Columnist’s corner: It’s hardly the latest and greatest of tech companies but, as Bill Snyder point out, the New Year kicks off with a pair of bullish notes on Microsoft. “What a pleasure it is to see something positive after the carnage of last week.” Snyder is, of course, referring to word coming out of Global Equities Research and Goldman Sachs, the latter of which bumped its estimate by a penny a share. “Not a huge revision, but given the runup in Microsoft’s shares over the last year, her comment that the stock is still ‘attractive’ is significant,” Snyder explains in Tech’s Bottom Line. Show of the week: CES is on in Las Vegas. Bill Gates kicked the show off with his final such keynote and a video self-parody that had everyone from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama denying him a job, while Jay-Z endured his attempts at rapping. On a more serious note, AMD lights Puma up with hybrid graphics that further its platform for notebook PCs, while HP goes high-definition with the new Pavilion HDX laptop. For continuing coverage, see our Geeks guide to CES. Related: Finding myself at CES ’08. Test Center review: What separates a security information manager from a basic log-file aggregator? Curtis Franklin asks just that, then continues that a SIM must go further. “Like many SIMs, the Symantec system improves with each new data point it has to chew on. Unlike many SIMs, Symantec’s has its own Global Intelligence Network of analysts, experts, and OPSIMs (other people’s SIMs) to throw into the intelligence mix,” he writes in Symantec SIM brings friends. “The Symantec Security Information Manager 9650 is a solid piece of network security infrastructure that’s in the prime of its product life: old enough for serious development to have taken place, but not past its peak.” Technology Industry