Stories by Joab Jackson

An email composed, but never sent, by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs may prove instrumental in the Justice Department's case that Apple, along with the five largest book publishers, colluded to fix prices for electronic books.

Apple didn't try to fix or raise the prices of electronic books when it entered into the market in 2010, according to Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue. Rather, he says, the company was only working to ensure a profit for itself.

The supercomputing arms race is heating up again between the United States and China, as China retakes the top spot in the 41st Top500 listing of the world's most powerful supercomputers with Tianhe-2, an updated system that was able to execute 33.86 petaflops, or 33.86 thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

In the new update of DB2, released Friday, IBM has added a set of acceleration technologies, collectively code-named BLU, that promise to make the venerable database management system (DBMS) better suited for running large in-memory data analysis jobs.

Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue offered only short answers in testimony Thursday in federal court when questioned by U.S. Justice Department prosecutors trying to solidify their case that Apple, along with five of the largest book publishers, worked together to illegally set the prices of electronic books for the market.

On the second day of its annual HP Discover user conference in Las Vegas, Hewlett-Packard launched an operating system (OS) designed specifically for cloud computing, called the HP Cloud OS. Initially, however, the software can only be obtained by purchasing HP systems.

Hewlett-Packard wants to help organizations get rid of their useless data, all the information that is no longer needed yet still takes up expensive space on storage servers.

After two years of beta testing, the Red Hat OpenShift Online platform as a service (PaaS) has been pressed into commercial use, charging customers and offering professional commercial support.

Microsoft's TechEd North America conference, which was held this week in New Orleans, provided a first glimpse of the architecture that Microsoft shops should use to manage employee personal devices for work duties, an emerging IT trend called bring your own device (BYOD).

The pending launch of Windows Server 2012 release 2 focuses on offering a number of advanced capabilities in storage and networking, which used to require the purchase of additional software, or even a full-fledged storage system.

The next version of Microsoft's relational database management system (RDMS) promises to bring immense performance gains to online transactional processing systems.

The next release of the Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), an application for managing software development, has been designed to bring agile development practices to larger, multi-team projects.

Compuware has updated its application performance management (APM) software to give administrators more insight into what might be slowing application performance, thanks to the inclusion of new metrics showing the operational health of the host infrastructure.

For the kickoff of Microsoft's annual North American TechEd conference, the company is urging administrators and IT professionals to think of it as the provider of the "Cloud OS."

Microsoft is updating a number of its IT infrastructure and development tools to work more seamlessly with its Azure hosted cloud services, including Windows Server, System Center, Visual Studio and SQL Server.