So, here we are, with our beloved leaders locking horns over a $700 billion bill to bail out Wall Street and the Dow taking a nosedive.

Well, it's going to plunge even further as the ripple effect of the financial sector's crisis is felt. All those companies closing down, and they're big ones, means IT vendors will sell less product and services.

Pile mergers and acquisitions on top of that -- behind every good M&A stands a bean counter cutting staff and, therefore, future orders of IT equipment.

And, as the economy continues to weaken, other companies will tighten their purse strings, refusing to cough up money for new IT equipment. Meanwhile, the vendors themselves will begin cutting staff, further swelling our unemployment ranks.

The one bright spot in all this may just be software as a service (SaaS) vendors such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite because, when companies don't have enough money to lay out the dough for capital expenditures, they may be willing to take the SaaS option. They just pay by the month and have, perhaps, some free cash left.

Expect cloud service players to get stronger too, as corporations use their services instead of investing in hardware.

Brings to mind the wise words of my old friend A. Nonymous: It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

Well, okay, call me SAML 2.0 then, which isn't the same thing as SAML 1.0, an earlier version of the Security Assertion Markup Language.

SAML is the protocol used to achieve Single Sign-On between Web sites as well as authentication that enables safe transactions, among other things. As our Webopedia site explains, SAML defines mechanisms to exchange authentication, authorization and nonrepudiation information.

If all this identity standards alphabet soup drives people crazy, it's probably because some mighty fine hair splitting is often involved with which standard to use, since there are others like WS-Federation.

WS-Federation is also trying to address the identity and security requirements of both Web applications and Web services. Definitely not the same thing as SAML. But new projects have cropped up to make them act the same, such as Project Concordia, whose mission is to "drive interoperability across identity protocols in use today."

And overall, the industry is making progress with interoperability. The Liberty Alliance, for example, which includes IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and RSA, group just announced that "products from CA; NTT Software; Ping Identity; RSA, The Security Division of EMC; and Ubisecure have passed its Liberty Alliance SAML 2.0 interoperability testing."

It can get pretty mind-boggling.

So now that several vendors' products have passed its interoperability tests, what does this mean? Simple: If you log in and create an identity once for one of these vendors' applications, you will be able to access the other vendors' applications without having to go through the identity creation process again. It's the equivalent of logging in to your Yahoo mail and using the same login to access Gmail and your Amazon.com account on the Web.

No more remembering multiple passwords or the answers to security questions. It might even save vice-presidential candidates' e-mail accounts from being hacked.

So here I am at Oracle OpenWorld 2008, being held through Thursday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The first thing that strikes a visitor is that, for Oracle, being bigger isn't everything, it's the only thing.

"The person who wins in software is the person with a lot of scale," Oracle president Charles Phillips tells a packed audience during his keynote this morning. "Being a leader is cultural for us."

So, a honking huge lunch tent is located between Moscone North and South, taking up a couple of city blocks and shutting off access to Howard Street between Third and Fourth Streets, except on foot. A herd of elephants could go grazing through it with no difficulty whatsoever.

The exhibition hall is full, and 43,000 people, which is the equivalent of what, three brigades of troops? are streaming everywhere. There are tons of laptops at the access stations, which visitors can use. They're ThinkPads, my personal fave. Gallons of water are being consumed from the dispensers, reams of publications are available for the visitor, and hordes of security guards are stationed at 20-foot intervals along the food tent -- ah, heck, it's a pavilion, let's tell it as it is.

Even the voices of people steering the morning crowds are big. "I've got the purple tags, don't ignore me, you gotta have the purple tags," bellows a large man, probably an Oracle staffer, as the crowd streams past in the morning. Naturally, everyone ignores him. "The lunch is here, it's over here," bellows a security guard in the afternoon, as the crowd erupts out of the buildings in search of sustenance.

The city of San Francisco is happy. Not only are hotels filling up for the event, but nightclubs, bars, restaurants and other, less savory places are humming in excitement. Even the clean-up;s going to be big: City authorities tacked on a full weekend before the event and a full day after the event for setup and cleanup. Perhaps Oracle is right: Size matters.

Out in the U.K., there's a cloud appreciation society whose members love clouds and rain. The society is making a documentary about clouds for the BBC.

Out at VMworld 2008, VMware's user conference being held in Las Vega through Thursday, a documentary about clouds of another sort could be made. Everyone, it seems, is coming up with a product that will leverage the cloud.

Not one to be left behind, Citrix Systems, a VMware rival, has teamed up with 3Tera, whose AppLogic gid operating system enables utility computing to provide customers with enterprise grade cloud computing solutions either on-premise or externally. A VMware rival, you ask? Indeed. Others are Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat and a host of smaller players.

Citrix's teaming up with 3Tera coincides with VMware's announcement that its technology will help leverage the cloud. So, whose isn't? And why is everyone running towards the cloud anyway?

Set aside for a minute the misty-eyed vision people paint of IT being able to offload its capital expenses onto a cloud service provider, which we keep hearing from vendors all the time; cloud technologies don't all talk to each other, as VMWare president and CEO Paul Maritz pointed out during his keynote speech.

The real attraction of cloud computing, especially when combined with virtualization, is that, even on-premise, it lets IT create a pool of resources, allocating them dynamically as and when needed. That  means IT will have to buy less physical resources,and will be able to stretch its existing physical resources further. How can that not look good to the boss?

Of course, there are still issues to be resolved -- zoning, control and management, to ensure compliance -- but they'll be solved at some point. Perhaps we can then launch our own cloud appreciation society.

When a truck slammed into a Baskin-Robbins store in Aurora, Colorado recently, killing two women in the vehicle and a three-year-old boy in the store, that was news.

In seeking to add further color to the story, the newspaper assigned the journalist to create real time posts via Twitter about the child's funeral. The posts were listed, in all their ghastly detail, on Eric Krangel's blog.

Like Eric and many others, I find this use of Twitter appalling. The touchstones reporters use when covering the news include: Is this important? Does the public have a need to know? Does the public have the right to know? All these questions are subject to one overriding rule: Is this in accordance with common decency?

Now, decency is something which is in a state of flux; the MTV videos of today would have been considered soft-core porn ten years ago. And four-letter words pepper today's speech to an extent previously considered unthinkable. Still, in this case, one could argue that the bounds of common decency were clearly breached.

There was no respect for the dead. And just what did the public need to know about the ghastly twits -- of people sobbing, pallbearers carrying out the coffin, the burial, and the chanting of the prayer? How did those twits add to our sum total of knowledge or inform, amuse or enlighten us?

In his response to criticism of the coverage, Rocky Mountain News editor, publisher and president John Temple said that critics did not differentiate between the idea itself and the execution. "Why not connect with them in real time, as long as we're not disruptive at the funeral, which we weren't and wouldn't be?" he asked. Because, John, that's intruding upon their grief, and the twits made a public spectacle out of a private affair.

John throws in the argument that he is the father of three children, and has covered many tragedies. Indeed. Assuming these points are at all relevant, which they are not, he should have known better.

So there I was, sitting at a table at TechCrunch50 today, on the second day of the show, still struggling, like many others, with the erratic Internet access, having the connection go down on me umpteen times as I tried to get stuff, when suddenly the clouds parted and a light shone on me from Heaven -- er, no, it only felt like that because I finally managed to access the Web and upload my story. From such little things does happines spring.

Later in the day, as I was back writing another piece and muttering about the Web access, I saw Jason Calacanis himself walk from table to table, cleaning them up while being followed by a staffer. Now, I'm all for democracy, one being, one vote and stuff like that, but what's the point of being a boss and co-founder of a conference and having a multitude of minions if you can't get them to do stuff like that?

It was not the best afternoon for Jason, by the way, because, as he was on his table-clearing rounds, he came upon three young men without TechCrunch50 badges. Which meant they had either lost them or snuck in. Jason, who is relatively small and mild-looking, promptly interrogated them about their lack of badges and got the staffer to escort them to the front desk, to either buy badges or leave. At least he had the sense to delegate that task.

I'm still wondering, though: Couldn't Jason have got a member of his staff to do the cleaning up?

So here I am pulling into the parking lot of the building where TechCrunch50 is being held, and racing into this shiny multi-story building. I stop a passing security guard and ask him where the conference is being held. "Over there," he says, pointing across the lot at a row of squat, burnt-red structures that look like what the British army used to call Quonset huts - lightweight prefabricated structures of corrugated steel. Yurgh!

Noticing my expression, the security guard hastens to cheer me up. "Its really nice inside," he says. So I trudge dutifully across the parking lot and, surprise! He's right. Cheered up, I go over to pick up my registration tag. Hmmm. Not available, I fell through the cracks, but the staff were nice enough to make up for that oversight.

Well, okay, time to trundle off to listen to the presentations and I do. Excellent. Superb. But marred by erratic Web access, which manifests as the hapless candidates make their presentations, and dogs everyone the rest of the day.

Otherwise, it wasn't bad. Ashton Kutcher of That 70's Show, and Punk'd! fame is one of the presenters, putting forth his Website, BlahGirls, for the teenaged girl market. I get to chat briefly with him and his good buddy Jason Goldberg, both cool guys who act like ordinary Joes, no hulking bodyguards around to crush questioners who fail to genuflect. Nice.

So we get to the afternoon panel, where the judges are good friends with each other and it shows. Salesforce.com CEO and chairman Marc Benioff speaks in Japanese to the presenter from Renin; Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi of ICQ fame says, "I can speak Japanese too," and rattles off a couple of sentences in Yiddish. Throughout the Q&A, Vardi bugs Benioff to remove his jacket. "This is Silicon Valley, don't be so formal," he chortles, and Benioff finally complies. And, after listening to the presentation from FairSoftware, which lets companies incorporate virtually, Vardi cuts loose with another joke. "It's a terrible thing that 97 percent of the lawyers give the rest of them such a bad name," he says, cracking up the entire room. Oy gevalt!

At the Office 2.0 conference today, held in San Francisco, Google executive Matthew Glotzbach said during his keynote speech that iPhone access to applications on the the cloud has transformed the mobile landscape. "I live almost exclusively in the cloud, and can access all my documents, flip through this presentation I'm making, plan for meetings, all from my iPhone," he told the audience.

Glotzbach's speech, titled "Ten things I can do in the cloud today that I couldn't a year ago," highlighted the power of the cloud. True, he's biased; after all, Google is a major player in the cloud space. But, as consumers and businesses both have found, the cloud is highly empowering, not least of all because it's either free or really, really inexpensive for what it offers.

Among the other things the cloud offers is instant translation capabilities through Google Translate, but that was a bit of a bust, with someone from the audience saying there was a big mistake in the English to Spanish translation Glotzbach demonstrated. He recovered well, though, saying translation is not perfect yet. Mind you, there are other online sites offering free translation, one of them being SmartLink's translation2paralink.com.

Online collaboration, the collaborative capabilities of Google Forms, the availability of online templates, and the ability to build scalable business applications on the cloud are among the other capabilities Glotzbach talked about.

Will newer and more innovative cloud applications and technologies to leverage them emerge? No doubt. Perhaps Glotzbach should begin taking notes for a speech along the same lines next year, just to see what will change and how.

VMware's announcement today that it has received Microsoft's seal of approval, under the latter's Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) came as no surprise.

While VMware remains in fear of Microsoft's entry into the virtualization market and its new CEO Paul Maritz, a Microsoft alumnus noted for his pugnacity, has publicly vowed to fight Microsoft tooth and nail, the two simply had to enter a marriage of convenience.

Microsoft would gain a foot-hold among VMware's customers, and VMware needed Microsoft's blessings because, otherwise, it would not be able to run its hypervisors on the Windows Server family. Since Windows Server is a billion-dollar business for Microsoft, that would be a huge loss.

The pain would be most keenly felt in the SMB market, where VMware has tens of thousands of customers, by its own account, and which is a Microsoft stronghold.

There's no doubt, however, that the alliance between the two is an uneasy one. On September 8, one week to the day before VMware's major conference, VMworld, kicks off, Microsoft will make some announcements about virtualization. The technical term for this is stealing someone's thunder.

Whether or not VMware executives hope Microsoft will then be struck by lightning during the launch is not something they will discuss openly; but chances are that sales of Pepto-Bismol will surge in their vicinity.