Hot review: Professed UDDI skeptic Philip Windley peers under the covers of Systinet Registry 6.0 and finds a platform that is “mature, stable and polished,” and goes to great lengths to hide UDDI from the user. That’s a good attribute, but Systinet Registry 6.0 is expensive enough to render it out of reach for any customers other than large corporations already committed to a service-oriented architecture. SOA: David Linthicum opines about the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum, Cathleen Moore reports live from the conference about the dream of a common language, and Jon Udell on how to get your heroes, I mean developers, on board for SOA. Columnists’ Corner: Our anonymous writer recounts an IT Off the Record tale of secrecy with a cast of characters that includes a power-greedy network administrator creating a web of black boxes that only he understood, a CEO hiring an outsourcing company without telling an IT soul first, and a newly-minted secret society that met without the CEO or the network administrator to solve the problems those two created. Best of the blogs: Neither Veritas nor Symantec have earned great reputations for the support they offer, and the merger is not expected to improve that, writes Ed Foster in The Gripe Line. CA spun off its open source Ingres database into its own company, but Dave Rosenberg asks does anyone care? Rosenberg refers to Ingres as “an also-ran product without a big market.” Technology Industry