"Acer, the Taiwanese computer maker that's suffered two consecutive annual losses, posted strong sales of notebooks using Google's Chrome platform after the release of Microsoft's Windows 8 failed to ignite the market. Chrome-based models accounted for 5 percent to 10 percent of Acer's U.S. shipments since being released there in November, President Jim Wong said in an interview at the Taipei-based company's headquarters. That ratio is expected to be sustainable in the long term and the company is considering offering Chrome models in other developed markets, he said." HP is also planning a Chrome OS laptop, and it's been at the top of Amazon's charts (whatever that means) for a while now. In case you haven't noticed - the desktop world, too, is changing. Nobody wants Windows 8 (touch or no), so OEMs are finally looking elsewhere. We're finally getting what we wanted 13 years ago.

Apple has released iOS 6.1 - it's not a huge release so you probably won't notice much. What is interesting, however, is that Apple has unveiled that after just five months, 300 million iOS devices have been updated to or run iOS 6 - about 60% of all iOS devices ever sold. Google can learn a lot from this, since we're 14 months down the line, and Ice Cream Sandwich is only on about 40% of Android devices. Like I said, trainwreck in slowmotion.

After about a year of work, the ArchLinux distribution now offers a variant running on the FreeBSD kernel. Says the developer, "Why would I do this? If like me, you enjoy FreeBSD and love it, but also like the philosophy behind Arch Linux, which is a fast, lightweight, optimized distro, I figured why not combine the both. Even though you could just do it on FreeBSD using the ports, not everyone wants to compile." This now puts Arch in the same category as Debian with Debian GNU/KFreeBSD, which offers a Debian userland on top of a FreeBSD kernel.

Fantastic article by The Verge: "Something strange and remarkable started happening at Google immediately after Larry Page took full control as CEO in 2011: it started designing good-looking apps. We went to Google looking for the person responsible for the new design direction, but the strange answer we got is that such a person doesn't exist. Instead, thanks to a vision laid out by a small team of Google designers, each product team is finding its way to a consistent and forward-looking design language thanks to a surprising process. They're talking to each other." I think Google's recent complete design transformation is one of the most remarkable shifts this industry has seen post-iPhone. I think the importance and possible ramifications of this shift are best captured by Tom Dale: Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.

"Apple Inc reported quarterly revenue that slightly missed Wall Street expectations as sales of its flagship iPhone came in below target, sending its shares down more than 4 percent. The world's largest technology company shipped 47.8 million iPhones, lower than the roughly 50 million that Wall Street analysts had predicted. Sales of the iPad came in at 22.9 million in the fiscal first quarter, about in line with forecasts." I'll leave the financials to the experts, but one thing that stood out to me: Apple sold 4.2 million Macs, almost a million below expectations. How much of a future does desktop computing have at Apple? Update: The NYT/Reuters changed the title during the night. Fixed it.

"Native Client enables Chrome to run high-performance apps compiled from your C and C++ code. One of the main goals of Native Client is to be architecture-independent, so that all machines can run NaCl content. Today we're taking another step toward that goal: our Native Client SDK now supports ARM devices, from version 25 and onwards."

"For the longest time Canonical has slapped an LTS moniker on some of their Ubuntu releases. Currently, a new major release of the operating system happens every six months, and is supported for 18 months after release. Whereas in the past when LTS versions received two years support or more, the current model - starting with 12.04 - supports new LTS releases for five years. However, a recent public Google Hangouts session revealed that Canonical has been thinking about switching from the venerable LTS model to a rolling release, starting with version 14.04."

Back in 2010, Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, and a few others settled with the US Department of Justice regarding their anti-poaching agreements concerning employees. While the CEOs did a good job of escaping possible prosecution, the affected employees filed a class action lawsuit about this, and judge Lucy Koh has just unsealed a number of emails concerning this case. They paint a pretty grim picture of Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt engaging in mafia practices, threatening smaller companies with patent litigation if they didn't agree to the no-poaching agreements, or demanding to handle matters verbally as to not leave a paper trail.

"If you consider NetApplications' data set, then Linux owns only about 1 percent of the desktop OS market and Windows has almost 92 percent. But if you consider all computing platforms, including mobile, than Windows has only 20 percent and Linux has 42 percent - and that would be in the form of Google's Android alone." No more or less legitimate than claiming Windows owns 92% of the market. It's all a matter of perspective.

"A complete continuum of screen sizes is actually a blessing for Web designers and developers. It forces us toward adaptive solutions that respond to diverse capabilities instead of being able to draw arbitrary cut-off points for separate mobile, tablet, and desktop sites. So I for one, welcome our six inch fonblet/phablet friends and look forward to further diversity in screens that allow us to access the Web." Hadn't thought of it this way yet. Clever. Aside from this, I'm happy with all these sizes - it means there's something for everyone. Just because I prefer 4.3", doesn't mean everyone should, or that I'm going to ridicule those that prefer larger or smaller displays.

"This week we are announcing our new Firefox OS developer preview phones because we believe that developers will help bring the power of the web to mobile. These developer phones are being developed by Geeksphone in partnership with Telefonica and Geeksphone." Loving the orange.

The lead developer of a niche ARM-powered OS has written a string of in-depth articles on the design, implementation and testing of a commercial operating system. Justin Fletcher was the architect of versions of 4 and 6 of RISC OS, the ARM processor's original operating system. Although his pieces will be best appreciated by RISC OS and Acorn users old and new, the series is a fantastic insight into operating system design: check out his build system for compiling code into ROM images, the abstraction of video graphics from a legacy 1980s-era kernel, converting images on the fly, testing and debugging, executing applications and plenty more. Justin has written tens of thousands of words and will be publishing new pieces daily online and in Android and iOS-friendly formats.

The words 'Facebook' and 'open' don't necessarily go well together, until they do. And while they may hoard your data, they've contributed to openness in other ways. "In 2011 Facebook began the Open Compute Project, an effort among technology companies to use open-source computer hardware. Tech companies similarly shared intellectual property with Linux software, which lowered costs and spurred innovation. Facebook’s project has attracted many significant participants, including Goldman Sachs, Arista Networks, Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard and Dell." An interesting read over at the New York Times.

"The first computers were gigantic, filling rooms and requiring constant care and maintenance. The computer stayed on the desk until the laptop computer, a smaller, more portable, but just as powerful machine, made it nearly obsolete. And then, the iPhone was released, followed shortly after by Android and the Palm WebOS, and the next step in computing was clear. What we did not immediately understand was if mobile computing was an accessory, or a replacement, for the traditional desktop machines." Jon-Buys at Ostatic believes the phone-becomes-computer paradigm is the next step.