The sand has hit the elephant. The buttons have dried the desert. The empty CD-Rs are dancing to Radiohead. The unicorns have left the building. The US International Trade Commission is going to be working overtime this year: after Nokia and Apple, Motorola, too, has now filed a complaint with the ITC, seeking a ban on imports of RIM devices.

AMD has reached profitability for the first time in three years during the fourth quarter of 2009, benefiting from a legal settlement with Intel and a change in its business model. The company reported net income of USD 1.18 billion during the quarter that ended on Dec. 26, an improvement over the loss of USD 1.44 billion it reported in the fourth quarter of 2008. The company reported diluted earnings per share of USD 1.52.

Like many of you, I kind of lost my faith in the US justice system (when it comes to piracy cases) when a judge awarded USD 1.92 million in damages for downloading 24 songs in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case. At the same time, also like many of you, I was very pleased with the outcome of the OiNK case in the United Kingdom last week. As it turns out, some of my faith in the US system has been restored: the USD 1.92 fine has been reduced by 97%, to a mere USD 54000.

Taking a break from reporting on the latest netbook or phone rumours, Engadget posted an article yesterday about several elements in desktop operating systems writer Paul Miller finds outdated. While there's some interesting stuff in there, there's also a lot to discuss.

"With the economy beginning to show signs of a recovery, Google's growth continued in the fourth quarter as the company beat analyst estimates and saw revenue rise 17 percent from a year ago on strong ad sales. Revenue for the quarter ended December 31, excluding traffic acquisition costs, was $4.95 billion, slightly higher than the $4.92 billion analysts were expecting. Including those costs, Google posted total revenue of $6.67 billion. Earnings were $2.19 billion, or $6.79 a share, excluding stock-based compensation and other costs. That was higher than the analyst expectations of earnings per share of $6.50, and up from year-ago earnings of $1.62 billion, or $5.10 per share. Including all costs, earnings were $1.97 billion, or $6.13 a share, compared with $381 million, or $1.21 a share. Traffic acquisition costs, the portion of revenue shared with Google's partners, totaled $1.72 billion and represented 27 percent of ad revenue."

"Computer users with rudimentary skills will be able to program via screen shots rather than lines of code with a new graphical scripting language called Sikuli that was devised at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With a basic understanding of Python, people can write programs that incorporate screen shots of graphical user interface elements to automate computer work."

As promised, Microsoft released the patch that fixes the Google attack vulnerability. Seven other holes are closed off as well. "Microsoft on Thursday issued a cumulative critical patch for Internet Explorer that fixes eight vulnerabilities, including a hole targeted in the China-based attacks on Google and other U.S. companies. The security update is rated critical for all supported releases of IE 5, 6, 7, and 8, according to the advisory. The more severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a malicious Web page using IE, it said."

"OpenBSD is widely touted as being 'secure by default', something often mentioned by OpenBSD advocates as an example of the security focused approach the OpenBSD project takes. Secure by default refers to the fact that the base system has been audited and considered to be free of vulnerabilities, and that only the minimal services are running by default. This approach has worked well; indeed, leading to 'Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!'. This is a common sense approach, and a secure default configuration should be expected of all operating systems upon an initial install. An argument often made by proponents of OpenBSD is the extensive code auditing performed on the base system to make sure no vulnerabilities are present. The goal is to produce quality code as most vulnerabilities are caused by errors in the source code. This a noble approach, and it has worked well for the OpenBSD project, with the base system having considerably less vulnerabilities than many other operating systems. Used as an indicator to gauge the security of OpenBSD however, it is worthless."

Only a few days ago, we discussed the most popular YouTube feature request: HTML5 video support. Apparently, a lot of people want a version of YouTube that doesn't depend on Flash (me being one of them), and now Google has honoured their request with the HTML5 YouTube beta. Sadly, video quality needs a lot of work, and in spite of the original feature request, it's using h264 instead of Theora.

Every now and then, you have these items which make you check the thermostat in hell. Today, we have a classic case: BusinessWeek is reporting that Apple and Microsoft are reportedly in talks about replacing Google with Bing as the default search engine on the iPhone.

Well, that was quick. Microsoft said yesterday it would release an out-of-band security update to fix the vulnerability found in Internet Explorer which was used during the Google attacks. Today it announced the fix will be released tomorrow.

"It's been a long time coming but Apple has finally updated its Boot Camp utility to allow owners of Intel-based Macs to run Windows 7 on their machines. Although this was already possible with some easy workarounds, and somewhat spotty driver compatibility, the newly-released version 3.1 adds native support for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft's latest operating system in its Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate editions."

The Mac version of BumpTop, the 3D desktop which shipped for Windows last year, has been released. It more or less works the same as the Windows version, but with lots of Mac-specific features and looks. It also supports multitouch gestures on Apple's trackpads.

Now this is material that piques my interest more than anything: insights from one of the bigger names in the industry. Jean-Louis Gassee debunks the "Apple-must-license-its-software-or-die" myth by looking back upon the past - and if you don't know who JLG is, then please take that dunce hat and stand in the corner for three hours, contemplating your existence. Note: OSNews has a bug with using diacritic marks on the front page, so JLG's name is misspelled. It is correctly spelled in the article body.