Yesterday I realized that I have run over 30 different kinds of Linux on my laptop. My final choice?

Open Solutions Alliance finds that changes in the economy will open the door for new deployments of open source in business.

Have you ever gotten annoyed by Wine/Cedega/CXOffice not matching to your otherwise pretty desktop? It is possiable to change the Wine color scheme to closely match your default desktop colors. You can even install a large varity of themes and have Wine use them to make your favorite applications look even better.

"...Here’s a list of 5 things you can do to get ahead of the game and make sure you don’t get trampled by the herd while looking at your watch. Although these ideas are written from a visual arts perspective, I’m sure that readers from other creative backgrounds can also apply them to their field. And please be warned, this is not an article about free-culture. It is about adapting to some of the changes that free-culture ideas are creating. If you want to learn more about this phenomenon, there are links after the article..."

In addition to answering questions about how Microsoft plans to take on its rivals and capture the hearts and devices of consumers, Chairman Bill Gates spoke to CNET News.com on other topics, not all of which fit into Monday's Newsmaker piece. Here are a couple more questions and answers from Gates.

"Microformats are open data formats that some Yahoo! sites support. You can't see them (unless you do a "view source" on a web page), but they're there -- bits of HTML that describe things like contact information (hcard), a review (hreview), an event (hcalendar), or a listing (hlisting). Microformats make data in web pages reuseable since the data is in a standard, canonical, format instead of just a jumble of HTML. Thousands of sites expose their data in Microformats, and that data is available for developers to use. One of the best opportunities for developers to make use of Microformats is in the forthcoming Firefox 3 web browser which features a new global Microformats object and API. The new API makes finding and parsing Microformats trivial and efficient..."

"...I’ve recently heard 'the author of the TurboGears book is using Django now' as part of a Django enthusiast’s argument that TurboGears is dead. This cracks me up, because I’m the author in question, and I see the exact oposite. I’m learning Django to make TurboGears better, not because it’s dying..."

"After midnight on the West Coast, Wikia made its alpha search available. Our heightened interest stems from the early pronouncements by Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia. This time, his plan is to apply collaborative tools to build a better search engine than Google..."