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.

You'll find flash file systems used in personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellphones, MP3 players, digital cameras, USB flash drives (UFDs), and even laptop computers. This article looks at a couple of the read-only file systems and also reviews the various read/write file systems available today and how they work. Explore what the flash devices are all about and the challenges that they introduce.

BBC News reports that Microsoft has come up with an interesting strategy to increase usage of its Live Search service: it is "offering "cold, hard cash" to persuade users to shop online using its Live Search engine and help the company catch up to rival Google. The savings range between 2% and 30% on products sold by select retailers through its so-called cashback service... '2008 is the year that search got competitive,' said Bill Gates."

"The Fedora distribution has a reputation for innovation, and the new Fedora 9, released today, is no exception. With features that range from easy filesystem encryption to support for the ext4 format, it includes a wide range of features that are likely to become standard in other distributions in the next six months. But for Paul W. Frields, who became Fedora project leader in February, what distinguishes the release is less the technology than the community that supports it, and how the technology contributes to the larger free software world."

A lot of Windows XP users experienced SP3 aches and pains. This tutorial on PC World has some timely tips on what to do when SP3 installation doesn't go well.

Slowly but surely, Haiku is moving towards their very first alpha release. It 'self-hosted' for the first time in February of this year, but it did require a few hacks to work properly. The need for hacks was removed April 1st (what's in a date) by Bruno G. Albuquerque. Recently, some more progress has been made.

According to BetaNews, Microsoft has announced that they will support OpenDocument (ODF) and PDF in Office 2007 SP2. This comes as a major victory not only for OpenOffice.org and its offshoots, but also for open source in general. Microsoft is planning on making Office 2007 SP2 available in the first half of 2009.