Nokia has just posted its results for the fourth quarter of 2013 - this is the last set of quarterly results which include the devices division, which has been sold to Microsoft. The parts that remain at Nokia are doing relatively well, but the holiday quarter for Lumia was a letdown.

Exactly how much of a letdown we can't say, since Nokia has - curiously, but tellingly - stopped reporting Lumia sales (update: Nokia has confirmed it sold 8.2 million Lumias). However, they do state that Lumia sales in the fourth (holiday) quarter were down from the third quarter, but up from the year-ago quarter, meaning they sold anywhere between 4.4 and 8.8 million Lumias during the holiday quarter of 2013. Tweakers' Arnoud Wokke has done the math, and concludes Nokia sold between 7.55 and 7.98 million Lumias (update: Nokia has confirmed it sold 8.2 million Lumias). Average selling price dropped again, most likely due to the popularity of the low-end 520. This gives Nokia a smartphone market share of about 2-3%.

All in all, the devices division, with its crashing Asha sales and struggling Lumia sales, was a clear stone around Nokia's neck, kept somewhat afloat by cash injections from Microsoft. However, those injections apparently weren't enough, and by now, we can conclude that Microsoft was effectively forced to step in and buy Nokia's devices division - lest someone else do it.

With this being the last quarter in which Nokia reports on its devices division, an era has come to an end. Now it's up to Microsoft to try and see if they can make something out of the Lumia brand - however, without the Nokia name, that's going to be a very tough sell.

Just ask the Surface department.

Apparently AT&T is not considered to be a technology company, because they spent more than Google. All in all, virtually all companies heavily increased their spending on legalised corruption in the US.

The webpage contains instructions for building the kernel yourself, for installing it in a virtual machine, and for running it on real hardware.

I've been dealing with fanboys for as long as I'm an OSNews editor - made worse by the fact that I don't really have a strong allegiance to any platform, and therefore, tend to criticise and praise each of them at the same time, on a weekly basis. This means I have to deal with all manner of fanboys, and while it sometimes can be quite tiring, it's just kind of adorable most of the time.

The other side of the coin is being accused of being biased for or against something. I used to maintain a list of all the companies and products I was accused of being biased for or against. Interestingly enough, all of the companies and products mentioned appeared in both the biased for and biased against column. In other words, I was biased for and against every single company and product mentioned on OSNews at the same time.

In the meantime, out in the real world, I try to use as many different products from as many different companies as (financially) possible, so that I gather as much as real-world experience as I can. So, in the past 18-24 months, I've bought a Nexus 7, HTC 8X Windows Phone, Surface RT, iMac, Find 5 (Android), a self-built Windows 8 PC, Nokia E7 (Symbian), iPhone 5S, Jolla, and only last week I added a Nokia N9 to my collection. On top of that, I've used a whole bunch of other classic devices to further expand my horizon. I love technology, regardless of brand or platform.

So yes, I've probably had more experience with fanboys than just about anyone here on OSNews. However, the things I've had to deal with are minute compared to the things people like Joshua Topolsky from The Verge has had to deal with.

The gist of this somewhat random collection of words: be happy OSNews is a relatively small, niche site. Sure, we get into our (in the grand scheme of things, pointless) debates, but at least virtually every regular commenter here displays a reasonable amount of intelligence and restraint. We could do a whole lot worse.

FreeBSD 10 has been released. You can read the release notes, and, of course, go ahead and install it.

We report regularly about Visopsys - one of the few hobby operating systems that survived where virtually all the others (SkyOS, Syllable, etc.) died out. They've got a new website, which seems like a nice occasion to give it some attention again.

Steve Wozniak about the movie Jobs (crappy Google+ still doesn't have comment links, so scroll down a bit):

This is what happens when a businessman is hyped up into the stratosphere and turned into a messiah - other people get marginalised to further deify the supposed hero.

Yeah! I mean, who wants Gmail, Google Search, Chrome, Android, YouTube, AdWords, Google Apps, Maps, and so on, and so forth. All useless stuff nobody wants!

How dare Google focus on more than immediate financial gain, and instead focus on trying to make the roads safer, or helping diabetics, or trying to explore the potential applications of wearable computing! All activities of every company ever should always and exclusively be focussed on immediate financial gain and shareholder returns, or else they'll get brilliant bloggers who contribute so much to the world complaining they can't spend their money right now, right away, now, now!

Google's 'moonshots', or the stuff Microsoft does at Microsoft Research, might not immediately satisfy the grubby little hands of entitled consumers, but thank god they're doing it.

The victims of war.

The NYT lists the changes. It's insubstantial.

See the email thread on the misc list for more details.

The OpenBSD project is the incubator for a number of other projects including OpenSSH and OpenSMTPD. If you use these or just want the project to survive, consider making a donation.

This is quite, quite an amazing journey.

ACM Queue posted an article titled "Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System", written by the main developers of MirageOS. The article is a good overview of the motivation and design of Mirage, which is a specialized lightweight hypervisor guest operating system for Xen. It's developed in OCaml and benefits from its features like memory safety, module system and compiler optimisations. It's comparable to OSv on many fronts.

More here.