Columnists’ corner: Tom Yager really can be a curmudgeon sometimes. In Ahead of the Curve, he rails against RFID thusly: “I have a lot of reasons for being no fan of RFID, but RFID has one serious, show-stopping shortcoming that trumps the others: It’s stupid.”In contrast, Jon Udell takes a measured tone in Stategic Developer, where he discusses whether SOA-style services will become commodities in b-to-b markets. “Call me an optimist, but I really believe that the transparency made possible by SOA could influence the b-to-b landscape in profoundly positive ways,” he says.Best of the blogs: In TechWatch, Forrester Research Vice President Navi Radjou says all is not lost for the U.S. in the competition for global tech dominance with India and China. “In pursuit of a new global organizational model, U.S. Vendors are integrating with Indian and Chinese partners (for) new market structures that let tech firms fluidly match global innovation demand with worldwide talent supply,” he writes. Dave Rosenberg’s Open Resource blog flags recent comments dissing open source and IBM’s on-demand model. “I realy don’t even know what to say,” Rosenberg writes. “The absurdity confounds me”The news beat: Tom Krazit of IDG News Service writes that AMD will introduce a new core design in 2007 that is similar to the core used by the company’s Opteron and Athlon 64 processors. he reports from AMD’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California during its analyst day. Software Development