Most of us here are not particularly big fans of the concept of patents. Most of us are aware of the significance of patents, we just believe the system has gone out of control and needs a serious kick in the butt. Well, it turns out not even the richest people on this earth are immune to the call of the patent troll. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed a massive patent lawsuit, using broad and vague patents to sue just about any big name in the business - from Apple to Google.

When Google and Verizon unveiled their joint net neutrality policy proposal, in which the FCC would play a central role in governing the internet, I mentioned how the the FCC might not be the kind of institution you'd want to hand over control to over your pornography life line (also known as the internet). Over the past few days, the FCC pretty much reiterated just why they are no the right people to govern the web.

At the Hot Chips 2010 conference, IBM announced their upcoming z196 CPU, which is really, really fast. How fast? Fastest chip in the world fast. Intended for Z-series mainframe computers, the Z196 has a clock speed of 5.2GHz. Measuring just 512 square millimeters, the Z196 is fabricated on 45nm PD SOI technology, and on its surface contains almost one and a half billion transistors. My... Processor is bigger than yours.

The OpenSolaris governing board fell on its collective sword Monday and resigned en masse after Oracle continued to ignore its ultimatum to appoint a liaison guy to work with it on the future of the open source project. The move was anticlimactic to say the least. Oracle last week leaked an internal e-mail into the wild effectively saying OpenSolaris is dead. The news of the mass resignation, coupled with Oracle suing Google claiming Android infringes on its Java patents, had Adobe's director of open source and standards David McAllister casting Oracle as the New Microsoft and saying "the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so".

The InfoWorld Test Center rounds up of the past year in open source, highlighting the best open source offerings in several software categories: "The word 'best' here can mean many things. It is sometimes equivalent to 'most promising', 'most surprising', 'most subversive', 'most unnerving', 'most opportune', 'most happening', or some weird, inchoate mixture of them all. The one thing it always means is 'most useful' - to developers, IT administrators, and users on a business network." From enterprise apps, to app dev tools, to platforms and middleware, to networking software, the list is expansive, including 39 hybrid license and community offerings.

"Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer's microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don't spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, 'wouldn't it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?' Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail."

A couple of days ago we talked about how the RIAA and NAB are planning on asking US Congress to mandate FM radio chips inside every cell phone. This plan was met with some ridicule, so the NAB decided to write a blog post addressing the critics. Most of the post is overshadowed by an overdose of America's favourite national pastime: WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE. 9/11!

Today, Mozilla released the fourth beta of Firefox 4.0. After a period of what I would call stagnation, the Mozilla team are back on track with delivering interesting UI concepts. They were sensible enough to copy Chrome's excellent tabs-on-top UI, but have now also added something called Panorama, a new and very interesting way of managing your open tabs.

"You can't say that AMD is ever boring. The company says its next-generation Bulldozer CPU core will take a unique approach to computing that goes beyond Hyper-Threading, which some believe could offer phenomenal performance."

In what has surprised me greatly, nobody has submitted anything to us regarding this day in the history of computing. Sure, memories of her may not be fond, and with the magical unicorn power of hindsight you'd rather forget you ever dated her so intensely, but she served a purpose. She led a revolution that changed the world forever, and while you may have hoped for a more charismatic leader, I think it's unfair not to honour the fact that she turned 15 today.

OSNews patent watch, at your service. Lexmark, apparently under new leadership who can't recall the defeat the company suffered back in 2005, is undertaking yet another attempt to block third party cartridges for Lexmark printers to enter the market. Instead of invoking the DMCA, they got clever this time and are claiming patent violations.

Earlier today I bought a $10 album from iTumes, which I wish I hadn't. The reviews were glorious, and the previews not indicative. Listening to the album all I could hear was hipster drivel. Obviously, I wanted my money back. Well, bad luck. iTunes won't give refunds. I tweeted about it, and a friend suggested Rdio. Rdio, a brand new streaming service, currently offers a 3-day free trial -- without the need for a credit card. For $5 let's you stream their huge library on your desktop via an Adobe AIR app or browser, and for $10 let's you also stream from Android/BBerry/iOS, plus be able to sync your music with you offline on these devices. Unlike Last.fm and Pandora, Rdio let's you stream on-demand.

A rumor has been going around for about four months now that Valve is coming out with a Linux version of Steam and had a lot of people in the Linux community very excited. However Valve have officially killed the rumor. And it is not what people wants to hear - there is no Linux version of Steam in development.

Kevin Rose, of Digg fame, wrote a blog post yesterday about the upcoming revolution of the TV. A sentiment that I of course agree with. However, trying to think one step ahead, it makes sense to envision that the next big device that will get "smart," is the car. And when this happens soon, everything else will follow.