For over a century, people have tried to cope with understanding Einstein’s special theory of relativity and his famous equation, E=MC2. There have been long videos and visualizations that attempted to dumb down both the process that Einstein used to come up with the theories and the way that our minds can wrap themselves around them.
Here, the good folks at Minute Physics did as their namesake implies: they explained it to us in a pair of 2-minute videos that (should) make it easier to comprehend.
First, let’s look at the special theory of relativity:
Yahoo has announced it will soon support the Do Not Track privacy header across its sprawling network of websites. Supporting Do Not Track means you will soon be able to easily tell Yahoo to stop tracking your movements around the web.
Behavioral advertising, as such tracking is known, is a common practice on the web. Advertisers use cookies to track your clicks, watching which sites you visit, what you buy and even, in the case of mobile browsers, where you go. Often the sites tracking you are not just the sites you’ve actually visited, but third-party sites running ads on those pages.
Much like the Do Not Call registry, the Do Not Track system offers a way to opt out of this third-party web tracking.
The Do Not Track header now works in every major desktop browser except Google Chrome, though none of them turn it on by default. Still, for privacy-concerned users savvy enough to enable Do Not Track, the header offers a quick and easy way to tell advertisers that you don’t want to be followed while you browse the web.
Numerous online advertising groups already respect the Do Not Track header and refrain from tracking users that enable it. Today’s announcement means that, starting this summer, you can add Yahoo to the list of companies that will stop tracking you if you’ve enabled Do Not Track in your web browser.
Of course, there are still many advertisers and websites that don’t yet support Do Not Track. If you’re concerned about your online privacy and don’t want to rely on the goodwill of advertisers, there are other, more aggressive steps you can take to limit how your tracked on the web. See our earlier post on browser add-ons that help stop web tracking for more details.
Adobe has released Flash Player 11.2 and has decided it’s high time the once-ubiquitous browser plug-in started earning the company a bit of money.
Starting Aug. 1, 2012, Adobe will begin taking a 9 percent cut of game developers’ net revenue over $50,000.
For most Flash developers that means the new revenue sharing plan will not have any effect, but for the very successful companies building Flash-based games using the new domain memory in combination with the Stage 3D hardware acceleration, the change may affect the bottom line.
Users of Flash Player 11 don’t need to pay anything.
There are two exceptions to Adobe’s new revenue-sharing model. The first way to avoid it is to crank out your app now, before that Aug. 1 deadline arrives. The second option is to switch over the developing for AIR, in which case there is no revenue sharing. That means that the new rules don’t apply to any AIR apps compiled to standalone apps for iOS or Android.
So what are you getting for your 9 percent fee? Access to what Adobe is calling Flash’s “premium” features category. The premium features all revolve around the hardware-accelerated Stage 3D graphics in Flash Player 11. The Stage 3D rendering in Flash 11 consists of a low level API that offers hardware-accelerated 2-D and 3-D graphics. Adobe claims that Stage 3D can deliver “console-quality games” in the browser.
Adobe says the new premium-tier features and the accompanying fees are aimed at “game developers interested in creating the most advanced, graphically sophisticated, next-generation games for the web.”
Of course developers may also note that Adobe’s announcement comes on the heels of an impressive HTML5 gaming demo from Mozilla, which might offer some game developers another possible way to avoid Adobe’s revenue sharing plan.
NyanCat is one of several Easter eggs in BrowserQuest
Mozilla has partnered with developers at Little Workshop to launch BrowserQuest, a Zelda-inspired multiplayer roleplaying game built entirely on the open web stack — HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.
While BrowserQuest is a fun game to play, it was written as much to prove a point as to be a game — namely, that web developers no longer need to rely on Flash to create sophisticated online games. Using today’s web standards, game developers can build impressively complex games that work across devices.
To give BrowserQuest a try, just head on over to the site and pick a username. BrowserQuest will work in most modern web browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera (provided you enable WebSockets), Mobile Safari and Firefox for Android.
In an effort to help game developers looking to build more serious HTML5-based games, the code behind BrowserQuest has been released on GitHub.
BrowserQuest’s backend, which handles the real-time multiplayer aspect of the game, is written in JavaScript and runs on Node.js. As you would expect BrowserQuest uses the HTML5 Canvas element to actually render its 16-bit-style world and hooks into the HTML5 audio APIs for sound effects.
BrowserQuest is responsive as well, using @media queries to adapt to the size of your screen.
WebSockets — which are back, after being rewritten to fix some early flaws — handle the chat feature, which allows players to communicate within BrowserQuest. The final element in BrowserQuest’s HTML5 puzzle is localStorage, which saves your progress as you move through the game.
Although designed as much to showcase the power of WebSockets as to be an actual videogame, BrowserQuest is addictive and can easily suck you into its world for an entire morning if you’re not careful. (Not that we’d know.) There are also quite a few Easter eggs hidden away in its depths.
Be happy. You have survived another close call with asteroid destruction: the April Fools Day asteroid—technically called 2012 EG5—passed today at half the distance between the Earth and the Moon: 143,000 miles. More »
Roll that spliff phatly, pack some fresh ice into the binger, and set the Volcano to “toastify.” It’s time for tonight’s Stoner Channel. We’ve collected our best high-times material for the discerning pothead so sit back, relax, and pass that shit on the left, yo. More »
iPhones. iPads. Android. We’ve updated all of our essential apps lists to include a few forgotten favorites, some long awaited arrivals and, as always, even more amazing apps. Check them out! More »
Adobe has released Flash Player 11.2 and has decided it’s high time the once-ubiquitous browser plug-in started earning the company a bit of money.
