"Since my last blog entry I have mostly completed the implementation of the AWT/Java2D port. It is still in need of a lot of testing, but it is stable enough to run a lot of Swing apps out of the box." Pretty cool for Haiku. I wonder what the use is - besides Minecraft - but alas.

"Why did Apple just release new MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, and a Retina MacBook Pro, but no new iMacs or Mac Pros? And why are the iMacs probably being updated this year while the Mac Pro update won't happen for 12-18 months? As usual, I have some guesses." Good points.

This intrigued me. I decided to see what would happen if you plug a Windows Phone 7.5 device - my HTC HD7 in this case - into a Windows 8 machine (the release preview). The answer? Nothing happens. If you combine Microsoft's prime desktop operating system and prime mobile offering, nothing happens. No dialogs, no sync options, no check for updates, no backups, no audio/video transfer, not even a mount or a dialog to download Zune. They've got only a few months to address this.

John Goerzen, Debian/GNU Linux developer, transitions his kids from bash to xmonad: "I'd been debating how to introduce GUIs for a very long time. It has not escaped my attention that children that used Commodores or TRS-80s or DOS knew a lot more about how their computers worked, on average, than those of the same age that use Windows or MacOS. I didn't want our boys to skip an entire phase of learning how their technology works." I decided long ago that my kids - if I ever have them, I'm undecided and way too young - will learn computing the way I learned it: with a CLI. I never realised an xmonad setup would form a good transition phase into GUIs.

While I sometimes see Dutch as an endangered language, reality is that with nearly 30 million speakers worldwide, we're actually doing pretty well. Sadly, this can't be said for the 3000 truly endangered languages of the world - nearly half of the world's total number of languages is on the verge of extinction, and with it, large amounts of human culture are in danger of disappearing forever. In collaboration with several universities and language institutions, Google has launched the Endangered Languages Project to document these languages - textually, visually, and auditorially.

"Oracle has agreed to accept zero dollars worth of damages from Google, three weeks after losing the major portions of the case in which Oracle accused Google of violating Java patents and copyrights in Android." From six billion to zero. It's not like Ellison needs the money. Pretty place.

"Icaros Desktop is an effort to build a modern Amiga-compatible operating system for standard x86 hardware. It's a distribution built atop AROS, which is an open source effort to create a system compatible at the API level with the AmigaOS 3.x series. I recently had a chat to the creator of Icaros, Paolo Besser, about the creation of the OS and why Amiga continues to inspire people today."

"It is time for us to make a change. ClamAV is now mature software and we are confident that Sourcefire will successfully continue its development, move it forward and maintain the integrity of its infrastructure. Matt Watchinski, who has headed Sourcefire's Vulnerability Research Team for 10 years, will continue to lead this project. Joel Esler, the company's Open Source community manager, will also be your main point of contact and advocate."

So, the Microsoft announcement - taking place as I write this, 01:45 in my timezone - turns out to be a bigger deal than expected. Microsoft just announced it's going full-on hardware - the company announced a new tablet called 'Surface', and boy, is this thing something to behold. Microsoft's hardware partners? They're not happy right now. Update: Here's Microsoft's official Surface site. I believe someone coined the phrase 'sexy as a succubus' in the comments about Vizio? Stealin' it! Update II: They aren't just taking the iPad head-on - this is a straight-up MacBook Air competitor.

JLG (we can suffice with his initials on OSNews, right?): "Nokia, once the emperor of mobile phones, shipping more than 100 million devices per quarter, is now in a tailspin, probably irrecoverable, taking its employees into the ground. And there is Nokia's chosen partner, Microsoft. What will Nokia's failure do to its future? Ballmer knows Microsoft can't be relegated to a inconsequential role in the smartphone wars. Will this lead to Microsoft going 'vertical', that is buying Nokia's smartphone business and become an vertically player, as it already is in its Xbox business?" Microsoft will eventually buy Nokia's smartphone business. I mean, it's not as if they have any other serious WP7 OEMs they can piss off with such a move.

Great find by Hack A Day: "Over on the 68kmla forums, a website dedicated to old Macs built before 1994, released his Android port of Mini vMac, a Macintosh Plus emulator that puts the power of a Motorola MC68000 processor and System 7 on any computer.

It's been one of my major pet peeves on both Android and iOS: the total and utter lack of consistency. Applications - whether first party or third party - all seem to live on islands, doing their own thing, making their own design choices regarding basic UI interactions, developing their own non-standard buttons and controls. Consistency died five years ago, and nobody seems to care but me.

In the past year I've reviewed four lightweight Linuxes for OS News: VectorLinux, Puppy Linux, Lubuntu, and Damn Small Linux. This article compares the four distributions. I invite your comments in response: what are your own experiences with these and competing lightweight distros?

"The UEFI secure boot mechanism has been the source of a great deal of concern in the free software community, and for good reason: it could easily be a mechanism by which we lose control over our own systems. Recently, Red Hat's Matthew Garrett described how the Fedora distribution planned to handle secure boot in the Fedora 18 release. That posting has inspired a great deal of concern and criticism, though, arguably, about the wrong things."