Platforms: After losing a month’s work, research and creative projects, to say nothing of registration keys and activation, Tom Yager has this to write: “I can barely contain my glee at having so grand an opportunity as this to learn a new way.” The problem, you see, is that the MacBook Pro Apple loaned him slipped into what Yager calls a coma — and be blames the Intel chip. “This wouldn’t happen to a PowerPC Mac.” The new road to recovery is worse than the old one. So he took to the cloud, went browser-based and lightweight mobile to avoid a similar loss in the future. The lesson in all this? “I now know that my recoverability expectations for Macs should not exceed those that I associate with PCs.” Open source: In the Ubuntu plunge Day 2 Randall Kennedy admits to feeling spoiled. “After years of enduring one questionable Microsoft UI decision after another, I’m having a blast tweaking and re-skinning gnome under Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon,” he writes. Not that it’s entirely smooth, bug-free, or lacking application weirdness, just that “the reward is worth it: I now have a nice, pseudo-Mac OS X-ish UI with a nice, funky icon set.” Only two days and the blueblood Windows user has his day-to-day environment established and ready for work. “I’m actually starting to enjoy my new digs.” Related: The Ubuntu plunge, Day 1: VM madness, and Why Ubuntu (still) sucks, part 5. Networking: With two new switches Cisco is, in the words of Paul Venezia, giving “admins and network architects plenty to get excited about.” Those are the Catalyst 4500 E-series and the Catalyst 6500. Speed boosts, Virtual Switching Systems, improved diagnostics, the Supervisor 720-10G, Multi-chassis EtherChannel, are some of the highlights. “If the new supervisor for the 6500 series does what Cisco claims, it will mark a turning point in redundant networking.” Read the full analysis. SOA: David Linthicum reports from the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum in New York City, where the morning highlight was a keynote titled “Laying the SOA Foundation” delivered by Pfizer’s Martin Brodbeck. “He was very data focused, which I think took the audience back. I mean, why talk about data when you can talk about services? The truth is data becomes services, thus the starting point of data,” Linthicum explains. Technology Industry