Test Center review: It’s certainly not intuitive to pronounce, but the open source QEMU can be used to, among other things, blow your friends’ minds by launching Linux via the USB port of a PC, all the while leaving the Windows session none the wiser. “With the capabilities it has — its ability to run in multiple systems; the ease with which new virtual machines can be created; the performance enhancement of the Windows accelerator — QEMU can hold its head high next to even the likes of VMware,” writes Rick Grehan.Columnists’ corner: Cringe is at it again. This week, he’s poking inside Diebold touchscreen voting machines, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘cocktail wienies’ and tracking down those booth babes that once paraded around the E3 gaming show. NetSuite gets the boot, E3 nixes birthday suits. Security: It’s neither rated critical, nor widespread, but IT shops should be aware of a new zero day Microsoft exploit in the wild. Podcasts: Bob Garza interviews Splunk CEO Michael Baum about the 2.0 release of Splunk, enhancements it brings, and how it indexed half a billion events at the recent Interop show. Garza calls Splunk a ‘Google for events.’ Quoteworthy: A couple of years ago, hardware utilization was driving the virtualization train. Now, however, hardware’s inexpensive compared with the cost of the juice to keep it running and the people to swap it in and out when it fails. So if oil stays near $70 a barrel, and refresh rates on datacenter gear stay in the sub five-year range, you can bet that datacenters will be completely virtualized and hyper-efficient in a couple years. Wish I could say the same for my car. — Dave Margulius. Datacenter power crunch. Blast from the past: I’m dusting off the bottle, but the nectar is fresh once again as Dell CEO Kevin Rollins says, “I am sure there will come a time when we are going to use AMD,” in this Q&A. That day has arrived. Technology Industry