Best of the blogs: Randall Kennedy has a rather contentious series over at his Enterprise Desktop blog. Why Ubuntu (still) sucks. He’s up to part 4, which begins, “it’s the applications, stupid!” To wit, “an operating system is only as good as the applications that run on it. Combine that with the old saw, ‘you get what you pay for,’ and you begin to appreciate why a thriving, commercial, 3rd-party development community is essential to building a lasting presence in the marketplace. Without it, you get something like, well, Ubuntu,” Mr. Kennedy writes. Personally, I cannot wait for the epilogue he promised. Related: Part 1: Search; Part 2: Compiz Fusion; Part 3: x11. The news beat: After at first refusing Oracle’s offer, BEA Systems has countered, stating that $21 a share is a more realistic price. Microsoft takes a $240 million stake in Facebook, thereby beating Google to the punch. Trend Micro plans to acquire Provilla for its LeakProof software and, in so doing, step into the data leak prevention fray. NEC takes on the likes of Cray and IBM with what it claims is the fastest vector supercomputer, the SX-9. And an analyst thinks that Apple takes $18 per month from AT&T for every iPhone subscriber. SOA: Word is, those building SOAs have had it up to their noses with registries. “While the number of JADRs is not the problem, the fact that there is no clear standard or integration mechanism between the registries is clearly a problem.” That’s JADR, as in Just Another Damn Registry. “So, what can be done? First and foremost, vendors need to come together on a common registry, and repository for that matter. Or, perhaps provide integration mechanisms between them.” A novel idea, indeed. Technology Industry