When perusing my local dead tree Sunday newspaper's Business section, I came across the headline, Frugality pays off: Avoiding debt looks smart for area firms and thought, "Hey, this looks like something that my readers would enjoy." They've done exactly what I've said that companies should do: Be frugal during the good times and the lean times won't seem so lean.

I know this won't get the pageviews that a good rant will, so I guess you could say the rants subsidize the positive articles.

By default, Windows applications which run through Wine don't look very well, since that's the look and feel of Windows 98 at best, to mention nothing about XP. So what follows are a few easy steps which will allow to change the way applications ran through Wine look like.

It was a short presentation that focused dryly on "opportunities" for open source in something he called the "service-driven data center." But when he turned to the need for Linux to inter-operate with Windows in this service-driven data center, Novell's chief executive Ron Hovsepian delivered an apology - of sorts - for his company's controversial marriage to Microsoft in 2006.

Microsoft has made a "tremendous commitment" to systems and file interoperability, according to its head of North American sales and marketing. Robert Youngjohns on Wednesday called interoperability between Widows and Linux and support for open-file formats and open-source languages like PHP a business imperative.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has announced the government will throw out the controversial Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment (New Technologies) Act and start again. The provision involved a three strikes and you’re out plan for alleged copyright infringement. "Section 92a is not going to come into force as originally written.

A startup called Rhomobile announced the first formal release of its dual-licensed, open-source framework for smartphones. Rhodes 1.0 enables "write-once" development, using HTML and Ruby, of native smartphone applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and now Android, the company says.

In this guide I will show how to create CD/DVD ISO images in Ubuntu using four easy methods.