On a number of occasions, Apple has stated that it cannot design a laptop at around 400-500 USD that isn't total crap. This seems like a reasonable point to make - but why, then, is Dell - of all companies - seemingly able to do so? Dell just launched the Dell Vostro V13 (official press release), and it looks pretty good.

And we have news of yet another massive copyright infringement lawsuit in the music industry. This one takes place in Canada, and the infringed party is placing a truly massive claim on the infringing party: 50 million USD, with the possibility of it exceeding 60 billion USD. Bad news? Well, no, not really - you really need to consider the infringing party in this one. This is irony not even the ancient Greeks could imagine.

"Keeping Windows up-to-date can be a pain for an enterprise IT department, but Microsoft's new Windows Server Update Services can help tremendously. Ars shows you how to use WSUS to move beyond Automatic Update and take charge of your entire network."

InfoWorld's Mel Beckman conjectures on the functionality necessary to make the Google 'smartbook dream' a reality, prioritizing the features any smartphone/netbook hybrid would require to succeed. From multitouch, to SSDs, to dual-boot capabilities, the list goes beyond what early Android-based entrants have to offer but remains within the realm of possibility, especially if Google CEO Eric Schmidt's hints at a future Chrome/Android OS convergence come to fruition.

AppJet Inc. is the company behind EtherPad, a real-time collaboration tool somewhat similar to Google's own Wave. More about the acquisition here. Naturally, EtherPad team will be working on improving Wave in the future. The original plan was to discontinue the EtherPad, but because of user demand, Google decided to keep EtherPad online at least until its code is published as open-source. It was not originally planed to release the code either, but it was decided that it would be a fair compensation to EtherPad users. More about this here.

In usual form, Mark Russinovich debunks the machine SID duplication myth. " The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that machine SID duplication – having multiple computers with the same machine SID – doesn’t pose any problem, security or otherwise. I took my conclusion to the Windows security and deployment teams and no one could come up with a scenario where two systems with the same machine SID, whether in a Workgroup or a Domain, would cause an issue."

In what is certainly entirely expected, I was wrong about the whole CrunchPad drama. I suspected it was nothing more than a publicity stunt, but as it turns out, Fusion Garage's side of the story confirmed that the break between them and Arrington is real. During a press conference today, Fusion Garage told their side of the story, while also officially introducing the CrunchPad Joo Joo.

The Codezero team has released version 0.2 of their L4 microkernel. In this release, the microkernel is fully capability checked, and they introduced the notion of containers to provide isolated execution environments.

A few days ago we saw the release of version 0.8.1 of virt-manager, the Linux desktop client for managing virtual machines. Changes include a VM Migration wizard, exposing various migration options; enumeration of CDROM and bridge devices on remote connections, multiple graphs in the manager window, support storage pool source enumeration for LVM, NFS, and SCSI, and allow changing VM ACPI, APIC, clock offset, individual vcpu pinning, and video model (vga, cirrus, etc.).

Earlier this week, we reported on the apparent death of Michael Arrington's dream, the CrunchPad. The CrunchPad was supposed to be a slick tablet, but according to an emotional blog post by Arrington the project had been more or less stolen from him by Chandrasekar "Chandra" Rathakrishnan, CEO of Fusion Garage. Rathakrishnan has announced to hold a press event Monday, telling his side of the story, as well as a brief demonstration of the actual device.

"Intel's legal dispute with graphics-chip maker Nvidia is being reviewed as part of an antitrust probe of Intel by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, according to people familiar with the matter. Regulators are looking at lawsuits between Intel and Nvidia, said the people, who declined to be identified because the federal investigation is continuing. The FTC is trying to determine whether a lawsuit filed by Intel earlier this year is an effort to disrupt Nvidia’s business, one person said."

You thought the whole browser ballot thing in Windows was behind us, right? That everybody was finally happy, so that we could continue doing what an overwhelming number of people have already done without a ballot screen - that is, install non-IE browsers? Not exactly. Opera, Mozilla, and Google still had complaints, which Microsoft addressed, making everybody happy.

Websense has made ten predictions about security/vulnerability trends for 2010. There's no crystal ball, so we're not talking about malicious innovation, but mostly a recognition that certain nefarious activities are gaining traction and will expand in the near future. Of particular interest to OSNews readers: exploitations of Windows 7 and IE 8 vulnerabilities, the beginning of the end of the Mac's reprieve on security issues, and increasing targeting of mobile devices (beyond Rickrolling your iPhone, presumably). Read on to learn OSNews 2010 security predictions.

Google has just launched its very own public Domain Name System resolver, with which the company hopes to speed up internet traffic. The search giant claims its DNS is more secure (through protection against cache poisoning attacks) and faster than others.