"The world of standards-based web design and development has been undergoing something of a shake-up these past few days; Andy Clarke’s “CSS Unworking Group” seems to have opened the floodgates to expressions of dissatisfaction with the current method of progress (or lack thereof) in developing and standardizing new features for web developers and designers... how to produce a process whereby standards bodies can respond quickly to innovative ideas, and wherein innovators will encourage standardized, interoperable implementations of their ideas. "

Why can't the world be a straight-forward, non-political, friendly place? Damn politics. :)

"Second Life competitor Entropia Universe has signed an agreement to use the game engine CryENGINE 2.

According to Entropia Universe, the CryENGINE 2 platform will deliver the “closest-to-reality looking massively multiplayer online game ever seen.”"

Wow, the renderings look bloody amazing! They're pre-rendered still shots, but still, if you get 60% of that in the game it'll still be amazing. Now all we need is fast enough internet...

"IronMonkey, the project to map IronPython and IronRuby to Tamarin, so that Tamarin becomes multi-lingual, over time delivering high performance for all languages."

Wow, a major open source project using Microsoft code - who'd have thought that was possible. Good to see a project with some sense, and not just an attitude.

"ScreamingMonkey, the project to add browser-specific script-engine glue to Tamarin, enabling it as a <script> tag handler in other browsers, starting with IE."

This is pretty cool, a single JS engine over different browsers. One issue down, CSS and rendering to go.