I fail to see how this proposed behavior solves anything. Most software out there was written to assume that if you get back an address DNS resolution worked, if there was a problem you get back something like NXDOMAIN. Lots of apps are not going to report any problems if they get back 127.0.53.53, there are going to sit and wait for the connection to time out or depending on how the system is configured report connection refused. Leaving the user with no way to know the name was wrong.

It should be connection refused for most client systems. Because 127.0.53.53 is smack dab in 127/8 space - aka localhost space where all connections inside of 127/8 are supposed to resolve to itself, despite the actual IP used. For the few that have actual services in use (FTP, HTTP, etc), it's going to lead to a confusing mess.

The demand for this technology is there, as demonstrated by the popularity of 3D films. The availability of the technology to the consumer audience at the price point that will spark widespread adoption is not.

  The technology was developed and released at a time when consumers have little extra money to adopt the technology. Alongside that, the distribution model for 3DTV is flawed, demanding a clear chain of the 3DTV capable devices all be purchased in order to enable the functionality. Finally, there's not a single implementation of 3DTV, but rather several including side-by-side, interlace, every-other-frame, which has led to some interesting bugs affecting specific makes and models that fail to support these methods correctly.

  I believe my first point is ultimately what has delayed widespread adoption of 3DTV tech and caused some to call it a "fad".

Having actually done 3D work, you're partially right.

Though, the major issue with 3DTV is the damn glasses. While the percentage of spectacle wearers is fairly high, there's a good chunk of the population who don't, and wearing 3D glasses is goofy. Even among spectacle wearers 3D glasses are often ill-fitting and ill-wearing.

Especially since multitasking is the norm these days where people may look at the screen, then look elsewhere (smartphone, tablet, laptop) to tweet or other stuff, and dealing with the glasses in this case is even more annoying.

If 3DTV is to take off, you're going to need a glasses free display - which is still in the early R&D phase. And no, it's not like the 3DS screen (which is mediocre). I've seen real demos of it and it's actually very impressive (it was multi-view technology so the view shifts as you move about, creating a HUGE 120 degree viewing angle).

The signal formats are interesting since there are 4 primary formats - 3 of them halve a resolution, the aast is full res - side-by-side (quite common for existing implementations), top-and-bottom and line-interleaved (usually when converting interleaved input to progressive), with the last being frame-packed (a full-res version of top-and-bottom). Line interleaved is annoying to deal with, Frame packed is probably most common as that's what Blu-Ray uses (you want the quality, right? Well it's the only full-resolution format). Game consoles normally use side-by-side for 3D as it requires no change in hardware.

As the blog in EE Times ("The Case for Free, Open Instruction Sets") argues, an ARM license costs $1M to $10M and takes 6 to 24 months to negotiate and then they take a small royalty per chip.
http://www.eetimes.com/author....

The proprietary instruction sets (ARM, IBM, Intel) have indeed evolved; that is not the problem. The problem is that you're not allowed to share implementations of the proprietary instruction sets with others. Thus, the lowRISC project is using a design from UC Berkeley for free without having to take the time or money to negotiate a contract, and they can modify it as much as they desire. Can't do that with ARM.

A more hidden advantage is that a lower complexity chip is easier to fab.

A modern ARM core that you get spending $1M would be easily a 6-7 Metal process, and masks aren't cheap ($100K each. And a 6-7 Metal would easily need 15-20 masks, so $2M outlay before the first chip is made).

If the low complexity design can get away with a 4Metal design, that can easily halve the cost of just starting up. Plus if you use lower end technologies that they're about to retire instead of the latest and greatest, that'll cut fab costs down even more.

And Unity 5 is supposed to support multi-threaded physics as well. That should translate into a huge performance boost.

KSP, a game created by people who have never made a game before, that pushes both Unity and the best processors to their max. A game actually written to take advantage of a premium system instead of being written to a console level and ported.

I find it amusing that an Xbox One and PS4 would rank as low end computers for this game.

So much for Next-Gen.

Well, given the purpose of the game is educational, porting to consoles would be pointless. It's also an indie title hence its relatively low cost.

As for high end gaming PCs, well, yeah, the consoles have never matched what you could throw money at. But compared to the average Windows machine which doesn't have such advanced graphics and such, it probably is next-gen.

You have to remember a console is optimized for cost over its entire life - sure Sony and Microsoft could put the guts of a $2000 gaming PC in their consoles, but they'd either cost a lot of money, or never make back their cost.

It's also why Steam Machines are going to be pretty interesting in what you can stuff inside a box for $500 and how long they last - I don't see them lasting more than maybe 2-3 years before people in general give up on them. Either they'd be forced to upgrade something, or spend way more money in the end. I dare anyone to be able to take a $500 steam machine today and use it to the bitter end when the Xbox Two or PS5 are released.

Is there a list of guaranteed to never be used names? .local is not really that usefull for anything but the most simple LANs

Not to mention .local is used by IETF's ZeroConf (aka Bonjour) protocol to resolve using mDNS.

(It comes in handy on networks where the internal DNS servers don't accept registrations so your Linux machines can still be referenced using mDNS as if it was done regularly).

And well, on home networks that don't typically run DNS, well, mDNS makes it easy to find where that )(@*&%@)( printer is you just connected.

You're just miffed because I have a hotel on Park Place and three houses on Boardwalk.

Personal experience has it that the low rent district is the best - purely because no one wants it, and you can go to hotels readily. So you're pretty much dinging everyone early on in the game and getting tons of money out of it.

ANyhow, if the mere existence of alternative coins already devalues bitcoin, then bitcoin has already lost. Because now the value of your currency is dependent on the mere existence of another currency and how they choose to act.

That's like saying the value of the US Dollar can depend on how many zeroes Zimbabwe decided to put on their money today - while there is an influence (thanks to currency conversion) it doesn't influence the end user THAT much. Bread doesn't go up but USD$1 a loaf because Zimbabwe added three zeroes today instead two.

I think article poster is bitter that everyone realizes just how easy it is to do something like Bitcoin and that's undermining the value of those with significant holdings because any idiot can make their own currency and when it does, they lose 10% of their virtual holdings.

Heck, Ars Technica created their own currency to give everyone experience with doing a cryptocurrency. It could be used to buy pointless things to decorate your posts with (hats!), and that's it. No value otherwise since there's nothing else you could do with them on purpose. I suppose the interesting thing was is how many people went crazy with it and used high end rigs. Even though a couple of months later, they killed it all, wiped all wallets and even got rid of all the hats so everyone was back to the way they were. (And no, they actually said this at the beginning that it would happen in a few months so no point getting huge hauls).

Actually, even janitors and low level administration staff make a difference.

The new Employee who asks for something simple and reasonable to be done can get the response "sorry, you can not order me to do that" or he can just do it. In the latter case the new employee may get another picture of your company.

The team assistant with not even a bachelor degree can significantly influence the output of the specialist.

If i see that a demotivated mode of work is bussiness as usual in a company, then i run.

There is also a theme of interviews to ask the low-level receptionist and janitor about new prospects.- the thing being how the new hire treats people "lower than them" speaks volumes as to how they relate to other people.

In this case, the janitor or receptionist really do make business decisions. It's also a case of treating everyone equally.

Yet examples of all three exist today.

#1 - Chrome and IE do this. Windows VIsta and above implement User Account Control, which implements a major part of the sandboxing - Low Integrity Processes. A Low Integrity Process is limited in what it can do - it can only read and write one directory of the filesystem - the temp directory. It can't forcibly interact with regular processes - if you want IPC, you need to implement standard IPC.

IE uses this for downloads - the LIP part of IE does the webpage, and when you download a file, it spawns a download helper that pops up the "Open/Save/Cancel" and save dialogs. The LIP proceeds with the download, while the helper waits to move the file. This architecture means the LIP can't dismiss the download dialog.

#2 is implemented by Windows and OS X - Windows has signed binaries for the Windows provided binaries, while unsigned apps are asked if you want to run them. On OS X, it's a bit rougher - the default trust level is signed apps by either Apple or a trusted developer. You can temporarily bypass it for unsigned apps by holding CTRL on launch, but the apps have to be signed by the developer using an Apple-provided certificate or the Mac App Store in order to run without being noisy.

NOTE: OS X doesn't actually prompt for all unsigned apps - only from "untrusted sources" - e.g., the Internet. So as a developer, because it originated from the compiler (trusted), it isn't asked on your system.

And #3 is illustrated already.

Of these, only general purpose computers can do #1 and #2 - #3 is not possible unless you limit the OS (e.g., ChromeOS). Appliances can do #3, but you can't put it on a general computer.

What FPS BS? I deployed. I was under fire. Death was seen, bodies, human bones, discarded equipment with blood splotches, people shitting themselves, the whole nine yards. I still love FPS games. They are fun and are imaginary.

I think the FPS BS is that "war is cool" and "fighting is awesome" - the over-glorification of war. Whereas well, REAL wars aren't fun. They're tragic wastes of human life and put real toll on people (soldiers and civilians alike). And for most wars, done because some person wanted some inches of land or other reason to justify taking human life.

Basically the dad was annoyed that his kids had that view (war is NOT cool, war is NOT fun), so he brought them to a war zone to show them the reality of what they thought was cool.

You know the type - they're all badass because they can no-scope a shot thousands of feet away where the closest they've gotten to war is the nightly news.

Effectively, he's given his kids the ultimate "screen vs reality" speech. The FPS game may be fun (it's a game), but it in no way reflects reality, so enjoy it as a game, but don't think you're a badass and that war is cool because it isn't.

Both are terrible, and started going downhill around the same time, racing each other to the bottom - beginning in 2005 (when you started getting shows like Deadliest Catch and Decoding the Past, which became the prototype for many future series of increasingly less "reality"), and then full force by 2007 where you start getting too many shows to name.

Thank the threat of the ill-thought-out "a la carte" plans where instead of channels having to fight for subscribers as a group, they have to fight for subscribers individually.

This results in a race to the bottom lowest common denominator play where the goal is to get as many eyeballs as possible.

So what was once a cheap WWII theme channel now has to fight for eyeballs and subscribers on its own so the quality goes down in an attempt to attract the widest possible audience.

The other trick is that popular shows get moved to other channels so subscribers have to get them all.

All a la carte has done is moved the terribleness of network TV to cable since they all have to fight for the same attention.

Oh, and what sells is drama. Fake drama works, which is why all the "good" shows have to incorporate some form of interpersonal conflict.

Just another day in the law of unintended consequences. And in the meantime, speciality cable channels wither and die because they can no longer afford to produce high quality niche content on fewer subscribers. So all channels need to generalize.

The question is, will they have to?

I mean, maybe back when the original iPhone was released, people were releasing ever-tinier cellphones, then it made sense. But given that cellphones are going bigger and bigger, the pressure to make smaller and smaller SoCs is decreasing.

I mean, 3.5" was ginormous before. Now we have people buying phones with 6" screens and large, the amount of size reduction needed is practically nil.

The important question is whether they'll have the balls to block Google Toolbar.

Last time Java wanted me to update, it asked if I wanted to install Google Chrome!

Hrm...

Or it could be they're testing the next-generation of UIs so when those children grow up to be of serving age, they can easily sit down and use them in war.

They're children now, and will take at least a decade before something real comes out. That's about long enough to take the DARPA research stuff and implement in military hardware so by the time the children hit 18, it's ready.

DARPA is research, and it can take many years to commercialize the research. Being military related, well, a decade is probably the minimum amount of time it'll take.

Or it can be perfectly innocent research into human-computer-interactions, especially between military hardware and their drivers.

You could also boot with the install media and do a System Restore since Windows Update generates a checkpoint when you install updates.

Or you can boot the recovery partition on Windows (startup repair), and you can use it to restore from a previous restore point.

You should also be able to find a copy of the older gdi32.dll in the WinSxS directory (that's where all updates are stored - then the files are hard-linked to their final location in the Windows directory. You could, in theory just alter the hard link to point to the earlier version.

On Android, access to the contents of the device requires the screen to be unlocked. Does iOS also require this?

On iOS, it's the same - if you want to see your photos or other content, you have to unlock the phone (or slide to unlock if you don't have a passcode).

HOWEVER, I think if you plug in your phone for a sync (with iTunes to backup/install/etc), you don't get that as long as the connection was established as a trusted connection. (Plug into a new computer and it will charge, but not establish communications until you dismiss the dialog which requires unlocking the phone).

Not sure what happens if you have a passcode if you need to unlock it first to sync.