Columnist’s corner: AMD’s redesigned x86 chip, Barcelona, “is genius, a genuinely new CPU that frees itself entirely of the millstone of the Pentium legacy. It’ll do the same for you,” Tom Yager explains. You see, Barcelona is a new CPU rather than merely a doubling of cores or extensions strapped on here and there. Oh yes, and Yager has plenty of other reasons in this week’s installment of Ahead of the Curve. “Get ready to be blown away long before its release, which is scheduled for midyear.” Platforms: What do Oliver Rist, Paul Venezia, Jon Udell, a bottle of scotch, and lord-knows-who-or-what-else discuss in a hot tub on Super Bowl weekend? Well, truth is, I don’t even really want to know. Do you? Regardless, I’ll tell … a string of jokes along the lines of ‘connectile dysfunction.’ As in the malformity Windows users have had for some time, but that “Microsoft is trying to address with Office SharePoint and SharePoint Services V3 in general,” Rist explains in his look at the collaboration boost Microsoft gave SharePoint. Back to the jokes — Protectile dysfunction. Detectile, and they continue…Best of the blogs: Here’s a question we all ought to be asking right about now: What should you expect to happen to personal storage gear when you move to Vista? “I ran into a few interesting things in this my first encounter,” begins Mario Apicella in A Vista on storage. The news beat: Cisco reveals intentions to stop upgrading its NAC client, but instead opt to hand over the source code for the Cisco Trust Agent to the open source community within a couple of months. Sun says it will issue an ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office that will translate between the competing file formats. Bush’s 2008 IT budget request for $65.5 billion serves as evidence that the administration’s actions in the past year are not working all that well, and reflects his priorities to improve cybersecurity. And Microsoft releases a patch created to improve the performance of IE 7. Technology Industry