There's a scene in American Beauty where Kevin Spacey masturbates in the shower, while his voice-over states: "This will be the highlight of my day. It's all downhill from here." That's how I feel right now. We just had Microsoft suing Barnes & Noble, which was already pretty low to begin with, but Apple just upped the ante by suing Amazon... Over the 'app store' trademark. For the love of god.

Since competing on merit is looked down upon in the computer and software world, companies in this business usually go for the blindfolded chick with the scale and sword. Up until recently, Microsoft didn't go for the whole patent litigation thing, but now that they've tasted some, they want more. They just sued Barnes & Noble, Foxconn, and Inventec for patent infringement because they use Android.

If you use a photo editor to crop or convert your images, or to improve brightness, color balance and contrast, then you probably don't need a professional image processing suite. There are tons of web-based graphic editors that are available for free. However, if you are looking for self-hosted, open source solutions, you should definitely go in a different direction. Here's a list of four open source, self hosted online graphic editors.

The community-created Nouveau driver that's open-source and is written by clean-room reverse-engineering the NVIDIA binary display driver, has reached a serious milestone. For low-end NVIDIA GPUs, the Nouveau driver based upon the Mesa Gallium3D architecture is now as fast, or even faster, than NVIDIA's official proprietary driver.

Microsoft is claiming that Android infringes its patents, and has chosen Barnes and Noble, which is using Android for its e-reader, as a target for its ire: "The Android platform infringes a number of Microsoft’s patents, and companies manufacturing and shipping Android devices must respect our intellectual property rights."

A major deal just went down in the United States, which seriously shakes up the mobile industry on the other side of the pond: AT&T has announced it plans to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom.

"AMD worldwide developer relations manager of graphics Richard Huddy has blamed Microsoft's DirectX and its APIs for limiting the potential of GPUs in PCs. 'We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because... DirectX is getting in the way.'"

"Addressing a major weakness its plan to build its WebM video technology into the Web, Google yesterday released a version of its VP8 video encoder and decoder designed to be baked into hardware. The hardware implementation of VP8 is called H1 and now Anthill, said Aki Kuusela, engineering manager of the WebM Project, in a blog post. It comes in the form of RTL, or Register Transfer Language, a very low-level description close to how processors actually perform their instructions, and it's available royalty free."

Having reviewed the Wave 533's hardware in the last article, it's now time for us to have a look at the most interesting part: the bada OS itself. In this article, I'll have a look at the boot procedure of bada (how long it takes, what happens on first boot), and then will discuss the app-independent UI concepts introduced by Samsung in this OS before going in more details about specific apps in upcoming articles.

"A commercial ZFS solution is (still) coming to Mac OS X, thanks to former Apple filesystem and OS engineer Don Brady (who previously worked on the abandoned internal Apple project to port ZFS). Brady and his company, Ten's Complement, just launched a limited private beta in hopes to have the software polished and ready for a summer launch this year. Ars spoke with Brady, who has a long history engineering filesystems for Mac OS and Mac OS X, to find out a little about his previous work with ZFS at Apple, and what Mac users can expect to gain from Ten's Complement's port of ZFS."

The past few days have seen a stink regarding web applications on iOS. El Reg ran a story about how web applications launched from iOS' homescreen ran significantly slower than when ran inside mobile Safari. As more details emerged, it became clear this wasn't a deliberate move by Apple - but rather an implementation issue.

As a followup to the story from a couple weeks ago about a Windows 1 to 7 upgrade chain, the same intrepid explorer has upgraded from Internet Explorer 1 all the way to the latest version, just to see what happens.

From the release announcement: "Almost a year ago we started building a set of Mono bindings for building native MacOS X applications. Our original goals were modest: bind enough of AppKit that you could build native desktop applications for OSX using C# or your favorite .NET language. We leveraged a lot of the code that we built for MonoTouch our binding to the CocoaTouch APIs."

Microsoft has confirmed that an old known vulnerability has struck their newest version of their browser, Internet Explorer 9. According to Microsoft: "Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability in all supported editions of Microsoft Windows. The vulnerability could allow an attacker to cause a victim to run malicious scripts when visiting various Web sites, resulting in information disclosure. "