Best of the blogs: After a friend suggested that negative feedback loops act to prevent collapse, Bob Lewis realized something. “The mathematics of negative feedback covers the Collapse effect nicely,” he postulates in this entry. “The lesson is clear, really pretty obvious, and applies to a wide variety of situations: Make decisions based on current information, not what was true a year or two ago.” Columnists’ corner: Windows catches most of the heat for security problems and virtualization is no exception to that rule. That’s a pity, writes Tom Yager. But the bigger issue is that “some of the characteristics that make virtualization so convenient could conceivably make virtualized assets easier prey than physical ones,” Yager explains. Open source: Linux just might be behind the electoral victory by the Democratic Party last week. Indeed, the The DNC “tapped a new generation of low-cost, Linux-based data warehouse technology to improve the quantity, quality, and availability of voter information used by state Democratic parties during the election turn-out effort,” according to the story Dems score with better data. The news beat: Microsoft says that the pirated copies of Vista and Office 2007 already circulating are not final and, even with the available product code and activation keys, won’t work for long. SaaS provider Entellium boosts its offline functionality. And former CA sales executive Stephen Richards gets a 7-year prison sentence for fraud charges. Technology Industry