Stories by: Patrick Thibodeau

Standards wars, such as the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD battle, can keep many potential users on the sidelines until a winner is declared. Virtualization software vendors are trying to avoid just such a battle over the adoption of virtual appliances.

When Enterprise Rent-A-Car completes a move from PCs to thin clients this season, as part of the rollout of a new rental transaction system, it expects to cut internal energy consumption by 5 million kilowatt-hours.

Ten years ago, Bill Gates was the new John D. Rockefeller. And from the US government's perspective at the start of its antitrust trial against Microsoft in 1998, Gates was every bit as powerful as the legendary oil baron was -- if not more so. The desktop operating system was seen as important to the new, tech-focused economy as oil had been to the industrial economy of the early 20th century.

The ears of attendees at Hewlett-Packard's annual technical conference seemed to perk up last week when HP CIO Randy Mott said that many companies are spending too much to keep aging systems running.

The antitrust investigation of Intel begun by the Federal Trade Commission last week is unlikely to be resolved before the next administration takes office in Washington, an antitrust legal group predicted Thursday.

IBM is trying to do for data centers what McDonald's helped to do for hamburgers and fries: turn the building of them into an efficient, quasi-manufacturing process.

Now that IBM has broken supercomputing's petaflop barrier with its RoadRunner system, capable of more than one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second, attention among supercomputer developers turns next to a new performance goal: an exascale system.

IBM is releasing three new rack servers built on Advanced Micro Devices' quad-core processors, all aimed at users who need large memory systems.

Moving into server virtualization is little like playing a video game: The first few rounds are easy, but as many companies advance in deployment, they are increasingly seeking more specialized help.

HP plans to complete its $US13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems Corp. (EDS) during the second half of this year, initially creating a combined company of 309,000 employees. But job cuts may be on the way, as the two companies combine their operations and try to move customers toward increased automation of datacentres.

While Microsoft chases Yahoo, Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO and chairman is seeking a stronger relationship with IBM, something in which Big Blue's chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, appears very interested.