Best of the blogs: The response to Sean McCown’s post about how Microsoft should just give up on access has been more than he expected. “A lot of you came out against my post, and ended up proving my point for me,” he explains in More on Access. The problem, McCown explains, is that “people have been given a pistol without a safety and they insist on looking down the barrel.”The news beat: Toshiba recalls more defective laptop batteries because they pose a fire hazard. XenSource takes on VMware with the new XenEnterprise v4 virtualization software. SCO says it is down but not out in the Linux cases against IBM and Novell, after a judge ruled that Novell holds the patent to Unix and UnixWare. And Oracle debuts Coherence 3.3, its in-memory data grid software, with improved clustering and tighter links to Fusion middleware. Notes from the field: Robert X. Cringely reports that some readers are singing the TeleBlend and VoIP blues. Some days VoIP has even Cringe pining for the rotary dial and Ma Bell. And he’s not alone. “After SunRocket crashed to earth last month, Cringe fan M. K. switched over to TeleBlend. But when TeleBlend’s voice service went AWOL for several days last week, he was furious.” The plot thickens, and gets nastier, though our author thanks his lucky stars not to have been the recipient of a $218 trillion phone bill, “like that poor sap in Malaysia.” Podcasts: AppStream enhances two flavors of its application deployment and management software, enterprise and SaaS versions. “What impressed me was the number of features added into the product for a dot release,” says David Marshall. “They’ve also added an SDK for both client and server customizations.” Tune into Virtualization Report here. Databases