Photographer Richard Mosse traveled to Iraq to document this bizarre circumstance, this juxtaposition of supposed liberators dwelling in the very home of the dictator they vowed to depose. He called the resulting book Breach, a nod to the liberators stepping into the breach they created when Hussein was removed from power.

When an amusement park becomes abandoned and an eerie silence descends to blanket the decay, the atmosphere seems to twist and takes on a nightmarish vibe. Here are 69 uber-creepy urban exploration photographs as we tour the abandoned amusement park Six Flags New Orleans.

Currently, your contacts live in address books that are distributed all over the Internet and your desktop. Because of this, chances are that you have numerous address books on the web that are often "inconsistent and disjointed." Contacts, a new Mozilla Labs project, wants to put an end to this. The Contacts addon creates a local database for all your email and Twitter contacts that can then be used by your browser and any website that supports Contacts' API. Sponsor

Thanks to this, you can now import all your Gmail contacts to the local database and use this contact info to autocomplete forms anywhere on the web. You can also import data about your Twitter friends and if you are on a Mac, you can import your local address book as well. Contacts will also import avatars from Gravatar whenever they are available.

Lots of Ambition Beyond Autocompletion

This email autocompletion feature is really just a first step for Mozilla, though. The real mission of this tool is to give users more control over their own data - a mission that is also very much in sync with what Mozilla considers its own mission to be these days. When you import your contacts database on most websites today to check if your friends are already online or to invite them to the service, you have to trust this service that it will keep this data private. Once more sites implement Contacts directly into their services, however, you will be able to control exactly what data a third-party site can access and retain control over this data.

The current version of Contacts consists of four pieces:

a browser-based database that syncs with your address books. Contacts uses the Portable Contacts format to represent this data in the database. a generic importer system that allows developers to create importers for desktop and web-based address books an email autocompletion feature a Javascript API that third-party sites can use to access all of your data (with explicit permission and the ability to filter the data)

Give it a Try

After installing the addon, you can test both the autocomplete and the tool's export features here. Discuss

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews In the first series of comprehensive performance tests comparing Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 technical preview, released yesterday, to stable Web browsers in current use today, Betanews confirmed superb speed gains by the IE9 chassis in specific categories. Not everything in the new IE9 was faster than IE8, but in the computational department, the development team's Chakra JavaScript engine shows much-needed gains.In anticipation of IE9, Betanews has been developing a radically improved set of performance tests to complement (and, in a few categories, replace) those we've used in recent months. Our objective is to determine not just how much faster IE9 is, but how much better and more efficient it will be, in computing data, in rendering on-screen objects, and in adapting to varying workloads.Betanews estimates that the IE9 chassis on Windows 7 offers 9.32 times better raw computational performance than IE8 on Windows 7, on the same machine. That's a welcome number due in large part to vastly improved scores in the widely respected SunSpider battery, as well as high scores in a new set of variable-workload computational tests produced by Betanews. Specifically on the SunSpider, the IE9 preview scored a 44.77 on Betanews' relative performance index, compared to 5.59 for IE8. Our index is based on cumulative relative performance in each category of the test battery, compared against the score posted by an old, slow Web browser: IE7 on Vista SP2. This means, yes, IE9 (thus far) offers almost 45 times the computational speed of IE7 on the older operating system -- easily the single largest surge we've seen between generations.A recent dev build of Google Chrome 5 on Windows 7 scored a 69.83 on that same SunSpider index, followed closely by the first stable version of Opera 10.5 with 68.64.As Microsoft embraces HTML 5, it's also managing to eke out some marginal speed gains in the rendering department, although it must be noted that the IE9 chassis is running in an almost feature-less window with very minimal overhead. As of now, the IE9 preview offers 23% better rendering performance (CSS, DHTML, support for the Canvas element in HTML 5) than IE8.Looking for the goodWhat Microsoft did yesterday was give outside developers, for the first time, direct access to just the engine of its next-generation Web browser, long before the functionality and usability features are attached to it. The reason, the Internet Explorer 9 product team says, is to elicit real-world feedback so that the product can be fine-tuned.That describes exactly what we intend to do. Over the last few weeks, Betanews has been compiling a suite of next-generation browser tests, having taken into account the feedback we've received from both our readers and browser manufacturers, Microsoft included. As rapidly as browsers have evolved in just the past year, it's become clear to us that when we compare brands, at one level, we truly are comparing apples to apple trees, or lawnmowers to bulldozers. When we concentrate on the prowess or power angle, with all the adrenaline-rushing metaphors and superlatives, we sometimes forget that sometimes, what the world really wants is an efficient lawnmower.Last year, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch asked me to take a closer, fairer look at Internet Explorer. Specifically, he said that there were architectural efficiencies to be found in the product line, if only we took the time to look for them.How I opted to respond to that challenge was to focus on one under-appreciated aspect of the Web browser that will become more important as its components are transported to six-core desktop systems on one end, and Snapdragon handsets and netbooks on the other: scalability. Specifically, I started exploring whether there was a way to effectively measure how well a browser handles increasing workloads, of ever higher orders of magnitude.Mozilla helped to begin making scalability an issue with its introduction of the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine in Firefox. Tracers make problems that appear complex in coding simpler for their processing engines to execute, by pre-processing instructions ahead of time, converting and optimizing long sequences into easily digestible, assembly language-like instructions. Theoretically, the simpler and longer the sequences, the easier the digestive process should become.So in this new era, it becomes necessary to test the efficiency of a browser's capability to digest those long sequences, to make harder problems simpler for themselves. This is the scalability element which will represent 30% of the score in our revised Relative Performance Index.Yesterday, Dean Hachamovitch played down the importance of just-in-time compiling as a factor in improving browser efficiency, promoting instead the option of moving the interpreter to a background process. But doing that alone, as we're discovering now, may not effectively combat what has historically been IE's biggest problem as a Web apps platform: the ability to fall off a cliff (see: "stack overflow") when problems get especially difficult. On new tests involving sorting algorithms, for instance, where recursion easily becomes thousands of layers deep, IE8 can spin off into a coma. So far, we have not seen the comatose effect in the IE9 tech preview, which could be the first sign of very good news for Web app developers.What I was surprised to discover in crafting this new set of tests was that IE was not alone. Chrome can fall off a cliff too, just several orders of magnitude later (after 10 million iterations, for example, rather than 100,000). As the problem gets more and more complex, the gap between Chrome or Safari or the new Opera's performance and that of IE becomes wider and wider...and wider. And that's a problem because you could arbitrarily choose some point out in space, where Chrome is a thousand times faster than IE rather than, say, ten. Wait long enough and you might get 10,000.And that, as IE proponents assert, would not be fair. It's actually the reason we chose not to include Google's V8 benchmark battery in our tests: because there does not appear to be a real-world correlation between the hundreds of times greater performance the V8 battery can report over IE, and the differences we see in ordinary use.So the goal of our scalability tests is to recognize that smaller engines can still be efficient in what they do, even when they offer lesser horsepower. Maybe IE can't run a 10-million-iteration test. But the difference between its performance in 100,000 iterations and in 10,000 can be compared to Chrome's difference between 10 million iterations and 1 million. That factor may still be meaningful.In the very first report of browsers' scalability compared to IE7 in Vista SP2, the IE9 tech preview in Windows 7 scored a 6.57 compared to IE8's score of 1.13. That means, we believe IE9's new "Chakra" interpreter offers 581.4% greater efficiency than IE8 at speeding up when workloads increase. Betanews is applying these new tests to the latest stable browsers from the other Top Five browser makers; and yes, Ross Perot fans, we'll have the charts ready when the numbers come in. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Scientists have already created mini-cyborgs out of living cells and semiconductor materials, but now biological cells can also contain tiny silicon chips, which could become sensors that monitor microscopic activities, deliver drugs to target cells or even repair cell structures. More »

Got five minutes? That's how long it'll take to get even a cup of drip coffee at Blue Bottle in Williamsburg. The Oakland coffee company followed Stumptown east to test the patience of New Yorkers, who sometimes buy their coffee from a cart and are totally fine with that. But there's lots to look at while you're waiting, from the beautiful, giant roaster in the back to the Rube Goldberg–looking iced-coffee makers from Japan. Watch our slideshow and see if you can replicate any of this stuff at home.

Earlier: Will Blue Bottle Make New York a Coffee Town?

160 Berry St., nr. N.5th St., Williamsburg

Read more posts by Aileen GallagherFiled Under: openings, blue bottle, coffee, slideshows

Making the rounds, are we Google? Just over 24 hours after we saw an AT&T-friendly Nexus One go on sale, along come Sprint yelling "me too!" at the top of its lungs. Today marks the day that Google's first-ever smartphone now has at least a holding place on all four of the major US carriers, with T-Mobile nabbing it first and Verizon users still waiting for that vague "spring release." Unfortunately, Sprint's making us wait when it comes to finding out an exact price and release date, but at least we're assured that both are coming "soon."Make it four: Google's Nexus One coming to Sprint originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink   |  Sprint  | Email this | Comments

If you can’t tell your Belt of Orion from your Little Dipper, Microsoft is here to help. Today it added its WorldWide Telescope application to Bing Maps. The application let’s you look up at the sky from a street view level in a map and see the stars and planets conveniently identified by red lines connecting them together. Microsoft debuted its WorldWide Telescope application two years ago, and it’s existed as a standalone desktop and Silverlight app. But now that it is part of Bing Maps, it should become more popular. (Inside Bing Maps, you first need to click on “Map Apps” and select WorldWide Telescope to enable it). The app is not just for identifying constellations and planets. The menu on the left allows you to load up all sorts of data from sky surveys, the Hubble Telescope, and other astronomy data sources. The navigation isn’t as fluid as it could be, but at least it gives you a point of orientation to make sense of the night sky. What Microsoft needs to do is bake this into its Bing iPhone app so that you can see the constellations identified through your camera viewfinder. CrunchBase InformationBingInformation provided by CrunchBase

David Desandro has developed a newtypeface family named Curtis and done so in an interesting way.... using CSS:

Each character is wrapped in a <span> and then depending on the complexity of that character, more empty <span> elements are added to the markup to render each shape. Here's the markup for R: PLAIN TEXT HTML:

<span class="css_char r">

        R

        <span class="inside split_vert"></span>

        <span class="outside split_vert"></span>

        <span class="stroke"></span>

        <span class="fill"></span>

</span>

The Curtis CSS font wasn’t conceived of any practical application. I was more interested in seeing if it could be pulled off, and if so, what the final result would look like.

Fun and crazy!

We want girls with brains,(and beauty, if possible). Here are some specimens who not only made it in the ranks of professional chess, but also make for a nice swimsuit calendar, if Sports Illustrated will finally ever get to the chess/swimsuit issue we’ve all been hoping for.

Nothing like a late day ninja check-in. A trusted source has come through with a Verizon memo outlining an early upgrade program for those users looking to upgrade from a feature phone to a smartphone a bit early. Our source indicates this promotion is for Sam’s Club and Target kiosks and is only available in certain locations… but hey, an early upgrade is an early upgrade. The move is aimed to rope feature phone users into a more luxurious, and expensive, smartphone with the accompanying data plan, but that doesn’t mean those ready to upgrade can’t take advantage. Terms of the deal include:

Available in Northern California Region, Central Texas, Upstate New York, and Ohio/Pennsylvania User can not already have a 3G smartphone User will not be eligible for another upgrade for 12 months Customers can’t already be eligible for a standard upgrade Can’t be combined with other offers $29.99+ data plan required New 2-year contract must be signed

Any takers? Larger image after the break.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Download Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview via Fileforum now.[Today's delay in Betanews bringing you Internet Explorer 9 news was brought to you as a public service by the Cable Modem: Your Best Friend When It's Crunch Time. Remember, where there's smoke, there's a Comcast cable modem. Smell one today.]It is perhaps the unlikeliest scenario any technologist could imagine as recently as two years ago: Microsoft evangelizing developers to embrace Web standards by helping it to build its Web browser. Although one of the first browsers to be distributed for free, Internet Explorer has never been open source. Historically, it's always been ready when it's ready; its value proposition has been to the consumer who prefers convenience over adaptability; and when the fact that it was dirt slow was pointed out, the response typically was, the consumer isn't going to care.Today, the value proposition started to take shape for IE9, the browser that in an earlier era didn't need a value proposition. Microsoft's strategy, which premiered today at MIX 10, was to seize control of tomorrow's key talking point, HTML 5 compliance and compatibility -- to make HTML 5 identifiable with Internet Explorer. In fact, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch's greeting sentence to MIX 10 attendees this morning wasn't without the term "HTML 5.""When we started looking deeply at HTML 5, we saw that it enabled a whole new class of applications," was Hachamovitch's second sentence. "These applications will stress the browser runtime and hardware, as today's sites just don't. We quickly realized that doing HTML 5 right -- our intent -- was more about designing around what HTML 5 applications will need, rather than a particular set of features. Done right, HTML 5 applications will feel more like real apps than Web pages, and our approach to HTML 5 is to make standard Web patterns that developers already know and use, just run faster and better by taking advantage of PC hardware through Windows."Developers have always known that Microsoft has always had the capability to leverage its mastery of Windows APIs to build smoother applications. But as other Microsoft applications have weaned themselves off of the old Win32 dependencies, such as rendering using the old GDI and GDI+ libraries, Internet Explorer has fallen further and further behind. In fact, you could make the case that Silverlight gives Web developers opportunities to use the modern rendering libraries that IE should be using now natively.Soliciting general developers' help in improving IE (some will say for the first time), Microsoft today began distributing the bare-bones chassis of the IE9 Web browser -- no frills, no features, not even bookmarks. Just a rendering engine in a window. With Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and now even Opera having made effective cases for the Web being "the platform," Microsoft desperately needs to resume defining the platform before someone else ends up defining it instead.But one element of Microsoft's IE message remains the same even today: Those areas where the competitors say they have the advantage, may not be all that important to end users. Case in point: just-in-time compilation, the factor that has catapulted Mozilla Firefox and WebKit-based browsers such as Safari and Chrome into today's speed race.For example, Hachamovitch did cite the IE9 chassis' speed improvement on the widely accepted SunSpider performance test, created by the originators of the open source WebKit engine. On Microsoft's chart, Opera is the fastest performer on the SunSpider, followed by a Chrome 5 dev build, a Chrome 4 stable build, and the latest Safari 4.0.5, released late last week by Apple (apologies for the fuzzy screenshot of Microsoft's chart). So yes, IE9 comes in fifth, rather than dead last. But the difference isn't that much of a difference, he said:"It's interesting to note that the gap between IE9 and some of the other browsers to its right is about an eye-blink -- it's about 300 ms. And it took 70 seconds to identify that 300 ms difference."When it comes to HTML 5, Microsoft wants to be perceived now as leading that standard. But with respect to standards at large, the company's position remains unchanged from last year: As long as Web standards are up in the air, compliance is a foggy term anyway. Today, Hachamovitch implied that if the goal of standards bodies were the same as Microsoft's goal of one language, the fog would be lifted:"Developers want to use the same HTML, the same script, and the same markup across browsers. That's the goal of standards and interoperability. No need for different code paths for different browsers. That's a key goal for HTML 5. We love HTML 5 so much, we want it to actually work. In IE9, it will. We want the same HTML, the same script, the same markup to just work across browsers. So in IE9, we'll do for the rest of the Web platform what we did for CSS 2.1 in IE8. Now, at the same time, we want to be responsible about the standards that are still emerging, the standards that are in committee, and the standards that are partially implemented, often in different ways across browsers. So to make decisions on this front, we started from data."As an Acid3 test runs in the background (it's not done yet), Dean Hachamovitch demonstrates how 'standards' support varies between even Firefox and Chrome (lower right) for the same markup.The IE9 team leader went on to describe an internal tool that measured the script activity on 7,000 active Web sites. The telemetry that it received showed, for instance, that the #1 method in use was indexOf(), on 94% of sites measured. Number 17 on the list, used by 65% of sites, was addEventListener, a method that's key to W3C's advanced event registration model, but not yet supported in IE8."Because we started from data, what developers like you really use was our starting point for what to support." As a result, the IE9 chassis passed 578 out of 578 in the CSS3.info selectors test, putting it now on a par with Firefox. That's important, Hachamovitch noted, because developers want that one language -- one CSS, one HTML -- to work with for all browsers across the board.Meanwhile, the IE9 preview posts a 55% score on the Acid3 standards compliance test -- up from 20% for IE8, and 12% for IE7. The latest stable Firefox, by comparison, scores 94% on this test; and Safari, Chrome, and Opera all score 100%. Could the CSS3.info test be fair, and the Acid3 test unfair?"Some people use Acid3 as shorthand for standards support. Acid3 is kind of interesting, it exercises about a hundred details of a dozen different technologies. Some of them are under construction, others less so," Hachamovitch said. He added a promise that Acid3 scores will continue to improve "as we make more of the markup that developers actually use, work."Next: Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU... Offloading processing to the background and to the GPUThe architectural development that helped Firefox and others vault from banana-like bars such as those on the left of Microsoft's SunSpider chart, to peanut-like bars like those on the right, was the implementation of just-in-time compilation (JIT) -- a concept first implemented in Java and .NET, re-engineered for JavaScript. Today, Hachamovitch's tactic was to characterize JIT compilers as "JIT-ters," complete with the wimpy sound and unstable connotations, similar to how AMD characterized Intel's introduction of "hyperthreading" five years ago."In the beginning, the Web had lots and lots of HTML, and little pieces of script here and there. And an interpreter was good enough for that. Over the years, different browsers have added JIT-ters and different kinds of JIT-ters, many different kinds of JIT-ters. The problem with JIT today is that so much time and energy goes into managing the time and scope that the JIT-ter operates in. Users have to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too much, because the JIT-ter is sitting there compiling the code, and you don't get to run it. And the user has to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too little, because then the JIT-ter did a little bit, and the user is stuck running a slower interpreter."Something vaguely similar to the phenomenon Hachamovitch described is what we at Betanews have seen in a recent round of high-level browser testing, on IE and other platforms, in preparation for today's release of the IE9 tech preview. JavaScript interepreters, by today's design, are single-threaded. Their ability to run JavaScript very fast depends, to a great extent, on the relative complexity or simplicity of the instructions. JIT compilers produce much simpler machine code, but only in situations where the JavaScript instructions are relatively simple to parse, and not entangled in competing loops with unsightly timeouts. Long stretches of uniform code -- 100,000, one million, even ten million iterations -- are like butter candy to browsers like Chrome, smooth, silky, and easy to digest. But break up those instructions with interruptions (for instance, updates of an on-screen timer at one-second intervals), and what once seemed like butter now processes like rock-filled concrete. And sequences that Chrome could execute in under 30 seconds, all of a sudden, could take (by my estimate) days to execute if left unattended. It's in situations like this where the JIT-ter is jittering, to borrow Dean's phrasing. But about the only place you're going to find someone trying to do 10 million iterations of an algorithm in succession, is at Betanews, where the guy doing the testing is on his sixth cup of coffee and is jittery anyway.Still, in anticipation of the types of advances Dean described today, we've been working to create a new class of tests that would enable IE9 to shine if it truly does what Dean says it does. Today, he described how IE9 moves the JavaScript interpreter to a background process:"Compiling in the background puts hardware to use here without having to re-code the site. And the key here is to bring the best technology to the most important language you use, JavaScript."HTML 5 in large print, SVG in small printScalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a W3C standard since 1999, has never been actively supported by Internet Explorer even to this day. During today's demonstration of what he called, on the surface, "HTML 5 applications," Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch was joined onstage by Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky to jointly demonstrate the IE9 technical preview's new GPU-assisted graphics rendering support, with Sinofsky on the new browser and Hachamovitch playing catch-up with Chrome.Tucked away in the background of that clever little duel was the fact that IE9 was, for the first time, directly and openly supporting SVG.It's difficult to see from the screenshot of Microsoft's presentation above, but Sinofsky's IE9 browser at the upper left is rendering 100 simultaneous 3D extrapolations of 2D logos from various browsers, at 64 frames per second. Hachamovitch's Google Chrome, meanwhile, is rendering about 36 simultaneous logos at about 8 fps.HTML 5 may have had little or nothing to do with this result. The real takeaway from this demo is the following: For years, Web developers have relied on Adobe Flash for vector graphics that are scalable, mainly since it's the only platform that can be plugged into all the major browsers and that can run uniformly within all of them. The reason for that is IE's reluctance to embrace SVG. Well, now that embracing SVG is necessary in order for Microsoft to demonstrate its graphics processing prowess, this could change the ballgame for Web developers, who may soon have at their disposal, at long last, a single open standard for animating Web sites.Who better to celebrate that news with than the lovable Clippy character we all adored from Office XP? In a demonstration not only of processing prowess but of standards compliance, the two executives enlisted Clippy as the hero in a 3D game of Asteroids, where the targets were multi-colored circles of translucent plastic. Rendered properly, Clippy could hold his own; but stuck in Google Chrome, which doesn't appear to apply relative opacity properly, it looks like Clippy may be in trouble. And it looks like he's writing a letter of distress.Microsoft has posted links to the tests Sinofsky and Hachamovitch demonstrated on stage, on its special site devoted to the IE9 developers' preview. There you're also likely to find the stunning IE9 video carousel, which HTML 5 has everything to do with. Here, four HD videos of underwater scenes are rendered on translucent screens, that simultaneously travel along an invisible carousel-like path. Of course, you may always have known this kind of rendering power existed in your GPU, but you might never have seen your Web browser go this far to exploit that power.The IE team has always been careful to say that the advances that matter are the ones that users see and feel. Last year, the company advanced the argument that millisecond differences were imperceptible. Which they are, unless they become fruitful and multiply -- and in a Web applications environment, that will happen. The news from Las Vegas today is this: Microsoft is building a Web applications platform. Finally. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

One three-inch shrimp—happily swimming under 600 feet of ice, 12.5 miles from open water—has shattered all scientists' theories on life-harboring environments. An impossible discovery that opens the possibility of complex extraterrestrial life in our Solar System: More »

If this morning's news of Internet Explorer 9's support for HTML5 and video acceleration got you excited, and you happen to run Windows XP, prepare to get unexcited: You won't be able to install it on your OS. Sorry! [IE9] More »

Chilean wineries are beginning to resume normal operations following February's earthquake, despite constant aftershocks and tremors.

Microsoft just announced the launch of the first developer preview version of Internet Explorer 9. This release is clearly geared towards developers and only features a very stripped down user interface. The developer preview does, however, include Chakra, Microsoft's new JavaScript engine, as well as a new hardware accelerated graphics subsystem and additional developer tools.
Sponsor

Better Support for New Web Standards

Microsoft is clearly focusing on making Internet Explorer compatible with the latest standards, including HTML5, CSS3 and SVG2 support. Even though Microsoft is very focused on making its browser more standards compliant, the current version only scores 55 points (out of 100) on the ACID3 test.

Speeding up the Browser

Besides better support for standards, Microsoft is also focused on speeding up the browser. According to Microsoft, now that "the differences between script engines on benchmarks [are] approaching the duration of an eye-blink," the company is focused on making the actual user experience faster instead of just focusing on improving benchmark results that most users won't notice. The new JavaScript engine will compile the code in a background thread on a separate core of the CPU. While the IE9 developer preview's JavaScript performance isn't quite as fast as the latest Chrome releases yet (something Microsoft freely admits), it is considerably faster than IE8. IE9 will also use a compatible computer's GPU to speed up the browser's performance even more.

Get it Now

You can find more information about the IE9 developer preview in Microsoft's announcement. You can download the preview release for Windows here.

Discuss

Until now, people using Google’s Nexus One smartphone with AT&T service have only been able to access the carrier’s slower 2G or EDGE networks. But today, Google announced a new version of the phone that is compatible with AT&T’s 3G network, boosting speeds to stem consumer complaints. The new version is also compatible with Rogers Wireless’ 3G network in Canada. Google’s Nexus One can be used with a SIM card from most GSM operators around the world. The unlocked phone has run into limitations, though, since some carriers use different 3G frequencies. The Nexus One hit the market in January, with a plan and 3G support from T-Mobile in addition to the unlocked version. The Verizon edition is expected to launch later this month, and a version for Vodafone in Europe is scheduled to be released as well in the second quarter of this year. There have also been rumors about a stripped down version of the Android-based phone for the Indian market. The AT&T-compatible Nexus One can be used with a SIM card from the carrier, and the phone is sold online at $529. There is no discount for AT&T, however, because Google still offers a plan with T-Mobile only, at $179. Tags: Google, nexus Companies: AT&T, Google

Today, as part of MIX 2010, some exciting updates were released on the progress of Internet Explorer 9. The IE team is implementing some incredible features, such as HTML5, CSS3, SVG support, and a new lightning fast JavaScript engine, Chakra! Further, they’re currently scoring a 55 on the Acid3 test – a figure that’s surely to increase substantially before the official release. What about the idea of Microsoft contributing to an open source project, jQuery, with their proposed templating engine? Within moments of these announcements, the Twitter-verse spilled “tears of joy.”
Want to dive in and check out the developer preview? That’s available too, starting today!

Take IE9 for a Test Drive.

Finally, we announced the availability of the first IE Platform Preview for developers, and our commitment to update it approximately every eight weeks. We want the developer community to have an earlier hands-on experience with the progress we’re making on the IE platform. The Platform Preview, and the feedback loop it is part of, marks a major change from previous IE releases. IE Blog

Demos Check out some of the demos below in each browser to learn the unique code required for each.

Border-Radius Pulsating Bubbles SVG: Falling Balls CSS3 Selectors

New JavaScript Engine: Chakra

“You’ll notice that IE9 is faster at this benchmark than IE8 and several other browsers. It’s interesting to note that the difference between today’s IE9 preview and the browsers to its right in this graph. It takes about 70 seconds to identify a 300ms difference between browsers.” IE Blog

Miscellaneous Tweets about IE9 from MIX 2010

“Video tag and SVG support in IE 9 as well – and it’s crazy fast. Very impressed.” John Resig

“Microsoft to Expand its Collaboration with the jQuery Community”: http://bit.ly/cxybri @jQuery

“Today makes me very happy to have come to work at Microsoft. Very excited right now to see the reactions of the community.” Rey Bango

“They’re asking for help in getting ppl to move IE6 to IE8. They want users on modern browsers.” Rey Bango

“Open source, open standards, open Microsoft. Today I woke up to a different world than I thought I was living in.” Molly E. Holzschlag

“So what we have here is HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1 in IE9. If I weren’t seeing it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t freakin’ believe it.” Molly E. Holzschlag

Check back for more details as they become available!