Best of the blogs: The unchallenged champ of virtualization, VMware, may be showing signs of worrying about Microsoft. Some of those came through in a white paper the company published denouncing Redmond’s behavior as anti-competitive. “Many of their technical arguments are just plain silly,” Randall Kennedy explains in this Enterprise Desktop post. “I, for one, am glad to see VMware sweat a little.” Columnist’s corner: Evoking Shakespeare’s romance of a similar name, Tom Yager’s A PC Switcher’s Tale begins Act I this week with an opportunity he saw in Parallels. That being the chance to present a staid Windows user with that ol’ familiar operating system, but inside a Mac OS X Aqua window. “I had migrated her to a MacBook, which rested invisibly on her desk with its lid closed. I told her that, if nothing else, she now had a much faster Windows PC for work.” Now comes the watching and waiting. Just don’t go looking to Bohemia and Sicilia for the ending to this one. The news beat: Microsoft will update its antipiracy WGA tool and, in so doing, give customers the benefit of the doubt when it cannot determine for certain whether the OS on a PC is legal. IBM kicks off an effort to ease compute clusters and high-performance computing. And AMD unwraps the 690 PC chip set, its first replete with an ATI graphics processor. Careers: John West is continuing his discussion on IT mentors by suggesting that now is the time to become one. “Mentors know that there is a strong selfish motivation to helping someone else along,” he writes in Leading From the Trenches. Actually, and not to be nitpicky, there are myriad reasons for doing so. Besides all the others, it can help you stay in touch with the ground-floor folks, “giving a glimpse into details you would usually miss.” Software Development