Can you believe it's been only six months since Microsoft first unveiled its brand-new and most likely last-ditch effort to regain some significance in the smartphone market? Well, today the company announced that the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools will go gold September 16, and applications submissions will be accepted from early October onwards.

Authorities investigating the 2008 crash of Spanair flight 5022 have discovered a central computer system used to monitor technical problems in the aircraft was infected with malware.

Lennart Poettering has posted a status update about systemd, an init/upstart alternative. systemd is able now to replace /etc/fstab and cron, and it seems it will be the default init system for Fedora 14. He has also written a post about systemd for administrators.

"This is a minor release of Vim. It consists of Vim 7.2 plus all patches, updated runtime files and some more, see below. It has been two years since the 7.2 release, thus it's not that 'minor'. But not 'major' either. Something in between, don't know how to call that."

"AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of consumer grade graphics processors. While this Evergreen support isn't yet finished and for the time being is targeted towards Linux developers and enthusiasts, you can now play around with your ATI Radeon HD 5000 graphics processor on an open-source driver while having 2D EXA, X-Video, and OpenGL acceleration."

"Maverick Meerkat is set to become the last version of Ubuntu that'll run on Oracle's Sparc, ending a four-year relationship. Also getting canned is Ubuntu running on Hewlett-Packard's Itanic 64-bit challenger. Meerkat is currently in feature-freeze ahead of October's official launch, and apparently nobody's stepped up to maintain the Linux ports to either Sparc or Itanium. The Ubuntu Sparc port has fallen out of use and updates have slipped, meaning it's fallen below the level of quality needed for an Ubuntu port. Ubuntu on HP's IA64 is in slightly better shape, but - still - nobody's actively maintaining it."

Rumours were abound that the first Google ChromeOS device would emerge towards the end of the year. Although this rumour turned out to be false, other snippets of news surrounding Google and the ChromeOS also emerged. One of these stories consists of rumours reported by TechCrunch, and two others are not rumours but simply confirmed facts.

The Nexenta Core Platform marches on with the release of version 3.0 of the OpenSolaris based distribution, based on b134. It has also officially unveiled plans of moving from OpenSolaris to Illumos, the fully open branch of OpenSolaris. It will also now plan on moving to a new userland release. Grab the iso here.

"The long wait is over and Linux users can finally use the Gmail Videochat! The GMail team recently announced the availability of voice and video chat on Linux. This feature is currently supported on Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions. RPM Support for Fedora Linux and other Red Hat based distributions (like CentOS) is going to be added soon." Some screenshots of GMail Video Chat on Linux in action

You know, I really like America and its citizens. Beautiful country, lovely people, nothing but good experiences on my end. However, like everyone else, the US has its problems, and one particular annoying one is the power of lobby and interests groups. I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that the RIAA and NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) are asking Congress to mandate FM chips in all portable devices - cell phones, mp3 players, PDAs, everything. Wait, what?

Fascinating stuff, but not entirely unexpected. As most of you will know, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is working on a tablet dubbed the BlackPad, and according to several sources reporting to Bloomberg, the device will ship with software written by QNs Software Systems, which RIM purchased earlier this year.

"If you've been following check-ins for the last year or so, then you already know that some dedicated contributors have been working on a MathML implementation in WebKit. I am very pleased to announce that the implementation is now turned on by default in the WebKit build and in WebKit Nightlies! Big thanks to Alex Milowski, Francois Sausset, and everyone else who has worked on MathML in WebKit."

I don't trust the site that brought the rumour, but hey, we don't have much else to report on so bear with me. DownloadSquad is reporting that they've heard from a reliable source that Verizon and Google are going to unveil a Chrome OS tablet in November. So basically, Chrome OS is going to compete with Android on tablets. Excellent idea. Oh and also, Engadget has compiled Verizon's roadmap for the rest of the year, and it's Android, Android, Android, Andrdoid. Update: Surprising - it's nonsense.

In a recent interview with derStandard.at Mozilla's Chris Blizzard talks about the rising competition by Google Chrome, the evolution of the web platform and the prospects for WebM. He also promises that Firefox 4 will be "one generation ahead" of other browsers in relation to Javascript speed.