Best of the blogs: “It’s amazing to watch Microsoft continually be so clueless,” begins Dave Rosenberg in this Open Sources post. “Shrinkwrapped SOA is oxymoronic minus the oxy.” That’s because SOA stacks are antithetical to the very nature of a loosely-coupled architecture. “Show me a stack vendor that allows for truly clean swapping of components with other vendors and I will eat my words.” From the feature well: Energy, its cost in particular, is changing the datacenter game. While virtualization and consolidation can help, “hidden energy costs await those who do not plan the layout of their virtualized datacenter wisely. And the chief culprit is heat,” explains Paul Venezia in The cool new look in datacenter design. “The killing-flies-with-a-shotgun approach to cooling and powering the datacenter has been banished to the history books along with the 85-cent gallon of gas. Retrofitting existing datacenters is never easy or inexpensive, but in this case, the benefits are immediate.” Related: APC instruments mark the rebirth of cool. The news beat: IBM buys DataMirror to get its real-time data integration software, which Big Blue plans to sell stand-alone and include in its own Information Server. Verizon unveils what it calls Integrated Optical Service that enables companies to tie in Ethernet service. And open source JBoss Rules gain speed. Notes from the field: Dell just might turn itself around by engaging in new and provocative side businesses, Robert X. Cringely reports. One reader, you see tells Cringe in Dell’s hot new line of business that, “when he said he wanted a laptop, Dell must have thought he asked for a lapdance.” The confusion came during a call to tech support, of course. Technology Industry