Best of the blogs: The industry’s DRM approach is not accomplishing what it should — even if you have sympathy for software vendors’ need to protect against piracy. A reader recounts in Gripe Line, “one for the record books when it comes to stupid IT designs as far the activation issues I encountered with Adobe.” The quandary came about while upgrading from Acrobat 7 to 8, at which point our reader found both the ‘Activate’ and the ‘Deactivate’ buttons turned off. A call to the company fixed it but only for a day. That’s when the nightmare began. Special report: iSCSI’s star is on the rise. Thanks to lower costs, simpler deployment, and a raft of new products, iSCSI is becoming an attractive alternative to Fibre Channel, particularly for remote offices and SMBs. Lending credence to the cause are new choices in networked storage from the likes of Agami Systems, Hewlett-Packard and NetApp. Columnist’s corner: IT and bean counters are often at odds, it’s true, for a multitude of reasons. But that needn’t be the case. Instead, IT can actually aid the finance department, Ephraim Schwartz points out, and in more ways than mere spreadsheets. Take the fast close, for instance. As in the closing of books and accounting cycles. “Getting IT and the finance department working together can help drive the success of your business in subtle ways,” Schwartz writes. “If your company hasn’t realized that yet, it is about time it woke up.” The news beat: Salesforce.com trudges into new ground with its Wealth Management Edition application that integrates customer information with data services. MySQL inks a pact with open source BI provider JasperSoft to arm developers with tools for incorporating reporting into programs they build on top of MySQL. And a U.S. immigration bill increasing the number of H1-B visas permitted could pass both houses by July and ultimately land on the president’s desk come September. Software Development