SOA: The U.S. government is very interested in any concept that will fix their core IT architectures, which were built over many years of procurement cycles and thus have many layers of complexity and are about as agile as a pile or rocks, asserts Dave Linthicum in U.S. government…SOA to the rescue? (Okay, okay, it’s tempting to insert a joke or many here but I’ll leave that up to you readers…) Best of the blogs: With a headline like ‘Outing Cruella de Ville’ I could just leave it at that. She’s a corporate Cruella who also just might be a sociopath. You know the type, I’m sure: all smiles in the halls, reasonable and maybe even sweet at meetings, but behind closed doors, well, that’s another story. Or, actually, that’s the real story. Worse, she’s unfireable. And even has one consultant reluctantly considering measures to prevent her, or anyone else in the company, from being alone with an employee. Bob Lewis offers three promising possibilities for dealing with Mz. de Ville. Hardware: Intel says that the forthcoming Santa Rosa platform will become available in the first half of 2007 and bring with it faster processing power, longer battery life and improved wireless connectivity. The news beat: Hewlett-Packard’s CEO Mark Hurd blames the spying scandal on a Machiavellian investigation that spun out of control. Sun buys Neogent for its identity management tools and services. And six men are charged with a phishing scheme that harvested thousands of AOL e-mail addresses and infected victims’ computers. Technology Industry