Best of the blogs: Here’s one technology professionals don’t see so often: IT serving as a profit center and, mind you, not merely an expense unit. “It looks great in the PowerPoint, and it generally works the way so many PowerPoint concepts work — perfectly, except for the unintended but easily predicted consequences,” Lewis writes. Transfer that to the real world of back offices and datacenters, though, and it’s not quite that easy. “It isn’t all that different from trying to cure a disease by feeding poison to the patient.” Hardware: Call it a “mainframe on-a-rack.” Tom Yager does just that in reference to IBM’s Power6 processor. “Power6 eclipses Power5’s performance and power efficiency,” Yager writes in this week’s installment of Ahead of the curve. But the potential exists for Big Blue to catch some heat about the chip’s clock speed since it favored RAS over what Yager calls multicore mania. “I think that IBM made precisely the right decision. In fact, I’d like to see Intel and AMD back away from ‘core wars’ and start devoting on-CPU real estate to RAS.” The news beat: Just one day after VMware’s indisputably successful IPO, Citrix buys XenSource for its desktop and server virtualization wares. Forrester Research issues a report suggesting that businesses are still saying no to Windows Vista, thanks in large part to software incompatibilities and the need for hardware upgrades. A newly-found security vulnerability within Yahoo Messenger could allow malware to run on a PC. And in response to kernel hacks pestering 64-bit Windows Vista, Microsoft updates Vista’s PatchGuard, all the while denying that it is a security fix. Technology Industry