As Murphy's Law dictates, this news was destined to come while I'm down and out with the flu, while being miserable on the couch. Dragged my bum to the computer for this one (my iPhone alerted me, oh the irony): Apple has scored a major win in its case against Psystar. Judge William Alsup more or less agreed with just about everything Apple said, granting Apple's motion for a summary judgement. Instant update: Mind, though, that this ruling only covers Leopard. Snow Leopard will be handled in the Florida case.

Thom's down with flu, so to avoid moving a lot of interesting news to pg.2, I am creating a combined item here covering a number of Microsoft related news items submitted to us.

"Qualcomm has revealed that its 1Ghz Snapdragon ARM chip will ship in an upcoming Lenovo smartbook. AT&T has already partnered with Lenovo to sell the product. New smartbook products will bring ARM into the small form-factor laptop market and could give Intel's Atom some serious competition."

Techvideoblog has a video review of the Menq Easypc E760, an $80 ARM-based laptop that runs Android. From the looks of it, I don't think this is a very good gadget, because it's slow (less powerful than an iPhone 3GS, but of course also a lot cheaper), but I agree with the Techvideo guy: the Easypc is important because it's the vanguard of a likely wave of cheap, ARM-based devices that will very soon have the necessary power for a pleasant and productive web browsing experience. Once that happens, a sizable portion of the current laptop and netbook userbase will move downmarket, and some of the constituents that the OLPC program was trying to serve (young students and the lower economic stratum) will have a network communication device available to them that's more accessible.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is claiming Google's Chrome OS will debut next week - but his story does have an odd ring to it. He goes on and on about how driver support will be shoddy, but that makes no sense - isn't Chome OS supposed to be built on Linux? The only way I can see initial driver support to be shoddy is when Chrome OS has its own, custom graphical layer, instead of using X. However, were that to be the case, I'm sure Google would at least support some NVIDIA, ATI, and Intel chipsets. In any case, it's a rumour - do with it as you please.

GNOME 3, the much talked about next generation GNOME introduces a radical shift from the interface found in GNOME 2.x. Digitizor has a quick visual tour of GNOME 3 in Ubuntu 9.10.

We're in the middle of the distribution release frenxy, or so it seems. After Ubuntu 9.10 and Mandriva Linux 2010.0, it's OpenSUSE time now: the team has pushed out OpenSUSE 11.2. A minor version number, but there's enough in there, still.

Intel and main (and only?) rival AMD have long been embroiled in legal battles regarding antitrust and patent issues. On top of that, antitrust regulators all over the world are investigating Intel for possible antitrust violations, so it looks like Intel needed to close off at least one flank: the company has reached a settlement with AMD, ending all legal disputes between the two chip makers. Intel will pay 1.25 billion USD to AMD.

An up-and-coming networking chip company is buying one of the first companies to commercialise embedded Linux. Cavium has agreed to pay $50M for MontaVista, which has operated independently for ten years. The deal is the second this year to shake up the embedded Linux OS, tools, and service market. The first came this May, when Intel acquired Wind River Systems for $884M. Following Wind River's lead, MontaVista says that after the acquisition, it will retain its brand name, and continue to operate independently.

October 2009 marked an important milestone in the history of computing. It was exactly 40 years since the first Multics computer system was used for information management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) is regarded as the foundation of modern time-sharing systems. Multics was the catalyst for the development of Unix and has been used as a model of operating system design since its release four decades ago. Here is a picture gallery of Multics' history.

The Miami New Times News (try saying that out loud ten times in a row really fast) has a long story on the Pedraza brothers, the two men behind Psystar, which is located in Miami. The story details the brothers' youth, and, of course, talks a lot about Psystar and Apple. There is a lot of interesting stuff in there not covered before.

Google has invented a new programming language designed to reduce the complexity of coding without compromising the performance of applications. Called Go, the language has been tested internally at Google but is still at an experimental stage, so the company is releasing it as open-source code in the hope that it will get help with its future development.

There are a number of browsers allowing you to switch between rendering engines, with Lunascape being one of them. We've covered this browser before quite extensively, and today, the Lunascape team released the first beta of Lunascape 6 ORION, the bext version of this triple-engine web browser.

Just when we were starting to worry that the OS world was becoming ossified around three increasingly-competent options, making it very boring for OS enthusiasts, along comes a re-energized mobile computing market and a furious land grab among established players and new entrants. Samsung, the #2 handset maker by marketshare, is releasing a new mobile OS called Bada and will be vying to become the seventh major mobile OS in the market.