Best of the blogs: Neither Bill Gates nor Google exactly conjure images of truthfulness, but there must be some virtue in the fact that open source advocate Matt Asay, for once, is siding with Mr. Gates in asserting that Google needs competition. “And I’d go one further: Google’s innovation has stalled. Outside search and a killer business model, Google has given the market little,” he writes in Now Microsoft is the honest one…Notes from the field: The typically dour Mr. Cringely this week tells a story with a happy ending. It harks all the way back to his last adventure, involving D-Link and one fellow’s NTP server. Turns out, future routers will no longer tap Poul-Henning Kamp’s NTP server for a free time-check. Word from CA, however, is not so bright — particularly since a U.S. attorney came knockin’ to investigate “a culture of corruption and fraud.” CA execs cop a plea, Sun’s McNealy set free. Test Center review: Apparently slingshots are not strictly used to fell giants anymore. Akimbi, in fact, has a virtual lab automation tool dubbed Slingshot. If you’ve not heard of virtual lab automation, the wares in this nascent group “enable IT test sites to make good use of virtualization technologies by simplifying the process of configuring, deploying, capturing, and simultaneously running multiple VMs,” explains Andrew Binstock. “Akimbi Slingshot will pay for itself by the ease with which you can set up, deploy, and manage configurations.” Not to say it’s perfect. Columnists’ corner: Now, dare I say, this one might resemble an annoying Whitney Houston song, but David Margulius believes that technology workers are the future. (Forgive me, please, if you spend the afternoon plagued by that tune.) “So where’s the love in enterprise IT?” Margulius asks. Well, it’s certainly not at the C-level, but it is “the developers, contact center reps, designers and architects, QA folks, the people making it happen.” Technology Industry