Think your wireless service is crummy? Just wait until next year when the spectrum drought really hits home. And maybe you've been telling your users that installing a graphics card in an office PC is a waste of money. If that's the case, you're missing a chance to make them a lot more productive (as long as the games stay at home). You've known about CMOS for years. But do you know that an emerging technology called PCMOS, which uses non-Boolean logic, is on the verge of slashing power consumption in ASICs?

Those are just three of the ten top technology stories of 2009 you probably haven't heard about. Our writers, editors, and contributors have scoured the landscape, pinged their sources, and stayed up late to find the news you need to stay on top of the lightning-fast changes sweeping the information technology industry.

In a year when Google's Android finally made the mobile market a multiplatform competition, when Microsoft seemed to redeem itself with the launch of Windows 7 and the beta releases of various 2010 server products, Oracle swallowed Sun as enterprise software vendors continued to consolidate, and the bottom fell out of the IT employment market, it's no wonder that many important stories went unnoticed. We think you'll find these stories interesting and, above all, useful. Happy New Year!

The top 10 underreported tech stories of 2009

1. Wireless broadband woes are harder to fix than you might realize

2. "Conflict minerals" in your PC and cell phone fuel civil war in Congo

3. Malware's new frontier: Organized gangs tricking users to act stupidly

4. GPU computing: Graphics accelerators aid mainstream, even business, PCs

5. Dumber may be smarter: Less-accurate chips bring more speed and savings on power and heat

6. Lawyers begin trolling in the cloud

7. Ruby on Rails gets respect in the enterprise

8. From feast to famine: Dark fiber gets hard, and expensive, to find

9. Patent Office to inventors: See you in 2013

10. Enterprise wikis become a platform

This article, "The top underreported tech stories of 2009," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.