"Research In Motion today released the 'gold' build of the BlackBerry 10 developer toolkit. The 'gold' build includes all of the final tools, components, and APIs that will enable developers to create integrated, social and beautiful applications for BlackBerry 10, and have the confidence that their apps will delight customers at launch." Let's hope so. This industry needs more viable players.

Linux kernel 3.7 has been released. This release includes support for the new ARM 64 bit architecture, ARM multiplatform support - the ability to boot into different ARM systems using the same kernel; support for cryptographically signed kernel modules; Btrfs support for disabling copy-on-write on a per-file basis using chattr; faster Btrfs fsync(); a new experimental "perf trace" tool modeled after strace; support for the TCP Fast Open feature in the server side; experimental SMBv2 protocol support used by modern Windows systems; stable NFS 4.1 and parallel NFS; the vxlan tunneling protocol that allows to transfer Layer 2 ethernet packets over UDP; and support for the Intel "supervisor mode access prevention" security feature. Many small features and new drivers and fixes are also available. Here's the full list of changes.

Confirming the industry's worst-kept secret, Valve CEO Gabe Newell has confirmed Valve is working on its 'Steam Box', a Steam-powered HTPC geared towards console-like gaming. It'll most likely run Linux. "Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment," he told Kotaku. "If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that's what some people are really gonna want for their living room." Steam has 50 million subscribers, so there's a market here. As a comparison: Xbox Live has 40 million subscribers.

"Calling themselves Phoenix International Communications - a name that references the mythical bird that emerged from the ashes of its predecessor - the group aims to raise enough money to produce and sell a smartphone running an open-source version of webOS perhaps by late 2013." Like Jolla, I have the hope - just not the expectations.

"So sprawling is Samsung's modern-day empire that some South Koreans say it has become possible to live a Samsung-only life: You can use a Samsung credit card to buy a Samsung TV for the living room of your Samsung-made apartment on which you'll watch the Samsung-owned pro baseball team. Samsung is South Korea's greatest economic success, and, more recently, the subject of major controversy. Economists, owners of small- and medium-size businesses, and some politicians say Samsung no longer merely powers the country but overpowers it, wielding influence that nearly matches that of the government." Campaign contributions, moles in political offices and chambers, this Samsung stuff - this is what happens when companies are left unchecked. It's cute if you think this only happens in Korea. Much of it all is legal, but that doesn't make it right.

Morphos made its debut, albeit still in beta, on a SAM460 board at Pianeta Amiga 2012 in Bologna, Italy a few days ago. Codenamed Project Naomo (an anagram of Moana, a different project that allowed to run AmigaOS4 on a Mac Mini through a modified ISO) by Frank Mariak, it aims at running MOS 3.2, the next official version, on both the aforementioned Italian motherboard and Powerbooks. Soon, it should extend support to the AmigaOne 500 as well, as hinted at Acube's Facebook page, where it provided an email address from Morphos Team for further inquiries. Acube now boasts support for AmigaOS4, AROS and soon Morphos, along with some Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Debian, for its SAM460. Pictures and a video first appeared on the official Facebook page of the event and the latter is now available on Youtube.

So, Apple is serious about this thing. Tim Cook has said in an interview the company plans to manufacture one line of Macs in the US, starting next year. Coincidentally (or not?), Foxconn has just announced it plans to expand its production facilities... Into the United States. There's no indication as of yet that the two are linked, but the coincidence is at least interesting.

With computers now shipping with UEFI Secure Boot enabled, users of any OS other than Windows 8 will want to know how to circumvent it. Jesse Smith of DistroWatch tells how he did it here. The Linux Foundation describes its approach here. If you want to boot an OS other than Windows 8, you'll want to figure this out before you buy that new computer.

"The European Commission has fined seven international groups of companies a total of EUR 1,470,515,000 for participating in either one or both of two distinct cartels in the sector of cathode ray tubes. For almost ten years, between 1996 and 2006, these companies fixed prices, shared markets, allocated customers between themselves and restricted their output. One cartel concerned colour picture tubes used for televisions and the other one colour display tubes used in computer monitors. The cartels operated worldwide. The infringements found by the Commission therefore cover the entire European Economic Area. Chunghwa, LG Electronics, Philips and Samsung SDI participated in both cartels, while Panasonic, Toshiba, MTPD (currently a Panasonic subsidiary) and Technicolor (formerly Thomson) participated only in the cartel for television tubes." The EU can do good things.

"For two decades, X has been the foundation for Linux graphics. Ubuntu's decision late in 2010 to switch to Wayland shakes things up all the way to those roots. Just over a month ago, the official 1.0.0 release of Wayland appeared, as well as its associated Weston project. How will these milestones affect working GUI programmers? What will happen to all the existing toolkits - Qt, wxWindows, Tk, and others - on which so many graphical applications already depend?"

Two weeks ago, as I was busy finding out in Vegas that double-shot frozen cocktails are a really stupid idea, a small Finnish startup unveiled their mobile operating system: Jolla unveiled Sailfish. With a strong focus on the Chinese market, the company is aiming to offer serious competition to Android's dominance of the smartphone market.

"For a seventh consecutive month, the Samsung Galaxy S III is the most popular smartphone in the United Kingdom. The data compiled by uSwitch is based on live searches, pre-orders, as well as postpaid sales. Curiously, Apple's current smartphone flagship is not even second. The iPhone 5 is outperformed by its predecessor, whose lower price and improved contract offers helped it remain appealing. The Samsung Galaxy S II completes the quartet at the top. The rest of the top ten smartphones is entirely an Android party. It includes the Google Nexus 4, who entered the rankings a solid fifth. The second half of the top ten includes the Samsung Galaxy Ace, Samsung Galaxy Note 2, Sony Xperia U, HTC One X, as well as the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2." This is getting ridiculous, and it's not good for the market. For the love of Fiona, people, buy something that's not Android. I don't want to live in an Android-dominated smartphone world.

"Few tools are more indispensable to my work than Unix. Manipulating data into different formats, performing transformations, and conducting exploratory data analysis (EDA) is the lingua franca of data science.1 The coffers of Unix hold many simple tools, which by themselves are powerful, but when chained together facilitate complex data manipulations. Unix's use of functional composition eliminates much of the tedious boilerplate of I/0 and text parsing found in scripting languages. This design creates a simple and succinct interface for manipulating data and a foundation upon which custom tools can be built. Although languages like R and Python are invaluable for data analysis, I find Unix to be superior in many scenarios for quick and simple data cleaning, idea prototyping, and understanding data. This post is about how I use Unix for EDA."

News Corp. has just announced its iPad-only newspaper The Daily will be closed down. What do you know, a platform-specific publication fails in the internet era. I totally did not see this coming at all. Times are changing, people. Platform-specific is so 2007.