"If you're looking for notebook power on the cheap and you're not too keen on either using Intel's integrated graphics or paying for a higher-performing, NVIDIA-made workaround (i.e., Optimus), then there's an obvious alternative mobile platform for you: AMD/ATI. AMD is gaining steam in the mobile space due to a combination of low cost and its ATI Radeon graphics solution, with Reuters reporting that the company will better than double the number of design wins this back-to-school season compared to a year ago."

An attorney for Google slammed a controversial intellectual property treaty on Friday, saying it has "metastasized" from a proposal to address border security and counterfeit goods to an international legal framework sweeping in copyright and the Internet. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is "something that has grown in the shadows, Gollum-like," without public scrutiny, Daphne Keller, a senior policy counsel in Mountain View, Calif., said at a conference at Stanford University.

According to The Register, "Researchers say they've devised a way to bypass protections built in to dozens of the most popular desktop anti-virus products, including those offered by McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG, and BitDefender. The method, developed by software security researchers at matousec.com, works by exploiting the driver hooks the anti-virus programs bury deep inside the Windows operating system. In essence, it works by sending them a sample of benign code that passes their security checks and then, before it's executed, swaps it out with a malicious payload."

Whatever products we use, I think we can all agree that the United States patent system and the US Patent and Trademark Office need a serious overhaul. Not only has the USPTO a history of granting ridiculous patents (massive prior art, obviousness, incredibly vague, the USPTO grants them all), it also has a backlog of about 750000 patent applications. The USPTO now has a plan to combat these issues - sadly, they once again display their utter incompetence.

And so the suing continues. Apple and Nokia aren't particularly friendly towards one another as of late, with both companies accusing each other of infringing upon one another's patents. Several shots have been fired back and forth already, with the latest one coming straight from Espoo.

"Samsung has finally released the public version of their bada SDK. Samsung has been seeding new SDK releases to partners but it's the first time, they've released it to the public. It's a beta version and the final release is expected later this month. You can download the full SDK now by registering for free on the bada developer site." More here.

The recently released 10.04 version of Ubuntu is the third Long Term Support (LTS) version Canonical has released. I installed this new version on four of my laptops (2 netbooks, 1 normal laptop, 1 portable desktop replacement), and here's my impression of it.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics. A really annoying overused catchphrase which sadly happens to be an adequate description of a story which appeared on Fortune's website, in which a Morgan Stanley report is quoted as saying that the introduction of tablet computers - the iPad specifically - have caused netbook sales to plummet. It seems like the researcher in question, however, needs to learn how to read her own graphs.

While Eugenia has already detailed just how intricate and impressive the MPEG-LA's efforts have been to basically set up the foundations that would allow them to sue just about everyone - their vague and unclear licenses are used in everything from DVD players to digital camcorders, and as such, it's hard to avoid them. Many others claim that the MPEG-LA won't ever go rogue (or this, take your pick). I think those people will be interested to know that one of the MPEG-LA's subsidiaries, a cut-and-clear patent troll, has launched several patent infringement suits earlier this year. This patent troll's CEO? Larry Horn - yes, the same Larry Horn who's also CEO of the MPEG-LA.

Another blow for Flash. As Adobe is stating that they will make the best tools for HTML5, another major website using Flash has announced they're switching over to HTML5. Scribd, which provides in-browser access to all sorts of documents and e-books uploaded by users, will ditch its Flash-based website in favour of a brand-new HTML5 version.

H264 or no, the rest of the world pretty much continues to spin, which also means new iterations of the programs central to this whole debate: browsers. While Google released an ambitious new Chrome beta release, Microsoft shipped the second platform preview release for Internet Explorer 9.

The Journal of Information Technology and Politics will host JITP 2010: Politics of Open Source on May 6 & 7, 2010 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The conference will also stream live via the conference website. The Politics of Open Source is an interdisciplinary conference that examines the politics associated with the Free/Libre and Open Source Software Movement. The conference features two keynote lectures. The first is by Eric von Hippel, Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Dr. Von Hippel's keynote, "Democratizing Innovation" will discuss the development and impact of democratized innovation systems.

A recent addition to Linux's impressive selection of file systems is Ceph, a distributed file system that incorporates replication and fault tolerance while maintaining POSIX compatibility. Explore the architecture of Ceph and learn how it provides fault tolerance and simplifies the management of massive amounts of data.

"Microsoft's Kin One and Two will be available to prospective buyers within days, though the pricing and data plans seem to fall in an awkward spot for a device the companies are targeting at teens. Microsoft announced Wednesday that the two devices would be available on Verizon Wireless' website as of May 6 and show up in stores on May 13. After a $100 mail-in rebate and a new two-year contract with Verizon, the Kin One will cost $49.99 and the Two will cost $99.99."