Microsoft isn't the only company in the technology industry with a monopoly. Its partner in crime, Intel, has often been accused of monopoly abuse as well, and is currently under scrutiny by the same European Commission who fined Microsoft. Sources have told eWeek (which generally has a good track record) that Intel will indeed be found guilty this week of abusing its monopoly position to stifle the competition.

You can find out a lot about your network by using a variety of different tools. Understanding the layout of your network, and where packets are going, and what people are doing is important. This tutorial examines techniques for monitoring the traffic and content of your UNIX network and how to read and diagnose problems on your network.

Special Offer: 50% Extra Free. I hope you have your tea/coffee cup primed for this one-and-a-half hour edition of the show! We cover a lot of ground (and everything in between) on the Windows 7 RC, the Kindle DX (is that like the Nathan TX?), application and OS updates and finally what would we change about the Mac Pro and Mac OS X.

And another week passes us by. This week we were informed about two projects replacing some GNU software with alternatives, FreeBSD, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and Windows 7 did new releases, Psystar replied to Apple's allegations (and the Apple world completely ignored it), and Chrome users were the most up-to-date with their browsers. This week's my take is a prelude to the one for next week.

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.