Best of the blogs: The digital divide is an international problem. So is software piracy. Hurricane Katrina instantaneously made the former far worse regionally, and that got Ed Foster thinking. “No, I’m not suggesting that hurricane victims should be allowed to pirate software as they choose…If we really want our nation to be one where everyone has a fair chance to lift themselves up, the software industry will have to help us find a way to level the playing field for all,” Foster wrote in The Gripe Line. Columnists’ Corner: When things go wrong in the enterprise, many IT shops have found a certain comfort in the practice of having one vendor’s throat to choke. No more, writes Ephraim Schwartz, particularly not in the rapidly changing enterprise applications landscape. Schwartz also debunks a few myths concerning Oracle and Salesforce.com. Databases: Microsoft yanked mirroring out of Yukon, its next version of SQL Server, but that’s better than forcing DBA’s to band-aid solutions together, argues Sean McCown. Greg Nawrocki explains why Release 3 of database provider Oracle’s app server may represent “one giant leap for Grid-kind.” The news beat: Google may be launching a Wi-Fi service. Opera said it will give its browser away free, without subjecting users to advertisements any longer. And the European Union said it is investigating a number of informal complaints against Microsoft that were waged by rivals concerning its business practices. Technology Industry