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.

We're still in the slow news period, so let's talk about something we discussed before: blocking advertisements on websites. Up until, well, today, I didn't block ads - not because of some ethical objection or whatever, but simply because I couldn't be bothered to setup AdBlock. Today, after taking a closer look at some of the websites I frequent, I decided to take the plunge and install AdBlock on all my machines. The following set of screenshots should pretty much explain why.

C++ is usually synonymous with object-oriented programming (OOP), and further replenished in no small measure by popular technical literature. This article tries something different - functional programming with C++ using the open source FC++ library from Yannis Smaragdakis and Brian McNamara. Learn how you can use FC++ to implement basic functional programming.

Mark Shuttleworth has just announced the codename of the next Ubuntu release after Maverick. Ubuntu 11.04 will be called Natty Narwhal. The name follows the usual Ubuntu naming tradition of the codename consisting of an adjective and a name of an animal starting with the same letter, and following an alphabetic order. Continue reading to know more about the Narwhal.

It's clearly summer in some parts of the world, since news has been particularly slow the past few days. In other words, I have to scrounge up something to talk about, so let's talk about another apparent victim of Apple's and Google's success in the mobile space. RIM launched its Torch mobile phone to much fanfare not too long ago, but early reviews were negative, and now sales aren't really stellar either. What more can RIM do?

In June 2009 we had some very good news about the integration of multitouch events support inside the Linux kernel. Since then, many multitouch device drivers were developed, mostly in collaboration with LII-ENAC, to take advantage from this. All the work was kernel-based, and multitouch supports needs more components to be added in a stack to get multitouch working out of the box. Canonical got interested in providing the needed user experience for multitouch by developing a new gesture engine that recognizes the grammar of natural hand gestures and provide them upstream in the stack as new events.

Not too long ago Adobe started a "We love Apple" campaign, as a response to Apple's continuous negative remarks about the company. With Flash 10.1 slowly but surely appearing on more and more mobile devices, it seems like the company just doesn't care about it any more. Adobe's CEO Shantanu Narayen has said they've "moved on".

I've seen it so many times in the movies and TV: a person wakes up in this futuristic world, walks by his kitchen, and a computerized voice is telling him that someone is calling him. But instead of picking up a receiver, the call is actually a video-call, and his TV is used for the conversation. If you put 2 and 2 together, this is not really that futuristic. Having a camera attached on your TV, and a VoIP SIP or Skype connection with it, is not mad science. So why don't we already have this on our TVs?

Lots of talk on net neutrality this week, mostly due to the joint policy proposal from Google and Verzion. While many Americans are calling for government-imposed net neutrality rules, The New York Times' Eric Pfanner proposes a different solution - one that has been working wonders in Europe. And hey, what a coincidence - I'm European!

KDE reaches out to another device form factor. Plasma's plugin-based design is at work again, after launching KDE special netbook interface. This time around, the KDE team presents its Plasma Tablet interface.

"We always knew that WebKit is going to make Konqueror fast; but how much faster? Today we test that by putting Konqueror with KHTML through the SunSpider JavaScript Test and the then do the same with WebKit. To get an idea of how fast they are compared to other browsers, we also decided to put Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 through the tests."