-contained representation of positive and negative numbers, "the distinction between signed and unsigned numerals no longer needs to be made; thereby eliminating the need to duplicate operator sets into signed and unsigned varieties." That to me sounds like it'd make ALU circuits simpler, not more complex.

Comment Re: it ran on a 80386 (Score 4, Informative) 173

The first few x86 processor models came as follows: 8086: 16-bit registers, 16-bit data bus, 20-bit address bus 8088: cost-reduced version of the 8086 with 8-bit data bus 80186: new architecture, aimed at embedded applications, contains a lot of glue logic that required separate hardware on 8086 systems, same register/data/address sizes 80188: same as above but with 8-bit data bus 80286: new architecture, 24-bit address bus, protected mode

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