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Psystar has turned up the heat in its legal battle with Apple. The small computer vendor first burst on the scene several months ago by audaciously offering for sale a line of Mac computer clones called “OpenComputer.” After a few weeks of silence, Apple unleashed its legal hounds on the startup, seeking to shut it down for good. Since then, Psystar has shown little sign of backing down from Apple — a company that’s seldom shy about using the legal system to protect its intellectual property.

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Xen.org, the developer of the open source Xen project, on Wednesday announced the release of the Xen 3.3 hypervisor engine. The product is the result of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from more than 50 leading hardware, software and security vendors. Xen 3.3 includes enhancements that further advance its position as a fast, scalable and secure virtualization engine for a broad range of server and PC chipsets from supercomputers to PDAs.

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Less than a week after a representative for Orange in Poland revealed that actors were paid to stand in line the night the iPhone launched there, another kerfuffle has arisen over Apple-related marketing, this time in the UK. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has pulled an iPhone commercial after it received complaints from two viewers that the ad was misleading. “[Apple is] having two issues — one probably more important than the other,” said Mary Beth Kemp, a Forrester Research analyst.

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Mozilla Labs launched a new prototype Tuesday aimed at giving Internet users new ways to create mashups of online content. Dubbed “Ubiquity,” the technology is Mozilla’s solution what it sees as a common and time-consuming problem Web surfers face when they try to compile information from the Web. “Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left trundling between Web sites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time,” Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, wrote on his blog.

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Qik, a company that has developed live video streaming services for certain smartphones, has received a boost in its financial backing from Netscape veterans Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The duo, which have made a “significant investment” in the company, are also joining Qik’s board of advisors. Bhaskar Roy, cofounder of Qik, declined to tell the E-Commerce Times how much Andreessen and Horowitz have invested in the company. Qik means to use the investment to expand its customer base to every mobile phone type.

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Microsoft will receive nearly $21 million from Immersion, a company that develops “tactile-feedback” technology, after the two companies agreed to settle a lawsuit. San Jose, Calif.-based Immersion has developed tactile feedback technology which makes video game controllers vibrate when there is an explosion or some other game action event on screen, Sid Parakh, an equity analyst with McAdams Wright Ragen, told the E-Commerce Times.

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Dell is going after emerging markets with a new line of low-cost computers. The Vostro notebooks and desktops are the company’s first models targeted specifically at China, India and a handful of other Asian, African and Latin American nations. The systems will sell for about the equivalent of $440 to $475. The move marks a distinct shift in strategy for Dell, which has previously focused on building standard products that stay constant from country to country. The change follows similar steps by competitors such as HP and IBM, which are pushing low-cost models of their own.

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Numerous flight delays caused by an electronic communication failure at a Federal Aviation Administration facility drew new criticism for an agency that has been scrutinized over air traffic controller staffing levels and inspection standards for its ground-based equipment. The Northeast was hardest hit by the delays prompted Tuesday by a glitch at a Hampton, Ga., facility that processes flight plans for the eastern half of the U.S. As of Wednesday morning, the FAA said that the situation around the country had returned to normal.

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Who would like to bid the highest amount for the exclusive global rights to the new domain suffix, .dubai, under ICANN’s latest policy? Such a suffix will create a powerful domain root that will corner some 180 services underneath it, like go.dubai, hotel.dubai, job.dubai, cars.dubai or fly.dubai. Who would be the next global cyber-branding leader of this new millennium? Are auctions the right methods to sell such mega marketing channels? ICANN, the Internet authority, is looking into auctioning off such popular name identities.

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As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine. So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros. I visited the booths of several distros, Ubuntu, Suse, Red Hat and even BSD, grabbing disks along the way. The plan was to give each a test drive, then choose one based on my experience.

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