In the old days-when people read news on paper, used phones they couldn't talk loudly on while sitting next to you on the train, and figured "virtualization" probably meant to make something less real-late summer was known in the news business as "silly season."

It's the time of year when half the country is on vacation and the rest wish they were and very little of any importance is being done because no one's paying attention.

It was silly because that was the time of year the UFOs and alien babies and bizarre accidents and sightings of Bigfoot showed up in the paper because something had to fill the space between the ads and there were not-as there are now-entire media empires built on those same stories.

(As I write this the local news radio station is reporting that a local teenager spotted a large alligator in a local New England lake, though everyone admits it might have been a snapping turtle, or a log. Last week a Denver teenager sparked a massive alarm after photographing an African lion hunting the suburban veldt, before state wildlife officers decided the photos actually showed a member of the relatively benign "big dog" species of lion. So far no UFOs or Bigfeet have been implicated in either sighting, but it's just a matter of time.)

Luckily those of us in the tech press rarely have to worry about silly season stories, though the anti-Windows paranoia of Mac-o-philes and Linuxians offers plenty of opportunity.

Even during downtimes, like immediately after a major Microsoft product announcement, when the industry's hype-generators are exhausted, or during the summer when nothing more exciting than routine hardware product refreshes and odd-but-irrelevant product introductions are going on, you can count on second-tier vendors to keep the technical discussions going.

This week's most pertinent V-discussions-much to my disappointment, actually-have a certain amount of relevance, if only because of what they indicate about the level of fatalism in the virtualization market and who the various vendors actually think they're competing against.

Citrix, for example, which actually did come out with something interesting last week, keeps CTO Simon Crosby busy being nasty to VMware, while mid-market stalwart Virtual Iron sics chief strategy officer Tony Asaro on Citrix. The rule seems to be to keep the CEOs out of it and let the chief geeks hold the sniping contest, but only by targeting competitors one step up the ladder from oneself.