Most people haven't heard of QNX Software, though they've likely come in contact with it. The real-time operating system is used where software failure can lead to catastrophic consequences, even death - from high-speed trains to air traffic control towers to highway toll systems. It's also used in more than 100 different types of cars on the road.

"I've read many articles about Internet Explorer 7's new security features and coupled with the imminent release of Vista this got me interested. I recall seeing a rather funny screenshot (which I found on the internet), which showed Internet Explorer 6 in Windows XP stuffed full of spyware/toolbars/etc. I wanted to see if IE7 was any better than that screenshot of IE6, how would it cope with a user that simply clicked 'yes/allow/next/accept' to everything that was presented to them. In addition, I wanted to see how the User Account Control reacted to this, and in the end, could I restore IE7 to it's former glory."

A lot has been said about the new user interface for Windows Vista. In this chapter from his latest book, Paul McFedries runs through the foundation, functions, and eye candy for Vista's latest UI.

Amiga Inc, thought to be dead after stopping all communication with the Amiga community, have reappeared. The long spell of silence was broken when they answered 25 questions from the readers at Amiga.org. In the answers, the CEO of Amiga Inc, Bill McEwen revealed some information that once again brought back some hope in the Amiga community. Hyperion Entertainment and their partners have been busy working on Amiga OS4, which has been in available in pre-release form since April 2004. The final release is held back by the lack of suitable PPC motherboards to run OS4 on, but this seems to be finally resolved, and a final release is expected this year. The Amiga.org interview left a lot of questions unanswered, especially with regards to Amiga Inc's plans for OS5. So to get a clearer picture of where they are headed, I asked Bill McEwen to answer some questions."

SuperFetch, a new feature of Windows Vista, is designed to intelligently manage memory pages to keep the system responsive even after running background tasks that take a lot of memory. Watch this Channel9 video to see how Vista attempts to form subsets of memory to page together. The speaker also touches on other new kernel-level features such as ReadyBoost and flash-based hibernate.

Jim Gettys from the OLPC team has responded in a long weblog to Theo de Raadt's concerns over the use of the Marvell chip in the OLPC. Gettys explains why the Marvell chip was chosen and how the team is working on open wireless firmware.