Speaking of Star Wars "side-movies", you can find a copy of the spliced-together reconstruction of the ultra-rare official mockumentary "Return of the Ewok" starring Warwick Davis and the ROTJ cast here: http://www.gappon.com/star-wars-return-of-the-ewok-1982-583635.html
I read somewhere that Google isn't not going to use Ogg Theora on YouYube because it isn't as efficient as H.264 and would eat up too much storage space on their datacenters.
A user comment at Mozillazine blog post "Video, Freedom And Mozilla" gives a few good points:
TK: I think that the fact that Google only enabled h.264 HTML5 video on youtube has more to do with the fact that all their videos were already encoded in that format (at 3 different resolutions), for iPhone and Android support. Therefore, it was relatively easy to just turn on the switch for beta HTML5 embedding.
Transcoding all those videos to Ogg Theora (with multiple copies for SD, HQ and HD) would require a major computing effort and storage space availability, that, sadly, just isnt worth it at this point. Remember, it took MONTHS in 2007 for youtube to transcode all of their h.263 FLV videos to h.264 mp4's for iPhone support. And that was before Youtube added 720p and 1080p HD video support. They'd literally have to double their datacenters' storage space!!
Actually, Flash is doing *much more* than a stand-alone video player, that's why a stand-alone video player will eat less resources.
Mike Melanson, the lead engineer of the Linux Flash Player team explains the technical challenges in his latest blog post, Solving Different Problems:
The Flash Player has to do a little bit more. In addition to decoding the data, it has to convert YUV data to the RGB colorspace and combine the image with other Flash elements. Then it has to cooperate with another application (web browser) to present the video to the user.
So the dedicated media player solves a problem: Generally, it plays linear media files from start to finish while allowing user interaction in the form of random seeking along the timeline. That's the most basic, trained monkey-type of labor in video playback. At most, the player might handle DVD menus.
Flash Player solves a different problem: It plays linear media files from start to finish while combining the video with a wide array of graphical and interactive elements (buttons, bitmaps, vector graphics, filters), as well as providing network, webcam, and microphone facilities, all programmable via a full-featured scripting language, and all easily accessible via a web browser using a plugin that most of the browsing population already has installed.
You seem to forget that video is not the only thing people use Flash for.
Actually, Flash Player performance on the Mac hasn't been up to par with that on Windows because Apple hasn't been cooperating with Adobe in efforts to improve the Flash Player on the Mac. See Adobe employee Lee Brimelow's post on the matter:
@Reda not going to rehash this too much because I said it in my other posts. Apple is not cooperating in our attempts to improve the performance of the Flash Player on the Mac. Microsoft is, and in FP 10.1 we cut the CPU utilization in half for watching video. Same with other mobile device manufactures. We would love to work with Apple to do the same but they are making a strategic decision not too so that they can increase their revenue. Hey thats business.
Actually, Flash Player has supported the playback of H.264 since 2007 and Flash Player is one of the biggest reasons why a lot of videos have now been encoded to H.264 on the web (H.264 used to be mostly only used for Blu-ray, not so much web videos).
A lot of people are confused about FLV. FLV is not a codec, it's a container. The video inside is usually encoded in Sorensen Spark, On2 VP6 or H.264.
The problem solved by Flash video wasnt can I show a video? Instead, Flash solved can everyone watch my video? HTML5 video doesnt provide this solution; it just adds another approach to the incompatibility pile.
HTML5 isn't going to change things unless browser vendors agree on a common codec.
Also, unless HTML5's video spec finds a way to implement DRM on video stream playback (which Flash does), studios and major media content providers who want to protect their content aren't going to bite on "HTML5 video".
Now regarding performance, given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system. We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this. Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to CoreAnimation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering.
Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on -- for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8 Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34% of CPU on Mac versus 16% on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video.
Parent is correct. The primary market of this kind of weapon is for military and law enforcement because there's a lot of fatalities/serious injuries caused by the bad guy grabbing the weapon from the police officer.
This tech/concept has been is more than a decade old and I used to see it get featured on Discovery Channel/National Geographic every so often for years now.
Or flash games? Really? There's no keyboard or mouse to play them, assuming that flash performance is going to be worthwhile anyway. How many flash games are there that are completely playable via clicking?
You, good sir, are talking out of your ass. Obviously you haven't been playing Flash games. Mouse-only Flash games used to be the predominant form of Flash games and they still consist a significant portion of them. Just do a simple Google search on the top Flash games of the past decade and look at the lists. Example. Be sure to also check out Ferry Halim's Orisinal. These would have no problems running on a 1024x768 tablet.
This isn't a huge loss, and more than made up for in app store games.
There are more and better fun flash games on the browser than there are App store games. The wealth of flash games is just incredible. The App Store does not more than make up for this and not all App Store games are free.
The same is true for iPhone games. Further, the overwhelming majority of Flash games will be unplayable on a multitouch device. They just aren't designed to be played by nothing more than clicking the mouse.
Huh? You obviously haven't been playing much Flash games, have you? Mouse-only Flash games have been around since forever. They constitute quite a significant portion of Flash games and would have no problems running on a stylus/tablet device. Try visiting Ferry Halim's awards-winning Orisinal games. Tapping on touch devices/tablets is no problem too since those are just normal mouse calls on Flash. No problem with em running on multi-touch too since since the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 (coming out on both desktop and mobile devices) has multi-touch support.
Regarding Mac performance, from what I know, there's an certain class & method needed by Adobe engineers to do certain acceleration on OSX, but access isn't being given by Apple's APIs. With Linux acceleration (Flash has now been using the GPU for acceleration for a while), there's quite a number of complications like incompatibility with Compiz Fusion enabled (See this entry by Penguin.swf, one of the lead Flash engineers working on Linux -> http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2008/05/flash_uses_the_gpu.html.
Check out John Gruber's excellent post at http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash: I've been hard on Flash Player for Mac OS X, but this performance situation is not entirely in Adobe's hands. On Windows, Flash makes use of hardware decoding for H.264, if available. On Mac OS X, it does not. This is one reason why Flash video playback performs better on Windows than Mac OS X, and also why H.264 playback on Mac OS X is better through QuickTime (which does use hardware decoding).
According to Adobe, though, this is because they can't. Heres an entry from their Flash Player FAQ:
Q. Why is hardware decoding of H.264 only supported on the Windows platform?
A. In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate when to support this feature on Mac and Linux platforms in future releases.
Adobe platform evangelist Lee Brimelow posted a weblog entry addressing this:
But let's talk more about the Flash Player on the Mac. If it is not 100% on par with the Windows player people assume that it is all our fault. The facts show that this is simply not the case. Let's take for example the question of hardware acceleration for H.264 video that we released with Flash Player 10.1. Here you can see some published results for how much the situation has improved on Windows. Unfortunately we could not add this acceleration to the Mac player because Apple does not provide a public API to make this happen. You can easily verify that by asking Apple. Im happy to say that we still made some improvements for the Mac player when it comes to video playback, but we simply could not implement the hardware acceleration. This is but one example of stumbling blocks we face when it comes to Apple.
And yes, Flash is a gaming platform unparalleled on the browser. You may not like Flash games, but a lot of people do. Flash has also ushered back the golden age of game development in the 80s where you could have just 1-3 people teams pumping out fun games, unlike in the late 90's to early 2000s before the explosion of casual gaming where to push out a game in the industry meant spending millions of dollars with tens to hundreds of developers per project, and it was all 3D, 3D, 3D and idea rehashes.
The ease with which authors can ties together together animation, illustration, design, sound & interaction on Flash is has no equal. Not everyone is a developer and that's why HTML5 will not kill Flash.
Coding slick GUIs and programmatic animation ain't an easy task and designers/animators/multimedia artists without programming backgrounds can't pull those off easily. Flash changed that.
H.264 video is also here now with YouTube, but Mozilla Foundation ain't willing to pony up for the proprietary codec so don't expect to see an H.264 bundled video player on Firefox soon. These HTML5 in-browser media players ain't as easy to reskin and meld with other interactive elements as Flash though so you can go stay in your bland Jakob Nielsen-esque world for all everyone else cares.
Btw, re: Flash's sub-par performance on the Mac, it's not all Adobe's fault. See this post from Lee Brimelow of Adobe (scroll down to comment #62):
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1703 "Apple is not cooperating in our attempts to improve the performance of the Flash Player on the Mac. Microsoft is, and in FP 10.1 we cut the CPU utilization in half for watching video. Same with other mobile device manufactures. We would love to work with Apple to do the same but they are making a strategic decision not too so that they can increase their revenue. Hey thats business. Another thing to note is that the site you showed is filled with Flash and just because it takes up a lot of CPU doesnt mean that kids will not want to play with it. Give people the option is what Im saying."
I sure hope they don't release the "Misa Jar Jar Binks".
Misa day startin pretty okee-day with a brisky morning munchy, then BOOM! Gettin very scared and grabbin that Jedi and POW! Misa here! Misa gettin' very very scared!
I really love what Hillary Clinton said in the article:
"Ultimately, this issue isn't just about information freedom -- it is about what kind of world we want and what kind of world we will inhabit," she said.
"It's about whether we live on a planet with one Internet, one global community and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors."
Really lovely and Charles Stross-ian, brings a tear to my eye:)
I have a friend in Shanghai, and it sucks because when I send him video links on Youtube, he can't view them because they're firewalled from Youtube.
Kudos for giving countries like this access to freedom of information.
It's like being only allowed to watch State-sponsored TV and government approved books in libraries, and then suddenly being allowed to experience the wealth of the world.
4chan and the dark underbelly of the internet aside, I hope this gives people a taste of culture/information other than what's force-fed down their throats and see what they're missing out on.
It would be fun to perform one's own statistical analysis of the list:)
Here's the top 20 most common passwords used according to the report:
Rank Password # of Users
1 123456 290731
2 12345 79078
3 123456789 76790
4 Password 61958
5 iloveyou 51622
6 princess 35231
7 rockyou 22588
8 1234567 21726
9 12345678 20553
10 abc123 17542
11 Nicole 17168
12 Daniel 16409
13 babygirl 16094
14 monkey 15294
15 Jessica 15162
16 Lovely 14950
17 michael 14898
18 Ashley 14329
19 654321 13984
20 Qwerty 13856
Shouldn't the same privacy logic apply even more to your laptops and personal electronic devices when you're entering U.S. borders?
Having these people search your hard drive is an invasion of privacy.
Adobe became aware on January 2, 2010 of a computer security incident involving a sophisticated, coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies. We are currently in contact with other companies and are investigating the incident. At this time, we have no evidence to indicate that any sensitive information--including customer, financial, employee or any other sensitive data--has been compromised. We anticipate the full investigation will take quite some time to complete. We have and will continue to use information gained from this attack to make infrastructure improvements to enhance security for Adobe, our customers and our partners.
Speaking of which, Serious Sam HD (the updated version of Serious Sam 1) is on massive sale this weekend only until Monday on Steam!Down to $6.79 from $20! Man, Steam game sales are awesome. I now have more games than I can possibly play because of the recent Steam Holiday Sale which had games at prices where you shouldn't even bother with pirating:P
That being said, the Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition can be gotten from Good Old Gamesfor only $5.99. The nice thing about GOG is that you can download any of the games you purchase from them again anytime (just log in to your account), and these classic games have absolutely no DRM (unlike Steam where Steam has to be running for your games to run).
Also, if you're going to give old Duke3D a spin, don't forget to grab the fan-made Duke Nukem High Resolution Pack which will give you high resolution textures, actual 3D models and a windows-native 3D hardware acceleration!
Well, one type of game where this would probably work out well was Lionhead's Black and White series where you controlled a hand floating in 3D space.
That being said, as a PC desktop and not a living room on-the-couch type controller, this could end up being tiring for the user to use over extended periods of time because you'll be holding your hand up all the time with no support unlike with a mouse/keyboard where your hands are resting on your desk.
I recall reading about why 3D mice failed or why Minority Report interfaces may not be as viable - it's very tiring for users to hold up and wave their hands in the air for extended periods of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of Star Wars "side-movies", you can find a copy of the spliced-together reconstruction of the ultra-rare official mockumentary "Return of the Ewok" starring Warwick Davis and the ROTJ cast here: http://www.gappon.com/star-wars-return-of-the-ewok-1982-583635.html
More info about it at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_the_Ewok
It's not available commercially anywhere, so I guess sharing the download link is historical/digital preservation and not piracy.
According to CNN, Apple isn't allowing Flash on the iPhone/iPad because because it doesn't want its devices to be the best porn products on the planet.
lol
Seriously though, the article is a good read: Behind the Adobe-Apple cold war
TK: I think that the fact that Google only enabled h.264 HTML5 video on youtube has more to do with the fact that all their videos were already encoded in that format (at 3 different resolutions), for iPhone and Android support. Therefore, it was relatively easy to just turn on the switch for beta HTML5 embedding.
Transcoding all those videos to Ogg Theora (with multiple copies for SD, HQ and HD) would require a major computing effort and storage space availability, that, sadly, just isnt worth it at this point. Remember, it took MONTHS in 2007 for youtube to transcode all of their h.263 FLV videos to h.264 mp4's for iPhone support. And that was before Youtube added 720p and 1080p HD video support. They'd literally have to double their datacenters' storage space!!
The recent quote by Brandon Watson is so ironic, yet so true: It is a humorous world in how Microsoft is much more open than Apple
Mike Melanson, the lead engineer of the Linux Flash Player team explains the technical challenges in his latest blog post, Solving Different Problems:
The Flash Player has to do a little bit more. In addition to decoding the data, it has to convert YUV data to the RGB colorspace and combine the image with other Flash elements. Then it has to cooperate with another application (web browser) to present the video to the user.
So the dedicated media player solves a problem: Generally, it plays linear media files from start to finish while allowing user interaction in the form of random seeking along the timeline. That's the most basic, trained monkey-type of labor in video playback. At most, the player might handle DVD menus.
Flash Player solves a different problem: It plays linear media files from start to finish while combining the video with a wide array of graphical and interactive elements (buttons, bitmaps, vector graphics, filters), as well as providing network, webcam, and microphone facilities, all programmable via a full-featured scripting language, and all easily accessible via a web browser using a plugin that most of the browsing population already has installed.
You seem to forget that video is not the only thing people use Flash for.
@Reda not going to rehash this too much because I said it in my other posts. Apple is not cooperating in our attempts to improve the performance of the Flash Player on the Mac. Microsoft is, and in FP 10.1 we cut the CPU utilization in half for watching video. Same with other mobile device manufactures. We would love to work with Apple to do the same but they are making a strategic decision not too so that they can increase their revenue. Hey thats business.
Actually, Flash Player has supported the playback of H.264 since 2007 and Flash Player is one of the biggest reasons why a lot of videos have now been encoded to H.264 on the web (H.264 used to be mostly only used for Blu-ray, not so much web videos).
A lot of people are confused about FLV. FLV is not a codec, it's a container. The video inside is usually encoded in Sorensen Spark, On2 VP6 or H.264.
The problem solved by Flash video wasnt can I show a video? Instead, Flash solved can everyone watch my video? HTML5 video doesnt provide this solution; it just adds another approach to the incompatibility pile.
HTML5 isn't going to change things unless browser vendors agree on a common codec.
Also, unless HTML5's video spec finds a way to implement DRM on video stream playback (which Flash does), studios and major media content providers who want to protect their content aren't going to bite on "HTML5 video".
Now regarding performance, given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system. We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this. Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to CoreAnimation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering.
Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on -- for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8 Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34% of CPU on Mac versus 16% on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video.
Exactly the sentiment from an Adobe employee who's a big Apple fan & loyal customer:
Dear Apple 1984 Called, They Want Their Video Back
Parent is correct. The primary market of this kind of weapon is for military and law enforcement because there's a lot of fatalities/serious injuries caused by the bad guy grabbing the weapon from the police officer.
This tech/concept has been is more than a decade old and I used to see it get featured on Discovery Channel/National Geographic every so often for years now.
Here's a paper on it from way back in 1994.
Here's an article on it from WIRED back in 2002
If you Google around, you'll get a lot of results of press releases about similar products since 2000.
Or flash games? Really? There's no keyboard or mouse to play them, assuming that flash performance is going to be worthwhile anyway. How many flash games are there that are completely playable via clicking?
You, good sir, are talking out of your ass. Obviously you haven't been playing Flash games. Mouse-only Flash games used to be the predominant form of Flash games and they still consist a significant portion of them. Just do a simple Google search on the top Flash games of the past decade and look at the lists. Example. Be sure to also check out Ferry Halim's Orisinal. These would have no problems running on a 1024x768 tablet.
This isn't a huge loss, and more than made up for in app store games.
There are more and better fun flash games on the browser than there are App store games. The wealth of flash games is just incredible. The App Store does not more than make up for this and not all App Store games are free.
The same is true for iPhone games. Further, the overwhelming majority of Flash games will be unplayable on a multitouch device. They just aren't designed to be played by nothing more than clicking the mouse.
Huh? You obviously haven't been playing much Flash games, have you? Mouse-only Flash games have been around since forever. They constitute quite a significant portion of Flash games and would have no problems running on a stylus/tablet device. Try visiting Ferry Halim's awards-winning Orisinal games. Tapping on touch devices/tablets is no problem too since those are just normal mouse calls on Flash. No problem with em running on multi-touch too since since the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 (coming out on both desktop and mobile devices) has multi-touch support.
Regarding Mac performance, from what I know, there's an certain class & method needed by Adobe engineers to do certain acceleration on OSX, but access isn't being given by Apple's APIs. With Linux acceleration (Flash has now been using the GPU for acceleration for a while), there's quite a number of complications like incompatibility with Compiz Fusion enabled (See this entry by Penguin.swf, one of the lead Flash engineers working on Linux -> http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2008/05/flash_uses_the_gpu.html.
Check out John Gruber's excellent post at http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash:
I've been hard on Flash Player for Mac OS X, but this performance situation is not entirely in Adobe's hands. On Windows, Flash makes use of hardware decoding for H.264, if available. On Mac OS X, it does not. This is one reason why Flash video playback performs better on Windows than Mac OS X, and also why H.264 playback on Mac OS X is better through QuickTime (which does use hardware decoding).
According to Adobe, though, this is because they can't. Heres an entry from their Flash Player FAQ:
Q. Why is hardware decoding of H.264 only supported on the Windows platform?
A. In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate when to support this feature on Mac and Linux platforms in future releases.
Adobe platform evangelist Lee Brimelow posted a weblog entry addressing this:
But let's talk more about the Flash Player on the Mac. If it is not 100% on par with the Windows player people assume that it is all our fault. The facts show that this is simply not the case. Let's take for example the question of hardware acceleration for H.264 video that we released with Flash Player 10.1. Here you can see some published results for how much the situation has improved on Windows. Unfortunately we could not add this acceleration to the Mac player because Apple does not provide a public API to make this happen. You can easily verify that by asking Apple. Im happy to say that we still made some improvements for the Mac player when it comes to video playback, but we simply could not implement the hardware acceleration. This is but one example of stumbling blocks we face when it comes to Apple.
News Flash bro.
You may not like/need Flash, but a lot of people like it, maybe most.
Why don't you check out the current Ars Technica poll on how many people would like to have Flash on the iPad:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/poll-technica-do-you-want-flash-on-the-ipad.ars
And yes, Flash is a gaming platform unparalleled on the browser. You may not like Flash games, but a lot of people do. Flash has also ushered back the golden age of game development in the 80s where you could have just 1-3 people teams pumping out fun games, unlike in the late 90's to early 2000s before the explosion of casual gaming where to push out a game in the industry meant spending millions of dollars with tens to hundreds of developers per project, and it was all 3D, 3D, 3D and idea rehashes.
The ease with which authors can ties together together animation, illustration, design, sound & interaction on Flash is has no equal. Not everyone is a developer and that's why HTML5 will not kill Flash.
Coding slick GUIs and programmatic animation ain't an easy task and designers/animators/multimedia artists without programming backgrounds can't pull those off easily. Flash changed that.
H.264 video is also here now with YouTube, but Mozilla Foundation ain't willing to pony up for the proprietary codec so don't expect to see an H.264 bundled video player on Firefox soon. These HTML5 in-browser media players ain't as easy to reskin and meld with other interactive elements as Flash though so you can go stay in your bland Jakob Nielsen-esque world for all everyone else cares.
Btw, re: Flash's sub-par performance on the Mac, it's not all Adobe's fault. See this post from Lee Brimelow of Adobe (scroll down to comment #62):
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1703
"Apple is not cooperating in our attempts to improve the performance of the Flash Player on the Mac. Microsoft is, and in FP 10.1 we cut the CPU utilization in half for watching video. Same with other mobile device manufactures. We would love to work with Apple to do the same but they are making a strategic decision not too so that they can increase their revenue. Hey thats business. Another thing to note is that the site you showed is filled with Flash and just because it takes up a lot of CPU doesnt mean that kids will not want to play with it. Give people the option is what Im saying."
It is a humorous world in how Microsoft is much more open than Apple.
Wow. Like the iPhone and OSX aren't proprietary. Perhaps you'd like to see those fade into Oblivion too?
I sure hope they don't release the "Misa Jar Jar Binks".
Misa day startin pretty okee-day with a brisky morning munchy, then BOOM! Gettin very scared and grabbin that Jedi and POW! Misa here! Misa gettin' very very scared!
I really love what Hillary Clinton said in the article:
:)
"Ultimately, this issue isn't just about information freedom -- it is about what kind of world we want and what kind of world we will inhabit," she said.
"It's about whether we live on a planet with one Internet, one global community and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors."
Really lovely and Charles Stross-ian, brings a tear to my eye
I have a friend in Shanghai, and it sucks because when I send him video links on Youtube, he can't view them because they're firewalled from Youtube.
Kudos for giving countries like this access to freedom of information.
It's like being only allowed to watch State-sponsored TV and government approved books in libraries, and then suddenly being allowed to experience the wealth of the world.
4chan and the dark underbelly of the internet aside, I hope this gives people a taste of culture/information other than what's force-fed down their throats and see what they're missing out on.
Does anyone have the list of passwords itself?
:)
It would be fun to perform one's own statistical analysis of the list
Here's the top 20 most common passwords used according to the report:
Rank Password # of Users
1 123456 290731
2 12345 79078
3 123456789 76790
4 Password 61958
5 iloveyou 51622
6 princess 35231
7 rockyou 22588
8 1234567 21726
9 12345678 20553
10 abc123 17542
11 Nicole 17168
12 Daniel 16409
13 babygirl 16094
14 monkey 15294
15 Jessica 15162
16 Lovely 14950
17 michael 14898
18 Ashley 14329
19 654321 13984
20 Qwerty 13856
Shouldn't the same privacy logic apply even more to your laptops and personal electronic devices when you're entering U.S. borders? Having these people search your hard drive is an invasion of privacy.
Well, all I can say is that 10 years from now, we'll be looking at this with 2020 hindsight.
*ducks*
Looks like Adobe could have been one of the other said targets in the cyber attack. Adobe was just issued this press release today:
Adobe Investigates Corporate Network Security Issue
http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/01/adobe_investigates_corporate_n.html
Posted by Pooja Prasad on January 12, 2010 3:16 PM
Adobe became aware on January 2, 2010 of a computer security incident involving a sophisticated, coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies. We are currently in contact with other companies and are investigating the incident. At this time, we have no evidence to indicate that any sensitive information--including customer, financial, employee or any other sensitive data--has been compromised. We anticipate the full investigation will take quite some time to complete. We have and will continue to use information gained from this attack to make infrastructure improvements to enhance security for Adobe, our customers and our partners.
Speaking of which, Serious Sam HD (the updated version of Serious Sam 1) is on massive sale this weekend only until Monday on Steam! Down to $6.79 from $20! Man, Steam game sales are awesome. I now have more games than I can possibly play because of the recent Steam Holiday Sale which had games at prices where you shouldn't even bother with pirating :P
That being said, the Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition can be gotten from Good Old Games for only $5.99. The nice thing about GOG is that you can download any of the games you purchase from them again anytime (just log in to your account), and these classic games have absolutely no DRM (unlike Steam where Steam has to be running for your games to run).
Also, if you're going to give old Duke3D a spin, don't forget to grab the fan-made Duke Nukem High Resolution Pack which will give you high resolution textures, actual 3D models and a windows-native 3D hardware acceleration!
Cheers!
Well, one type of game where this would probably work out well was Lionhead's Black and White series where you controlled a hand floating in 3D space.
That being said, as a PC desktop and not a living room on-the-couch type controller, this could end up being tiring for the user to use over extended periods of time because you'll be holding your hand up all the time with no support unlike with a mouse/keyboard where your hands are resting on your desk.
I recall reading about why 3D mice failed or why Minority Report interfaces may not be as viable - it's very tiring for users to hold up and wave their hands in the air for extended periods of time.
They forgot to add humans. Humans are animals too :P
Robert Rodriguez (director of Desperado) was one and got most of his money to fund El Mariachi as an experimental drug testing volunteer.