Best of the blogs: Admit it. On a semi-regular basis, you find yourself late in the office, the only one who can get a certain task done and wondering if the relationship with your employer is worth it for you. The question at hand: Am I underpaid? Nick Corcodilos has a suggestion about figuring that out. “Put yourself on the block and see what kinds of bids you get. Seriously.” But what of the recent surveys that suggest IT’ers are getting bigger raises than ever? Does it matter? Or, is that just more reason to be ticked off? “The next best way to get an idea of your value in the market is to talk to real, live people in your field. Get the information you seek straight from the horse’s mouth.” First look: VMware Infrastructure 3 is a hard act to follow, Paul Venezia writes. And with that, he tears into VI3.5. “The big news for VI3.5 isn’t the core functionality,” Venezia writes in Preview: VMware Infrastructure builds on the base. “The larger story is in the management additions.” One of the most prominent is Update Manager, an automated Windows and Linux patch manager designed specifically for virtual machines. The beta Venezia tested, however, had several problems, including fragile components and a Purple Screen of Death. Even still, he writes, “if the released code is significantly more stable than the beta, it will undoubtedly be a winner.” Related: VMware, SAP inks support pact. The news beat: Adobe is open sourcing some of its data access technologies, including remoting, messaging and the Action Message Format protocol. OpenOffice.org teamed with Ulteo to launch a beta program offering the OpenOffice 2.0 suite as a Web app, but only for the first 15,000 registrants. AMD will face tough questions at its analyst meeting, specifically regarding Barcelona shipping delays, goodwill charges related to its ATI acquisition, and speculation about the future of chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz. And BEA Systems is announcing today SmartConnect 3.0 which, it claims, connects ERP with ESB. Careers