Since it's weekend, which usually equates to no news, we figured we'd follow in Engadget's footsteps by asking you, our dear and loving readers, what you would change about Apple's current Mac Pro. Engadget readers already had a few things to say - this is the internet after all. And since this is OSNews, we add a question of our own: what would you change about Mac OS X?

The past few years, it seemed as if virus writers had moved away from doing actual damage to systems to instead focus on stealth, so that infected machines can silently, and unknowingly, be used for all sorts of malicious practices. Sadly, there are still those crackers out there that prefer the old-fashioned approach to these matters. The result: 100000 ruined Windows machines.

The recent emergence of industrial-strength Python testing frameworks means that Python tests are being written more succinctly, more uniformly, and with better reporting of results than ever before. Adopting one of the new generation of Python testing frameworks will provide concise idioms and uniform testing techniques that, in the past, every Python project had to supply for itself.

Red Hat, which started the HAL project many years ago, has deprecated it in favor of a new initiative called DeviceKit. David Zeuthen, primary developer of DeviceKit, has posted on his blog about the work done by the Red Hat Desktop team in Fedora 11 for improving the storage layer in GNOME by taking advantage of DeviceKit. This includes desktop notification if your hard disk is failing, a desktop utility to handle RAID and LVM storage, a replacement for the venerable gfloppy, and many others. Look at his blog for a number of screenshots showing the details. "The GNOME 2.26 release in Fedora 11 will ship with a completely different stack for handling storage devices. The plan is to land all this work in the upstream GNOME 2.28 release and most of that work is done already."

In this interview with Edward Hervey, the PiTiVi maintainer, GNOMEDesktop.org talks about the history of the project, its current status, and plans going forward. PiTiVi aims at being the premier open source video editing solution and with current developments that seems to be within reach.

After having released FreeBSD 7.2 just a few days ago, the FreeBSD project now sends out a new quarterly status report, with information about development projects in progress. This report contains news on Clang replacing GCC, VirtualBox improvements, upcoming support for an NVIDIA 64-bit driver, some DTrace news, and more.

OpenOffice.org 3.1 has been released. "The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce the general availability of OpenOffice.org 3.1, a significant upgrade to the world's leading open-source office productivity suite. Since OpenOffice.org 3.0 was launched last October, over 60 million downloads have been recorded from the OpenOffice.org website alone. Released in more than 90 languages and available as a free download on all major computing platforms, OpenOffice.org 3.1 looks set to break these records." There's a guide to new features, and you can download OpenOffice.org 3.1 here.

Chris Montgomery, otherwise known as Monty, is the founder of Xiph.org foundation and creator of the Ogg container format. He has been sponsored by Red Hat for several years to improve the codec quality of Theora and the next generation version, called Thusnelda, is already proving to be better than H264 as bitrate increases. Monty has posted some test results demonstrating the improvements. Chris Blizzard from Mozilla Foundation has some updates as well.

Vimscript is a mechanism for reshaping and extending the Vim editor. Scripting allows you to create new tools, simplify common tasks, and even redesign and replace existing editor features. This article introduces the fundamental components of the Vimscript programming language: values, variables, expressions, statements, functions, and commands. These features are demonstrated and explained through a series of simple examples.

In this article, learn about the new PHP V6 features in detail. Learn how it is easier to use, more secure, and more suitable for internationalization. New PHP V6 features include improved support for Unicode, clean-up of several functions, improved extensions, engine additions, changes to OO functions, and PHP additions.

Collect3 is an Australian iPhone development house that has released a number of successful utilities sold in the App Store. In this lengthy interview two of the founders discuss the pitfalls iPhone developers face and how they managed to find success in the increasingly crowded app store. They also discuss Collect3's sister company, Revolutionary Concepts, which is designed to be a collective to aid aspiring iPhone devs with marketing, know-how and other support.

"Microsoft is turning the source code for its embedded .Net Micro Framework over to the community and slowly withdrawing from that business, company officials are confirming. On the rumored list of teams most heavily impacted by second wave of Microsoft layoffs announced on May 5 was the .Net Micro Framework team - as well as the related MSN Direct unit. Indeed, both groups were affected, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed on May 6."

Remember SCO? They just don't know when to quit, do they? "The Department of Justice's Trustee program, which has finally had enough of SCO's stalling tactics and failed reorganization attempts, has filed a motion to transition the company to Chapter 7. SCO CEO Darl McBride says that the company will oppose the motion and will present a new reorg plan to the court."

For users in the United Kingdom, the Cupcake update has already started rolling and will continue to throughout the month. Users in the United States will have to wait until late next week for the updates to begin rolling, but patience is, after all, a virtue. New features include Picasa and YouTube uploads directly from one's phone, and that's spiffy. Cupcakes are quite tasty, so I think.