Best of the blogs: What with all the flap whirling around about Apple’s 802.11n enabler, Tom Yager sees fit to get to the bottom of why Apple is charging users for it. “If Apple hadn’t come up with this sound solution, you’d have to buy AirPort Extreme — an extraordinary product, as you’ll read in my review — or wait for Leopard in order to get 802.11n,” Yager explains in this Enterprise Mac post. On the upside, it’s only $1.99 and “you will never have to buy the enabler again.” SOA: As some so-called ‘early SOAs’ are just not meeting expectations, the notion of service performance optimization (SPO) is becoming increasingly important. “I guess you can blame a lot of things for poor performance; however I’ve found the core architecture and design issues are the most relevant variable,” writes David Linthicum in Real World SOA. To that end, he offers half a dozen tips on understanding service patterns. The news beat: Zend Technologies releases the Zend Platform 3.0 PHP application server to enhance commercial deployments. Xerox’s research arm Palo Alto Research Center pens a deal with startup Powerset that aims to unveil by year’s end a search engine to take on Google. And Intel researchers have built an 80-core chip that the chipmaker claims can crank more than trillions of floating point operations while consuming less electricity than a typical desktop PC processor. Columnist’s corner: Evoking those Dateline episodes where the online sexual predators fall head over heels into virtual love with an undercover law enforcement officer, Roger Grimes explains in this week’s installment of Security Adviser that “as the father of four children, including three teenage daughters, I love the Internet.” Why? Because, thanks to technology, “we’re catching a thousand criminals at a time.” Moreover, those who get caught are being locked up faster than ever. Technology Industry