Special report: This morning’s post included a look at Panther Express’ efforts to put CDN’s within reach of even the little guys. And there’s a reason for this startup frenzy. “The next two years will be critical for many of the early-stage enterprise companies, which have been out of favor with investors and customers for so long it’s hard to remember their last heyday,” explains David Margulius in Innovation, startups hot again in the enterprise. “Let’s face it: Large incumbents almost never deliver the ‘next big thing’ — otherwise we’d still be running OS/2 and texting each other on our StarTACs.” Green IT: Myriad IT shops have piles and piles of x86 servers in their datacenter that use less than 10 percent of their computing power in the average 24-hour day. Ted Samson puts that into perspective. “It’s like hiring 100 employees, but having 90 or more them sit on their tuchuses and twiddle their thumbs during any given workday,” he writes in Bad corporate cultural habits lead to tolerating waste. A telling stat: for each dollar you spend to power a server, it’s another dollar to cool. “A lot of companies are in need of a serious wake-up call if they’re willing to tolerate costly wastefulness.” Columnist’s corner: Feeling as rejected as a dog left out in the rain, our Off the Record author is the perceived victim of his neighbor WEP-enabling a wireless network. “My life of crime started three years ago,” pleads this number two IT guy at the company where he works. Said crime, by the by, is hitching a free ride on a neighbor’s wireless. Okay, so the author claims to have beat back temptation to hack into the TiVo box or perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the corporate VPN he could access. “Seriously, folks, I am glad my neighbor finally got smart and enabled encryption.” The news beat: Dell embraces Ubuntu by saying it will offer the Linux distribution preinstalled on certain PCs for users so inclined. Search Wikia hires Jeremie Miller, founder of Jabber, to help with its plan for building an open-source, community-driven search service. BEA Systems is working to blend open source and commercial developer tools within Workshop 10.1, an announcement that one official says makes BEA into “the Burger King of Java development.” Doesn’t exactly conjure mouth-watering images but, perhaps, that’s just me. And panelists at ‘The New Software Industry’ event say that selling software without services does not hold promise, though it remains to be seen if this transformation is permanent or temporary. Software Development