Early last week, Apple released the 10.6.2 update to Snow Leopard loaded mostly with welcome, but unsurprising bug fixes, including a patch for the uncommon but extremely harmful user account deletion bug. However, hidden in the kernel update was dropped support for the hackintosh-friendly Intel Atom processor. The Atom is Intel’s smallest chip and has the distinction of being the processor of choice for people building cheap OS X netbooks with limited hackery required. When early builds of 10.6.2 removed Atom support, speculation and rumors were abound regarding the future of the easy-to-build Atom hackintosh.

An Indian eye hospital is piloting software that will push to doctors' iPhones retinal images collected from patients in remote locations.

Doctors can then quickly send their diagnosis and recommendations from their iPhones, said Anand Vinekar, project coordinator and pediatric retinal surgeon at the Narayana Nethralaya Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology in Bangalore.

The source code for Google Chrome OS is available for download now and is ready to be explored. A Twitter update from Google employee Matt Cutts detailed where you can download the source code.

The download comes just minutes before Google is to show off the operating system to the world.

Dubbed by AMD as the "world's fastest," the ATI Radeon HD 5970 joins the ranks of DirectX 11 capable graphics cards, and includes ATI's Eyefinity multi-display technology.

Announced today, The HD 5970 boasts quite a few nifty features, including an integrated HD Audio controller, efficiency tools to lighten the card's power consumption, and nearly 5 teraflops of power. To illustrate how rapidly graphics cards are advancing, Nvidia's GTX 295, which was released early this year, offers up a comparatively measly 1.79 teraflops.

Google Chome OS, which Google is expected to preview this Thursday, has been the subject of much speculation and rumors since its announcement last summer, when Google made public its plans to develop a lightweight, open-source Linux-based OS aimed primarily at netbooks. Ever since, a series of fake screenshots and speculation as to what Chrome will offer has bombarded the Web.

The Facts

Unfortunately, so far we know very little in terms of solid facts about Google's Chrome OS project, with the company providing only scant details. The Linux-based OS, which is built upon the company's browser of the same name, is expected to arrive in the second half of 2010, and although it will be geared toward netbooks, it'll run on higher-end PCs as well. Google has revealed a number of the manufacturers involved in the project, such as Acer, Asus, Hewlett Packard, and Lenovo. Intel is also in on the act.

It's been four months since Google fired a shot across Microsoft's bow, with the announcement of its Google Chrome OS. The Web-centric operating system targets the perpetually-connected, and will blur the line between browser and operating system. Or so we've been told. Up until now, Google has only dropped morsels of details on its coming OS.

It's about time Google showed what's up its sleeve: TechCrunch reports that the search magnate will be offering the first real look at Google Chrome OS this Thursday, with technical demonstrations for the media. Reportedly, we should also hear about Google’s launch plans for Chrome OS.

If you're thinking of buying a netbook but you're not sure how well it'll handle full-screen HD Flash video, Adobe has a solution. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 with GPU acceleration--now in beta--promises to dramatically improve the streaming HD video experience on computers that lack top-notch processors. If your PC has a supported Nvidia or ATI graphics card (supported cards are listed in this release notes PDF), Flash Player 10.1 will use it alongside your processor to better decode streaming video from sites like YouTube and Hulu.

Modern graphics cards have tons of computing power, while the Atom chip that powers most netbooks is relatively weak compared to desktop and traditional laptop processors. Over the past few years graphics card vendors have developed ways to put this power to work for everyday computing duties. Using the GPU instead of the processor should dramatically improve streaming HD video experience. This is great news for anyone with an ION-based netbook, for example, or a PC with a fairly recent Nvidia or ATI GPU.

Intel could launch Arrandale, its upcoming 32-nanometer processor line, as soon as January of next year, according to a Digitimes report.

Motorola's Droid has been the subject of much discussion lately, fueled in part by a series of controversial TV ads.

So it was only a matter of time before someone decided to take the Android-powered device apart, revealing the innards of the highly anticipated sliding smartphone.

Late last week, an Australian hacker dubbed ikee deployed the Rickrolling worm– a harmless and humorous worm that installs a picture of 80’s one hit wonder Rick Astley to affected users’ home screens. Rickrolling serves not so much as malware but as a warning to jailbreak users who have installed SSH in order to gain root access to their iPhone’s file system from the internet but have neglected to change the default password, even though not doing so is clearly warned against in the installation documentation.

When the Zune HD launched, it swept the gadget world in a flurry of very positive reviews. It's a fantastic device for music, video, and podcasts, but the app selection could be charitibly described as "weak." The Zune team said more, and better, apps were coming this fall. Today, hot on the heels of a 4.3 Firmware update that improves browser performance (among other small tweaks), the Zune team has released half a dozen new games.

The Zune PR team sent me a mail detailing the six new games released today:

WarMouse, in collaboration with the OpenOffice.org community, revealed on Friday a new open-source mouse developed specifically for users of the OpenOffice suite.

The corded pointing device, memorably dubbed the OpenOfficeMouse, features an unconventional amount of buttons, and will undoubtedly be more than welcome in the lineup of the world's weirdest mice. The OpenOfficeMouse packs in a massive 18 programmable buttons, all of which can be double-clicked, in addition to a scrollwheel, 512KB of built-in flash memory, and support for over 60 separate configurations. With that many buttons, let's just hope the OpenOfficeMouse's target users are incredibly dexterous.