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."

Back in 1996, Palm released its first Palm Pilot PDAs onto the market, and quickly became a household name in the PDa business - so far as that Palm and Palm Pilot became synonyms for any PDA device. The company has hit some rough waters lately, but if it's up to CEO Ed Colligan, that's all going to change in the coming years.

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.

The idea of open-source hardware is slowly slowly but surely gaining traction. VIA Technologies, Inc., joined in on the fun today by unveiling an open source reference platform for low power notebooks, based on its own processor technology (obviously). The CAD files have been released under a Creative Commons license. The machine is tentatively named OpenBook.

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.

In spite of (or, thanks to?) Windows Vista, a recent release and all, Windows 7 has been getting a lot attention all over the web - even in the non-tech mainstream and print media. Since Microsoft is holding its cards close, people try to get by on little droplets of information, side remarks by Microsoft employees, slip-of-the-tongues, and, of course, plain-old forgery. PC World thinks these screenshots come from a scheduled May 2008 Windows 7 build, but if you look at them with a little more attention to detail, you will easily spot they are - at best - random mockups from Microsoft, or, - most likely - fake.

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.

Comic: "Feet".

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.

Abandoned Zone reviewed several lightweight Linux distributions, and concluded: "First of all it has to be clear that there's a difference between 'lightweight' and 'lightweight'. Especially Damn Small Linux is very lightweight, but also it's not really usable on 'more recent' systems. It think DSL is perfect for 486 or Pentium 1-based systems but nothing more. At the other side there are Zenwalk and Xubuntu which are pretty heavy lightweight distributions. I think the use of Xfce has something to do with that. All the others are floating between those two extremes."

"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!"

Many of us grew up with the idea of the component audio system. A receiver (or a separate preamplifier and amplifier), tuner (radio), record player, tape deck, and later on a CD player. If you were into more fancy stuff, you had a DAT or MiniDisc deck as well. While some of us cling on to this mindset like there's no tomorrow, the real world seems to favour a different method of consuming music. According to Erica Ogg (what's in a name), the component audio system is on its way out - thanks to the iPod and the commoditisation of music.

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.

Coverity has published the 2008 edition of its Open Source Report. The report uses static code analysis on C, C++, and Java source code to determine the quality of the code. These reports are funded by the US Department of Homeland Security and supported by Stanford University, and are part of the US government's Open Source Hardening Project. The report is based on over two years' worth of data from Coverity Scan.