Nokia is preparing to back Windows RT by launching a 10.1-inch tablet soon. Sources familiar with Nokia's plans have revealed to The Verge that the tablet, codenamed Sirius, will be launched shortly. While prototype pictures of the device leaked earlier this month, we understand that the final design more closely resembles Nokia's Lumia Windows Phone products.

Apps and their ads must not add homescreen shortcuts, browser bookmarks, or icons on the user's device as a service to third parties or for advertising purposes. Apps and their ads must not display advertisements through system level notifications on the user's device, unless the notifications derive from an integral feature provided by the installed app. (e.g., an airline app that notifies users of special deals, or a game that notifies users of in-game promotions).

'Silly-SMP' is a project to determine "What are the minimal changes needed to AROS to support 'full' SMP? Is it even possible?"

This is Research with a capital 'R'.

But that '25% of the time' _does_ show that a full SMP system on AROS is possible.

As is clearly visible in the graph above, the data shows that many more companies are getting sued than were a few years ago. That's true even though the number of lawsuits has held relatively steady over the last 5 years. The increase in defendants, the next graph shows, is driven by software patents.

"BlackBerry has a thriving ecosystem with BlackBerry 10." That's what CEO Thorsten Heins said this May at a developer conference before revealing that users had a choice of 120,000 apps from its still-young app market, BlackBerry World. The problem is that over a third of those apps come from a single developer. Yes, a Hong Kong-based company called S4BB has published just under 47,000 apps to BlackBerry World since launch. That's not a good sign of a "thriving ecosystem."

Although I have been a lazy blogger lately we haven't been lazy working on our remaining tasks at all. So, unsurprisingly, since my previous post we have reached and passed a few nice milestones. The latest one is that we're finally able to build the gcc2/gcc4 hybrid Haiku images again, including all the software needed for the official release.

While that in itself isn't a particularly impressive feat - after all we were already able to build the complete gcc 2 part before - the interesting aspect is how we are doing it.

The first production batch of Jolla smartphones has been fully booked by consumers and selected sales channels. Jolla launched its first smartphone at the #JollaLoveDay event inMay. At the same time, Jolla kicked off an online pre-order campaign, which reached its first batch limit by mid-July. Online pre-orders were received from 136 countries in all.

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention.

And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred - with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

There's more to the platform wars than mobile - Android is starting to take off in non-mobile markets in a massive way - Internet of Things, Television (Chromecast), etc. To date Linux has been the dominant OS but Android is now taking some embedded designs which would have run Linux. The effective decoupling of Android from carriers for non-mobile markets + the richness of tools and the existing developer ecosystem will likely cement Android as the definitive open source OS of the next decade. This will have pluses for Google but also unintended consequences.

A Linux distribution (often called distro for short) is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications. These operating systems consist of the Linux kernel and, usually, a set of libraries and utilities from the GNU Project, with graphics support from the X Window System. Distributions optimized for size may not contain X and tend to use more compact alternatives to the GNU utilities, such as BusyBox, uClibc, or dietlibc.

The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

I was recently talking to Notch in a TF2 livestream and asked him about his future aspirations of 0x10c. Although he seemed in a bad mood, he said: "Nope, their are no future aspirations for 0x10c. I'm going to make small games for the rest of my life. If someone on the office wants to carry it on they can." Well, at least now we have the final word from Notch. I thought it was just on ice, I'm very disappointed.

Gearing up for long term maintenance, Plasma Workspaces delivers further improvements to basic functionality with a smoother taskbar, smarter battery widget and improved sound mixer. The introduction of KScreen brings intelligent multi-monitor handling to the Workspaces, and large scale performance improvements combined with small usability tweaks make for an overall nicer experience.

This release marks massive improvements in the KDE PIM stack, giving much better performance and many new features. Kate improves the productivity of Python and Javascript developers with new plugins, Dolphin became faster and the educational applications bring various new features.

This release of KDE Platform 4.11 continues to focus on stability. New features are being implemented for our future KDE Frameworks 5.0 release, but for the stable release we managed to squeeze in optimizations for our Nepomuk framework.