The company just announced another step and tells web developers to stop using VML and DX filters as IE10 will not support those components anymore.

DX filters are based on DirectX and were first included in IE back in 1996 with IE4. Microsoft said that the most popular “multimedia-style” effects that are made possible via DX can now be created using CSS3 and are covered by CSS3 working drafts and standard recommendations. This change mainly affects effects such as gradients, shadows as well as opacity.

SVG is officially replacing VML (vector markup language) in Microsoft’s world as well. VML was proposed to become a web standard by Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Macromedia, Microsoft, and Visio back in 1998. Several more proposals targeting vector graphics on the web were submitted to the W3C in the same time frame, which resulted in the creation of SVG, which is not compatible with VML. Microsoft never discarded VML officially, but there has been no active development on VML since 1998.

IE9 still supports DX filters as well as VML, but it’s certainly good news for developers to see Microsoft dropping legacy baggage and moving its browser closer to the standards line.

SOURCE via MSDN

During the LeWeb 2011 expo in Paris, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said that Android is already ahead of iOS despite the fact that Apple’s iPhone has been on the market since 2007. In terms of unit volumes, he’s right: Apple’s iOS only resides on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad mobile products and Apple TV. Google’s Android is free for handset and tablet manufacturers to use, so the current Android market saturation is definitely understandable.

“In terms of unit volume, new ICS features, prices are lower, with more vendors, more price points – do I need to continue the list?” he said in an interview during the expo. “Apple has done an excellent job with iOS in terms of usability – but in 6 months thanks to ICS you will say the opposite, because apps vendors are driven by volume. The volume is favoured by the open approach Google is taking.”

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Prefer carats to cars? Have an appalling amount of money? Buy this! It’s a 1:8 scale Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 built by Robert Gülpen Engineering. First shown at the Frankfurt Motor Show, it’s about to make three entries into the Guinness Book of Records: the most expensive and most precious model car in the world, the most secure showcase – a bulletproof cabinet – and the most precious Lamborghini logo ever built.

So, beyond three spurious records and some fancy glass, what do you get? The body, doors and bonnet (all of which open) are made from carbon that’s got a 1/1000mm-thin thread of gold wrapped around the fibers.

The wheels (which turn) are made from a mix of gold and platinum, as is the interior. And the front seats are embellished with 1400 pieces of precious stones. The headlight LEDs are made from clear diamonds and the rear lights are built using coloured precious stones.

The, umm, lucky buyer also gets some masonry brickwork, a bit of paper, an old shard of metal and a big badge. More specifically, a piece of a wall stone from the Lamborghini building in Italy, the first design drawing of the Lamborghini Aventador car and engine, a bit of the prototype engine and a Lamborghini badge as big as the model itself made entirely of precious stones.

Now the interesting bit. The reckoning is that it’ll be sold at auction, but bidding begins at $5 million. Or 13 real Lamborghini Aventadors with real engines. The hammer drops this month and it’ll be up for grabs from four different houses in New York, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Beijing.

Mercifully, 500,000 Euros goes to charity, and if you find yourself stuck for cash after buying it, you boil it down and sell the materials, themselves worth 2 million Euros. And yes, we’re still talking about a toy car.

Toyota‘s GT 86 hasn’t even made its way into the hands of consumers, but a high-performance variant of the new sports coupe is already in the works out in Japan.

It doesn’t appear that Toyota’s willing to just sit around and play second fiddle to Subaru‘s BRZ with Chief Engineer Tetsuo Tada telling the media that supercharged test cars have already been made and are currently being scrutinized by Toyota Racing Development (TRD).

In the past, TRD has been known to develop superchargers for various Toyota models, including Scion‘s tC coupe. With the FR-S inevitably taking over as Scion’s top-of-the-line sports coupe, seeing a TRD variant equipped with a supercharger would be no surprise. Toyota prefers the supercharger approach since it’s simpler than increasing the engine size, and altering throttle response with a turbocharger would compromise the car’s performance objections.

What will be really exciting is if TRD takes on the GT 86 from bumper to bumper, offering styling accessories and even suspension components to go along with a supercharger option.

SOURCE via Autocar

The CM9 customization for Android 4.0 has only been in the works since mid-November and already its canny creators claim to have it running on a number of devices. They say they’re making the quickest progress with OMAP4, MSM8660/7×30 and Exynos-based handsets, so if you own of those you should find yourself at the top of the queue. Despite difficulties with totally new camera and graphics drivers in ICS, there should eventually be support for all CM7-compatible models going back to phones like the Nexus One, as well as the Tegra 2-powered Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Asus Transformer. There’s no mention of Tegra 3, though, and bad news for owners of the original Droid: if you want a taste of ICS you’ll have to leave your muddy perch and head out for an upgrade.

SOURCE via CyanogenMod

Well, Google’s gone and done it, turning the Internet into one giant graphing calculator. The software behemoth has brought graphing capabilities to search, letting users input a mathematical function into the engine — or multiple functions, separated by commas. And, this being Google, users can explore the graphs more closely by zooming in and out and panning across. According to the company, it “covers an extensive range of single variable functions including trigonometric, exponential, and logarithmic and their compositions.” If you know what all of that means, we’re guessing you’re pretty psyched about this news.

SOURCE via Inside Search

Printing on the road usually leaves you at the mercy of your local Kinkos FedEx Office, but as long as you’ve got one of Kodak’s cloud-print enabled Hero printers, you can avoid getting gouged. The company’s just released an Android app that lets you print nearly everything, even webpages as long as they’re accessed from the baked-in browser — provided that you’ve left your home printer switched on. You can pull it down for free from the Android market from today.

SOURCE via Kodak