I’m happy to tell you that a new full-length “Dune” movie was just confirmed. I’m very happy to hear that.
Moreover, they promised it to be a big-budget production, yet still faithful to the original Frank Herbert’s script. Way to go, Paramount.
Remember, Dune was a base for first full-featured RTS game - Dune II. It’s related by many as a life-changing experience. If you haven’t read that one before - now’s the time to do so.
photo credit: grand duck
You can read it on Wired, and you’ll be able to read on more news protals going ahead. A short recap is:
Hackers attacked Epilepsy Foundation forums with a script that created hundreds of posts with blinking animation and javascript code to do more flashing. This, in turn, caused headaches and seizures for a lot of readers. The forums were closed for removing the images and securing.
I think there are two important point to note here:
First, it was the first physical attack done via a computer. It really did hurt someone without any special means, just a computer display. It travelled through Internet.
Rembeber the exploding computers in “Live free or die hard”? It all lookes childish - come on, how can a computer explode? And all those movies about viruses spreading into people’s minds through computer / TV networks. Well… here we go - one way was already found.
Second, epilepsy arguments were often used in web standards discussions, as to why we should not use blinking text and sharp colors in animations. I hope this lesson will be learned and we won’t hear “oh come on, how can a <blink> tag hurt someone?” anymore.
I have just upgraded my blog engine to Wordpress 2.5 Yep, I know it’s a bit early, but all the new features look promising, I’ve already seen some positive reviews of it, and - best of all - the new admin panel interface is very neat.
See the new admin interface yourselves:
And this is how it looked like in the old, 2.4 interface:
The new panel is more clear, colours are less intrusive, it’s much more web2.0-ish. Now we just need rounded corners and “make friend” button ;)
I found just one issue - the new multi-file picutre upload panel doesn’t work in Opera. But I’m getting used to new Javascript features not working in Opera…
OK, I know all of you heard this once or twice. Or even said that sometimes, maybe to cover up some bug, maybe because it was true. But I think there should be some border, after which you don’t say that maic phrase anymore. The “IT-guy” inside you (AKA conscience in the real world) should start screaming that this is not right. And that it went too far. But he didn’t, at least for the ones designing and supporting FireWire.
See - FireWire allows DMA from one device to another. Which of course can be used to do some bad things, like bypassing authentication or getting BIOS passwords. Which was reported to Microsoft 2 years ago (other OSes are affected too, but it’s always better seen to bash Microsoft than Open Source). Who, in turn, said the famous words “It’s a feature, it’s not a bug” and did nothing.
Well… when you can just unlock a working desktop without a password, I would say this is far behind the border. I would feel this in my guts. But the Microsoft guys must be thick-skined.
For all of you taking care of web accessibility - it might be a good idea for a logo or a symbol you would use on your website. It’s simply “www” in Braille alphabet.
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