DEMOfall ’07: Roaming the show, Ephraim Schwartz has run out of patience for use of the term ‘community’ among startups presenting this year. “As a reader of history, I’m not sure the crowd is always wise,” he writes in Demo startups say it’s all about community — ugh! “This idea of the wisdom of many persists on the Internet in these collaboration sites and it appears to be growing … if I hear of one more company that bubbles the best ideas up to the top I’ll scream.”SOA: “The heavens have shifted just a tad … within the realm of SOA, in which vendors (both open and closed source) seem to have suddenly discovered that SOA is as much about b-to-b integration as it is about modernizing and integrating systems that live inside the firewall,” Brad Shimmin writes in SOA meets open b-to-b integration. Separately, BEA, Microsoft, MuleSource, and others are in the midst. The outcome is IaaS, aka Integration as a Service. “This isn’t to say that IaaS is better than SaaS. I don’t think that IaaS competes with SaaS in any way.” Podcasts: A look at relative newcomer Veeam’s two new utilities that make VMware’s platform that much better, as well as solutions from Vizioncore. Tune into Virtualization Report. Columnist’s corner: A mysterious Monday tape overload problem plagued the VAX network of an engineering firm. “Everything worked fine until one Tuesday morning when I came down to take out the Monday backup tape and replace it with Tuesday’s,” our Off the Record author explains. This time, the backup program called for a second tape. Problem was, the firm had only a single-tape deck. But the issue was fixed easily enough — until the following Monday when the same thing happened. That went on for about a year. Voodoo? Nah. Sabotage? Nope. A labeling mistake, admitted upon discovery, landed our author on the defensive from a fellow employee. “But my question to him, and to you, is: Would you have figured it out sooner?” Software Development