"I'm fascinated by the rapid decline and complete recovery that took place in less than 15 minutes exactly one month ago today on May 6, 2010 coined the 'flash crash'. Even with the gloomy global economic backdrop since then, it's taken the S&P 500 a full month to close lower than the downward spike of that event which originally occurred in two to three minutes. In over 10 years of studying the markets on a daily basis, I've never seen anything like it. I've spent the last few weeks studying the 'flash crash' for evidence that could lead to an explanation of how it happened."

As everybody already expected, Apple "unveiled" the new iPhone tonight. It's called the iPhone 4, and brings the iPhone up to par with what's already available on other smartphone platforms, hardware wise, while raising the bar on a few specific points (the display, mostly). The company also announced a name change for its mobile operating system - it's now called iOS. What we didn't get during this year's WWDC keynote? News about the Mac, Mac OS X, or the Apple TV. Make no mistake: the iPhone and iPad is where it's at.

On June the 7th Apple will do some stuff about some stuff and everybody will write lots about said stuff. We discuss a bit of this stuff and the problems Apple are facing with their stuff impacting our stuff. Moving away from Apple we give time to Amiga news on three fronts with MorphOS, AROS on Imica and Aeon's X1000 with its yet-unknown processor. If Thom has gusessed wrong, he'll be dining on a humble-pie / sock taste infusion. Lastly, debate on processors of another kind where we discuss ARM and x86

Employees of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have ported Sun's/Oracle's ZFS natively to Linux. Linux already had a ZFS port in userspace via FUSE, since license incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL prevent ZFS from becoming part of the Linux kernel. This project solves the licensing issue by distributing ZFS as a separate kernel module users will have to download and build for themselves.

A number of recent reports provide a new picture of the current smart phone market landscape and the trends likely to impact that landscape over the coming year. The latest US market share report by Nielsen shows both the iPhone OS and Android growing at the expense of Windows Mobile and the Blackberry OS.

When Google first unveiled its WebM project, there were quite some concerns over its license. This license was incompatible with version 2 and 3 of the GPL, and was effectively a new license, causing unnecessary confusion. Google has now cleared everything up by switching to a regular BSD license.

Earlier this week, Apple launched a HTML5 Showcase page, displaying several uses for HTML5 and related technologies. However, it turns out that Apple is using trickery to block out browsers other than Safari, with the end result that browsers with better support for web standards than Safari can't access the demos.

And the MorphOS team continues to expand their hardware support. They released MorphOS version 2.5 today, which adds support for Apple's eMac computers (the 1.25Ghz models, the 1.42 models have not yet been tested). Of course, there's also a whole load of fixes and improvements, too.

"Tuxera today announced the release of Tuxera exFAT for Android and other Linux systems. Developed using technical documentation provided by Microsoft Corp., Tuxera exFAT provides outstanding performance and stability, and meets the latest SDXC memory card standards."

"Xcode is a fantastic development environment for developing Mac, iPhone, and iPad applications. But it has some areas for improvement. In this post, I'll explore some improvements to how documentation and autocompletion is integrated into the development workflow and how Xcode could provide specialized interfaces for working with system frameworks."

A lot of people point to a possible Verizon iPhone as the one thing that will staunch Android's remarkable growth. Sadly for those of you stuck on AT&T, there won't be a Verizon iPhone any time soon. Verizon Wireless spokesman John Johnson has said that his company has "no plans to carry the iPhone in the immediate future". Bummer for all you frustrated AT&T people.

Now this is interesting. We only briefly touched upon Qubes two months ago, and now, the team behind the project have announced a very interesting feature: disposable virtual machines. The idea here is that you can tell your operating system to launch an application in a virtual machine that gets created specifically for opening that application. If you close the application, the VM is destroyed automatically - and this all in under one second.

I think that no matter which group you belong to - Apple, Linux, Windows, BeOS - we can all agree on one thing: original equipment manufacturers are terrible at writing or pre-loading software. Whether it be adding pre-exisiting software to Windows OEM installs, or software they write on their own, it is universally bad. As such, I just can't understand why Microsoft would leave creating tablet user experiences to OEMs.

Not too long ago, a lot of people were pleasantly surprised when HP announced it would buy smartphone maker Palm. While Palm launched a very well-received mobile operating system, the hardware it ran on was of questionable quality, leading to lower-than-expected sales and thus financial problems. Now that HP has bought Palm, we're certainly going to see the webOS running on top-notch smartphones, right? Well, not if it's up to HP CEO Mark Hurd. Update: This gives a slightly different angle.