"There have been some comments on the blog recently suggesting that the UAC dialog boxes in Windows Vista are not accessible and I just wanted to clear up the confusion here. First, to set the scene though. When a user attempts to access an application or setting that requires elevated privileges to run, they are presented with a UAC prompt, the appearance of which will vary depending on the type of user they are or the type of application that is trying to run."

Access, the company behind the former PalmSource, announced Thursday it is renaming the Palm OS operating system to 'Garnet OS', rolling out a new 'Access Powered' logo that replaces the 'Palm Powered' branding used on a wide range of handheld devices. In September 1995, Access purchased Palm OS and its owner PalmSource, which was spun out of Palm, Inc. following that company's separation from former parent 3Com. PalmSource changed its name to Access Systems America in October, selling the rights to the 'Palm' brand name back to Palm, Inc.

Discover how to use shell programming to modify the AIX System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) to develop, test, and install extensions safely.

"Does performance suck on Vista when compared to XP? That's what I was set out to find out. I was worried at first, since the performance in Beta 2 was quite bad. While there is indeed a performance decrease, it's quite minimal as you'll find out."

"Apart from a KDE desktop and applications, the developers of the Pardus 2007 Linux distribution have built an entire distribution from scratch. Pardus, released last month, has its own multilingual installer, custom dependency-resolving package manager, and an INIT system that slashes boot times by several seconds. The distribution has come a long way since its first release in 2005, when it was based on Gentoo and lacked a package manager. Thanks to its custom tools, it's one of the easiest Linux distribution to run and manage."

"The openSUSE team announced today the open sourcing of our openSUSE Build Service. We believe that it is not only important to release an excellent Open Source distribution but also create it in an open way with Open Source tools together with the openSUSE community. Releasing the build service as Open Source makes the complete project build on Open Source."

Mark Russinovich has started a series of articles regarding Vista's/Longhorn's kernel changes. "This is the first part of a series on what's new in the Windows Vista kernel. In this issue, I'll look at changes in the areas of processes and threads, and in I/O. Future installments will cover memory management, startup and shutdown, reliability and recovery, and security."

"Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony says his company is opening up its CNR software download and management service to other Linux distributions because "Linux really needs an easier way to find and install software, regardless of which flavor of Linux you're using." According to Carmony, Linspire has been working on this project more more than a year. To find out more about how this bold new program is going to work - and how it benefits everyone involved - Desktoplinux.com conducted the following short Q&A with Carmony via email."

After years breathing AMD's dust, Intel beat its rival to the punch by releasing its quad-core Xeon 5300 'Clovertown' processor for servers in November. But AMD's 'Barcelona' quad-core chip, due to arrive midway through 2007, will be a significant notch faster than the Clovertown chips expected to be on the market at that time, said Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president for server and workstation products. "We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent," Allen said.

"For some time now, I've been working with members of In Situ team to integrate their Metisse software in Mandriva Linux and it is really exciting. Mandriva will announce very soon (today or tomorrow) Metisse will be part of Mandriva Spring 2007 and is also available as a Live CD based on Mandriva 2007.0 and GNOME right now so everybody can try Metisse right now and report bugs."

Apple on Tuesday released a security update for its QuickTime digital media software in response to a vulnerability discovered by security researchers associated with the Month of Apple Bugs website. In related news, new screenshots of Leopard have been posted to Flickr, while the WWDC this year is planned for June 10 through 15.

Microsoft announced that it was extending technical support for home Windows XP operating systems, a signal that it was not abandoning them for Vista software launching next week. The Redmond, Washington software giant said the 'support life cycle' for Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Media centre Edition would be stretched to April 2009. Similar support would be provided for users of Windows XP Professional, according to Microsoft.

Remember the Contiki operating system? A few years back it was used to run web servers and web browsers on really old home computers such as the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. Today Contiki has grown up and moved from being a hobby project to a serious embedded OS used in research into networked embedded systems and wireless sensor networks. It has matured so much that Adam Dunkels, its creator, today announced his PhD thesis on Contiki and its components; protothreads and the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack. It is an interesting direction for a niche hobby OS to take and probably quite different from what people expected Contiki to become when it first was released.

Our Nokia friends were very generous to send us over their newest Internet Tablet, the N800, for a review. Read more below about our experience with this Linux-based mobile gem.