The Wall Street Journal: "Apple has cut its orders for components for the iPhone 5 due to weaker-than-expected demand, people familiar with the situation said Monday. Apple's orders for iPhone 5 screens for the January-March quarter, for example, have dropped to roughly half of what the company had previously planned to order, two of the people said. The Cupertino company has also cut orders for components other than screens, according to one of the people." The WSJ is usually very well informed about Apple matters (and Japanese business new Nikkei reports something similar), so it's a safe assumption that they're not making this up. What, exactly, this means, we don't know; perhaps a new model already? Seems strange they would switch to a different screen this quickly, though. Android (more specifically: Samsung) keeps on growing, so it's only inevitable that Apple would feel a sting there at some point. We'll know for sure on the 23rd, when Apple's latest quarterly results come rolling in.

Tom Warren: "While Intel is trying to keep the Windows tree healthy, Microsoft is hoping that the leaves don't start to drop off before its own family of Surface devices are fully ready. Redmond isn't 'priming the pump' here, it's planting seeds for the future. If Microsoft is successful then it could be the world's biggest Windows OEM in just a few years. The future is Surface." You just have to look at the difference in build quality and supplied software between OEM devices and Surface even though Surface is cheaper to realise that the age of Windows OEMs is coming to an end. The writing's on the wall, and the OEMs know it: there's no future for them in Windows.

"Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11, according to his uncle, Michael Wolf, in a comment to The Tech. Swartz was 26." Swartz was one of three co-creators of Reddit, worked on the RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, and so many other things. Swartz faced decades in prison for downloading a collection of JSTOR scientific articles. JSTOR dropped charges, but the US government pursued the case anyway, demanding fifty years in jail. Lawrence Lessig, one of his close friends: "Aaron had literally done nothing in his life 'to make money'. He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don't get both, you don't deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you." Our sincere condolences to his family and friends. We've just lost one of the good guys.

After relying on third parties for several years - Internet Explorer, Netscape - Apple decided that it was time to take matters into its own hands. It was time Apple created its own browser (again). And so, Safari was born, and released unto the world ten years ago. These past few weeks, Don Melton, the project lead for Safari and WebKit, has been sharing a lot of interesting stories about the origins and development of Apple's browser.

"Recently, a method was found for Windows RT that allowed running unsigned code through a rather clever exploit. This method has now been turned into a full fledged tool by XDA Developers member Netham45. All the details are over in this XDA post, including the download." Super-simple, even a child can do it. A big <3 to XDA.

"Release early, release often. Today, we're introducing Chrome Beta channel for phones and tablets on Android 4.0+. You can expect early access to new features (and bugs!), as well as a chance to provide feedback on what's on the way. Just like our other Beta versions, the new features may be a little rough around the edges, but we'll be pushing periodic updates so you can test out our latest work as soon as it's ready." Well, let's see if the Chrome Beta is any less of a disaster than what passes for 'stable' Chrome on Android.

A Jolla (Sailfish) developer and a Canonical (Ubuntu Phone) developer walk into a KDE/Plasma IRC channel, and fire up a conversation about the QML component API. Not long after, the first fruits of this conversation become apparent. Aaron Seigo (who uses punctuation these days!): "Well, one thing led to another and Zoltan posted an email to the Qt Components mailing list summing up the conversation and proposing we bring our APIs into better alignment. We hope to address issues of API drift between the various component sets out there. This is a pain point others have identified, such as in this recent blog post by Johan Thelin. There is much work to be done before we can even think of calling this a success, but it's the right sort of start." Great news.

Nokia has just sent out a few preliminary comments about the company's performance during the fourth quarter of 2012. Nokia's figures are a good indicator for how well Windows Phone 8 is doing, and, in all honesty, I'm not exactly blown away. Apparently, neither was Nokia itself, since the company decided to redefine their Asha phones from feature phone to smartphone to prop up their smartphone sales figures.

"A senior OpenBSD developer has complained on a mailing list that upstream vendors of free and open source software are adding in changes without any thought of whether downstream users could adapt to the change. Marc Espie said this would hurt smaller players by not allowing them to keep up with the changes. Basically what is happening is that numerous changes are being made to Linux and smaller projects like OpenBSD cannot keep up with the changes. And, according to Espie, not all these changes are strictly necessary."

"BORPH is an operating system designed for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers. It is an extended version of the Linux kernel that handles FPGAs as if they were CPUs. BORPH introduces the concept of a 'hardware process', which is a hardware design that runs on an FPGA but behaves just like a normal user program. The BORPH kernel provides standard system services, such as file system access to hardware processes, allowing them to communicate with the rest of the system easily and systematically. The name is an acronym for 'Berkeley Operating system for ReProgrammable Hardware'."

This is so cool, and defeninitely the future of mobile phone displays. Samsung demonstrated a prototype phone with a flexible display. Flexible displays will be more resilient than the stuff we use today, and if we ever get around to developing flexible PCBs and batteries, we'll be golden. I long for sturdy, shatterproof devices.

Ars 'reviews' Haiku, and concludes that "at the end of the day, Haiku may not be much more than an interesting diversion, something to play with on a spare bit of hardware on a rainy afternoon just for a bit of fun. But even if it amounts to no more than that, Haiku is still worth checking out." The article is a bit scant on content, but it does give me the opportunity to link to my review of Haiku alpha 1 from 3 years ago. I try Haiku every now and then to see if that review needs an update, but it always amounts to 'it got a bit more stable' - which is fantastic, but not a reason to redo it.

Lead developer for Compiz, Sam Spilsbury, says he sees little need to develop Compiz for Wayland due to the increasing fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem. Spilsbury writes "What does compiz actually provide to users of these systems? None of this functionality that user wants really depends on our compositing engine. There's nothing so special about our compositing engine that gives it a reason to exist This is the real practical toll of fragmentation amongst the Linux ecosystem. It's not just that there are multiple implementations of the wheel. There are multiple implementations of entire cars which do almost the same thing, but a little different from everyone else. Some say this is the free software's greatest strength. Now that I know the personal and technical toll of fragmentation, I see it as its greatest weakness."

The Verge got to interview Valve's CEO, Gabe Newell, and the priceless quotes are just flying left and right. "We'll come out with our own and we'll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That'll be a Linux box, if you want to install Windows you can. We're not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination." Others will be making Steambox devices too. Also: "Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business. When I started using it I was like 'oh my god...' I find unusable." This last point is something I agree with vehemently. Can't comment on Windows 8 on tablets, but on regular PCs it's a schizophrenic, unusable clusterduck. It got me to switch back to Mac and use KDE (on my laptop). Let that sink in for a while.