"Windows Phone is fighting an uphill battle. Microsoft still has work to do in terms of user experience and the big hardware partners like HTC and Samsung are starting to lose interest and putting in only token efforts. But Nokia is keeping the platform in the conversation. We're not willing to consign Windows Phone to the same level of hopelessness as the open-source webOS or the out-to-pasture BB OS precisely because Nokia is too big and too active a partner." Having a big partner is by no means a guarantee. Microsoft is doing whatever it can - both legal and should-not-be-legal - to get people to buy Windows Phone, and it isn't working. A brand only gets you so far - you need a compelling product, too, and as much as I like Windows Phone, it's just not there yet compared to iOS and Android.

Want something ridiculous, but at the same time incredibly entertaining story for this Easter day? The men and women over at XDA have been hard at work hacking the Nook Simple Touch, and the results are pretty amazing. They've removed the black E-ink refresh flash, and added multitouch support. Multitouch Android applications on a monochrome E-ink display - because you can.

"This article CPU DB (cpudb.stanford.edu), an open and extensible database collected by Stanford's VLSI (very large-scale integration) Research Group over several generations of processors (and students). We gathered information on commercial processors from 17 manufacturers and placed it in CPU DB, which now contains data on 790 processors spanning the past 40 years. In addition, we provide a methodology to separate the effect of technology scaling from improvements on other frontiers (e.g., architecture and software), allowing the comparison of machines built in different technologies."

After more than one year of development, the 4th version of the SCHED_DEADLINE Linux scheduler has been submitted to the kernel community. Besides taking into account prior comments and observations, this version improves the handling of rq selection for dynamic task migration and has native integration with the PREEMPT_RT project (although a patch for the standard mainline kernel is provided as well). The official development has been moved to a GitHub repository.

"Over a thousand developers contribute code to any given Linux kernel release. It's a process that works well from a technical perspective, but it's also one that has its fair share of shortcomings. In a panel at the Linux Foundation Collaboration summit this week, top Linux kernel developers detailed their common pet peeves about the Linux development model. It's a model that is not for the feint of heart ."

Larry Page on Steve Jobs' comments on Android being a stolen product: "I think the Android differences were actually for show. I think that served their interests. For a lot of companies, it's useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that." We'll never know for sure, but considering Tim Cook is reportedly looking to start settling all these lawsuits, Page might be right. Let's hope the lawsuits - settled or no - at least lead to patent reform.