Best of the blogs: Some readers who’ve been taking Vista for a test drive are encountering interesting problems already, Ed Foster reports in Trying Vista can be trying. The issues range from actually acquiring the product to installation obstacles with Office 2007, to shady dealings with retailers. “There does seem to be a bit of a pattern here, don’t you think?”Columnist’s corner: Attempting to break into IT with skills that are “not that strong” and little experience with servers or network administration, our Off the Record author still managed to find a friend-of-a-friend type of gig where the hiring manager didn’t expect a lot, and had a salary budget to match expectations. “My first few days went OK. Then, on Wednesday, just as I was sitting down to lunch, our primary point-of-sales application went down.” Three years later and, yes, he’s still with the company. But that first week is legendary. The news beat: A leaked memo from Michael Dell reveals that the company has a couple tough quarters ahead, for which he plans to cut costs, managers and bonuses. Oracle and Unisys take their partnership on Linux and SOA a step further with joint engineering sales and marketing to boost systems migrations. And analyst firm W.R. Hambrecht & Co. publishes a research note estimating that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 should strengthen the company’s lead in open source when it ships next month. Software Development