Open source: With its traction in the enterprise open source has become something of a gold rush for startups, but now the bandwagon is becoming so crowded that some experts are predicting a market fallout and even a venture capitalist backlash.Notes from the field: Even scarier, Robert X. Cringely has a pre-Halloween nightmare that includes Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, a Ballmer character and tons and tons of spam. Some of Cringe’s trick-or-treaters are living with ghosts in their own machines, such as Mike R., whose Dell laptop checks out every time his Nextel Blackberry receives an incoming call. Mr. R. has not yet been able to determine which device is possessed but, evidently, an exorcism is in order. Product Preview: NFR Security’s Sentivist 5.0 IPS product enables users to “visualize the magnitude of security events.” Additionally, the use of vulnerability data allows the software to both deploy signatures and prioritize attacks. Columnists’ Corner: Patch management is never easy. The lapse between a hole being discovered and the delivery of a fix can be critical. But there are solutions that help buy you some time, writes Roger Grimes in Security Adviser. Snort is one. ISS offers another. Microsoft is rumored to be crafting one as well. David Margulius, meanwhile, points out in Technology plays both sides of the aisle that “Gartner has brazenly identified an architectural inversion,” in which “IT is turning outward to absorb ‘Web 2.0’ technologies already battle-tested with fickle consumers.” Think IM, search and Web apps but, all apologies, not TiVo. Security: Researchers from the SANS Institute and the University of London have illustrated how weak Oracle’s password security is by demonstrating that a hacker can gain access in less than four minutes. The news beat: Vodafone trials a new venue for selling mobile phones: the vending machine. A new survey finds that age discrimination is rampant in IT. You guessed it, the older folks are shouldering the brunt of this, and the higher up the corporate ladder one is, the more likely they are to practice age discrimination. Bill Gates, who turns 50 today, might want to watch out. Not that he’s backing down. Microsoft has warned that if regulators in South Korea order it to remove code or redesign Windows it will simply pull the operating system from that market. Technology Industry