From the Test Center: Microsoft’s Longhorn appears to have been hit with a mega-dose of growth hormones since the second beta, points out Tom Yager. “And I mean that in a good way.” Minding that, Mr. Yager focuses not so much on the strengthening of features that Microsoft has done but, instead, on the new functionality, commencing with PowerShell. Out of the box security and virtualization are in there, too. “Longhorn will go where money is no object. And from what I’ve seen of it in beta 3, it will sweep Linux off the table in some of those well-moneyed places where the heavy lifting is done, and will continue to be done, by unsinkable big iron Unix.” Read the full review.Startups: Calling his company “a bet made on several things,” CEO and co-founder Bob Quinn explains that 3Leaf Systems achieved the first piece of its two-phase plan just last week with the introduction of its V-8000 Virtual I/O Server. The appliance, he says, promises huge hardware savings via dynamic allocation of network and storage bandwidth among as many as 20 Windows, Linux, and VMware ESX servers. 3Leaf Systems: Scale up by scaling out. Or view the Month of Enterprise Startups slideshow, which features the dozen fledglings we’ve thus far named. Best of the blogs: A short list exists of issues that Paul Venezia just cannot comprehend. Six items that need to change, to be precise, beginning with the RIAA’s war against customers, and concluding with the aptly titled category, “Oops! I lost your ID. My bad.” I hate to eradicate the mystery of the others, so I won’t. I will say, though, that Mr. Venezia considers one that I’ve not revealed to be personal and while I cannot speak for him, they all more or less impact on an individual level. The news beat: IBM criticizes TippingPoint over the hacking contest it held that spurred the disclosure of a vulnerability in Apple’s browser. Big Blue also unveils Big Green, a $1 billion per year initiative to create datacenters that use less energy. Following that, here’s a look at seven green products that can save IT money, beginning with an esoteric data center liquid cooling system. Software Development