You have to hand it to them: Microsoft has made an excellent marketing move the last couple of days. Remember the UAC issue we reported on earlier? It turned out that changing UAC settings did not actually trigger a UAC dialog, allowing scripts and malware to disable UAC altogether without the user ever noticing anything - obviously leaving the system wide open. After stating numerous times the company wouldn't do anything about this issue, they have now done a complete 180, and will fix UAC to work as many had already advised. A brilliant marketing ploy right there.

Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, ZDNet takes to Sydney's streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration. Some funny responses by the passers-by in this little nonsense-investigation.

Lim Ding Wen, a fourth grader in Singapore, has taken up writing applications for Apple's all-popular iPhone, his latest of which is called "Doodle Kids," aptly named for its doodling or painting capabilities. He began his computer experience at the ripe age of two and has a good twenty programming projects under his belt. He is fluent in six programming languages. His father also writes iPhone apps, and they often compare statistics to see whose is more popular-- as it is, Lim's app has over 4,000 downloads. Do you think perhaps we could be calling him "King Ding" in thirty years when he's taken over the digital world?

PureMobile sent us in the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic for a review, the first Symbian OS smartphone with S60 5.0 in it to date. This impressive-looking smartphone looks like a darling touchscreen phone, but is it really? Read on for more.

Microsoft has confirmed that an upgrade license for Windows 7 from Windows XP will be available, but there is a catch: users will have to wipe their hard drive and perform a clean install - so technically, it's not an upgrade. Still, the upgrade license will probably be cheaper than the full license, so it might just be worth it.

Opera has announced a new JavaScript engine. "Over the past few months, a small team of developers and testers have been working on implementing a new ECMAScript/JavaScript engine for Opera. When Opera's current ECMAScript engine, called Futhark, was first released in a public version, it was the fastest engine on the market. That engine was developed to minimize code footprint and memory usage, rather than to achieve maximum execution speed. This has traditionally been a correct trade-off on many of the platforms Opera runs on. The Web is a changing environment however, and tomorrow's advanced web applications will require faster ECMAScript execution, so we have now taken on the challenge to once again develop the fastest ECMAScript engine on the market."

Michael "Monty" Widenius, original author and founder of MySQL, has announced he has now resigned from Sun to start his own company, Monty Program Ab. Rumours of his departure had circulated last September and Widenius now confirms these had an element of truth to them. According to him, his issues with MySQL 5.1 GA were pivotal in the decision making process and his public warnings of those problems "had the wanted effect". That effect was an agreement to stay on for three months to "help Sun work out things in MySQL development" and allow Sun to "create an optimal role for me".

Between all the Windows 7 hubbub, you'd almost forget that that other operating system maker is also hard at work on the next release of its operating system. Even though Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was supposed to be a release that did not focus on end user features, it seems that Apple will still include a number of those in Snow Leopard. The new cat will follow in Windows 7's footsteps by including a location awareness framework, while also allowing programmers to make use of the multitouch trackpads in Apple's laptops.

Linux Containers provide lightweight virtualization that lets you isolate processes and resources without the need to provide instruction interpretation mechanisms and other complexities of full virtualization. In this step-by-step tour of Linux container tools (LXC), the author introduces you to the Linux container tools and shows how to get up and running on them. This article will show you how Linux containers significantly lower the overhead of using true virtualization, while still providing isolation.

So Windows 7 is supposed to be screaming fast, right? Anecdotal accounts report it booting quicker and feeling snappier than Vista, but the proof is in stats. TuxRadar has benchmarked Windows 7 against Vista and Ubuntu Linux, comparing install time, disk space usage, boot speeds and filesystem performance. The graphs also show how the sparkly ext4 filesystem compares against its older brother.

With Linux traditionally coming in many, many flavours, a common call among some Linux fans - but mostly among people who actually do not use Linux - is to standardise all the various distributions, and work from a single "one-distribution-to-rule-them-all". In a recent interview, Linus Tovalds discarded the idea, stating that he thinks "it's something absolutely required!"

The JNode project has released a new version of their Java-based operating system. Apart from a small nanokernel written in assembler, JNode is written entirely in Java. The reason for undertaking this effort is to provide those that like the idea of a Java operating system something to work with. Obviously, version 0.2.8 improves JNode in several areas.

Windows 7 was causing quite a bit of hype months before its release, and now that it's finally out into the void, you'd think people would be contentedly beta-ing the system and be happy to wait until the wrinkles are smoothed, right? Apparently not, at least for a certain Kelly Poe and now over 2,500 Windows 7 enthusiasts.

Apple has always been about moving forward, about pressing customers to buy the latest and greatest. Product pacing has been high in Cupertino (except for the Mac Mini, obviously), and this is obviously a good thing if you're an Apple bean counter. Most Apple fans more or less accept this planned obsolescence without question, but the company may have just gone a little too far.