"Premakes" The Empire Strikes Back (1950)
One Youtube user envisions what Star Wars would have looked like if it had been a 3D movie made in the fifties. The trailer is astonishingly authentic, mainly because it’s cobbled together from actual fifties movies like Flash Gordon, The Phantom Planet, and Buck Rogers. It may well be the most impressive Star Wars tribute video I’ve ever seen.
Check out a side-by-side, frame by frame comparison with the original footage, or watch more “premakes” at whoiseyevan’s YouTube Channel.
Making the Google Chrome Speed Tests
Today Google released a new beta build of their fastest version of Chrome to date for the Mac, Linux and Windows. From the Google Chrome Blog:
Today’s new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpiderbenchmarks over the previous beta channel release. In fact, looking back in time, Chrome’s performance has improved by as much as 213% and 305% on these two benchmarks since our very first beta.
Today’s beta release also includes a handful of new features. Not too long ago, weintroduced bookmark sync into the browser, which allows you to keep your bookmarks synchronized on multiple computers using your Google Account. Beta users can nowsynchronize not only bookmarks, but also browser preferences including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, and language. By popular demand especially from avid Chrome extensions users, you can now install and use Chrome extensions while inincognito mode.
Under the hood, today’s release contains the goodness of some new HTML5 features, namely Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop capabilities. Additionally, this is the first Chrome beta that features initial integration of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in with Chrome, so that you can browse a rich, dynamic web with added security and stability -- you’ll automatically receive security and feature updates for Flash Player with Chrome’s auto-update mechanism.
To try out all these new features, download Chrome on the Windows beta channel, or download the Mac or Linux betas.
Lastly, with this beta’s crazy speed improvements, we designed a series of equally unconventional speed tests for the browser. While the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks have their strengths, we felt that more could be done to measure speed on the browser. Here’s an early preview of how we designed, built, and implemented these speed tests. Stay tuned for the full results; we’ll post them here tomorrow.
The video that was made to illustrate how fast Chrome has become is phenomenally cool:
Lady Gaga 'Telephone' + US Troops = Amazing & Hilarious
I blame Glee for this.
Obama Nails the National Anthem
From Beskweekever.tv:
Let me first say that there is absolutely nothing funny about the recent West Virginia mine disaster. Twenty Nine men, all of whom had friends and family who loved them, lost their lives. Every day, they descended into a mine knowing that a certain level of danger was inherent in their work, yet, by all accounts, they were happy to do it. They performed one of the few jobs left in America that actually produces something. They dug into the earth and came back up with the very thing that allowed the rest of us to live our lives with comfort. Our lights come on with the simple flick of a switch, but only because men and women like these have the skill and fortitude to, day after day, climb into the bowels of earth and tunnel further and further away from safety. Now they are gone. And there is nothing funny about that.
However.
There was this thing that happened during the memorial service. As a man came to the podium to sing the national anthem, the TV cameras focused not on him, but instead, on Barack Obama who was singing along. And it looked like this: