Our advertising partner, Cnet Networks, has posted a reader survey, and I promise that they really will give $2000 to three lucky survey respondents. Since they've chosen to place the survey request as an ad itself, and most OSNews readers wouldn't know why Cnet was doing a survey on OSNews anyway, I thought I'd mention that this survey, and the $2000 drawing, are legitimate, and encourage you to participate. They don't want me to link straight to the survey for some reason, but if you see the survey invite above, click on it. Update: I didn't realize this before, but the drawing is only open to US residents.

Apple has updated its Leopard operating system by releasing Mac OS X 10.5.3. "The Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update is recommended for Mac OS X 10.5, 10.5.1, and 10.5.2 Leopard. It includes general operating system improvements that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac."

Comic: "Eee".

I personally doubted that Windows 7 would make an actual appearance during the Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer joint interview up on stage at the D6 conference, but as it turns out, it has made an appearance. During an interview conducted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher about Ballmer and Gates' past, present, and future, a short demo was given of Windows 7.

KDE 4.0 was released to mixed reviews; more or less everyone recognised the enormous potential of the still young platform, but some doubted whether or not the KDE project had made the right choice by releasing KDE 4.0 as, well, 4.0. The KDE developers were clear: just you wait for KDE 4.1. They released the first beta of KDE 4.1 today.

So far, Microsoft has been very tight-lipped about Windows 7, carefully trying to prevent another Longhorn PR disaster where the company promised the heavens and more for Longhorn, but in the end ditched Longhorn to make way for Vista. Chris Flores (Windows Client Communications Team) as well as Steven Sinofsky, has broken the silence a little bit to talk about Windows 7. In addition, it is believed Windows 7 will make its first official debut at the D6 All Things Digital conference today, during a keynote held by Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.

AWK is one of the most common UNIX tools to process text-based data in either files or datastreams. Written by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan, AWK "extensively uses the string datatype, associative arrays (that is, arrays indexed by key strings), and regular expressions." ComputerWorld interviewed Alfred Aho.

Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell have released a new version of a real-time process monitor for Windows (tentatively called 'Process Monitor') that combines the features of Regmon and Filemon. There is a whole set of new features too, of course.

Ivan Krstic' critique of the One Laptop Per Child Project has made its ripples around the pond of the intertubes. Apart from the obvious part where it criticises a major project from an insider's point of view, it also had a few other remarks that caught people's attention - most notably the admission that despite his ability to do Linux kernel hacking, his main development laptop is a Macintosh running Mac OS X.

The serious tech journalists at XKCD have uncovered some major new security holes in some popular Linux distributions. Note: Coincidentally, after fixing some major hardware issues, Focus Shift is back.

"The new version of F-Script provides syntax for dynamically creating Cocoa classes. This is great for quickly experimenting, prototyping and using Cocoa interactively. You can type a class definition in the F-script console, hit return and immediately start playing with your new class. This article provides a quick introduction to this easy-to-use and powerful feature. You can experiment with it right now by downloading F-Script 2.0 alpha 3 ."

"FreeBSD 7.0 has already been released. If you are a real hacker, the best way to jump in and learn it is hacking together an introductory kernel module. In this article I'll implement a very basic module that prints a message when it is loaded, and another when it is unloaded. I'll also cover the mechanics of compiling our module using standard tools and rebuilding the stock FreeBSD kernel. Let's do it!"

The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small memory footprint desktop environment built on top of the extended FLTK toolkit ('Fast Light Tool Kit'). EDE features a desktop, a Windows-like panel with 'start' menu, taskbar, and system tray, support for theming, and graphical front-ends for software installation, xscreensaver configuration, and much more. Linux.com took a look at EDE version 1.2.

More often than not, the question arises on OSNews why certain projects or pieces of abandonware aren't released as open source software. Supposedly, this would speed up development, facilitate the growth of a community, all that jazz associated with open source development. Here are four projects I'd like to see released under a MIT license.