Columnist’s corner: Disbelievers in the paranormal, think again! That’s the advice our Off the Record author offers in The ghost who sabotaged the mainframe. “The story really starts back in December of 1971…” A week later, his predecessor, Ernie, was in a fatal car crash. Back in the office, though, the door to the limited-access computer room opened and closed — while every single person with permissions to it was in a meeting down the hall. Lights flickered. Soft breezes stirred. The most bizarre hardware problems HP had ever dealt with arose in the following weeks. “Gradually, we began to accept the fact that somehow Ernie was still with us … I didn’t feel comfortable telling the HP engineers.” This ghost tale, not entirely over even today, left one reader commenting that, “Many is the day I needed an exorcist far more than a call to Redmond. Exorcism is just the ultimate in outsourcing.” Startups: Rockwell Scientific spin-off ColdWatt makes servers mean and green. Indeed, a machine loaded with ColdWatt’s power supplies would need only 25 watts for power conversion and 106 for air conditioning; for a bit of perspective the company claims that a server needing 200 watts of electricity actually consumers 511 watts, with 96 for power conversion and 193 for cooling. View the slideshow Month of Enterprise Startups, with all 15 revealed thus far. Related: Vendors’ green messages are loud, not clear. Quoteworthy: Sarbanes/Oxley and other regulatory requirements aren’t just about keeping an eye on wayward CEOs. They’re about trying to govern the behavior of this species. Not an easy task. — Bob Lewis. Six stupid and the nature of adulthood. The news beat: U.S. ISPs, broadband and VoIP providers come up against the wiretap deadline to prove they can accommodate law-enforcement regulations. An IBM labor union calls for a 15-minute work stoppage this afternoon in protest of layoffs. AMD Developer Center gives a boost to software aimed at multicore chips, while Sun Microsystems licenses multithreading technology to ARM, and Intel settles its copyright suit with a Chinese company. Technology Industry