Stories by: Patrick Thibodeau

Monday was the last day to register to vote in next month's election in Silicon Valley's Santa Clara County, where Barack Obama has a clear edge and, now, a really big backer: Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Gartner has ranked virtualization as the No. 1 strategic technology for next year, not for its "tremendously obvious" ability to virtualize servers, but for its increasing capability to virtualize just about everything else in a data center.

In-flight Internet access may also enable videoconferencing on board airplanes, effectively closing off one of the last refuges from meetings for business travelers. At least, that's what Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers predicted at Symposium/ITxpo 2008 Wednesday.

The full depth of IT's involvement in Wall Street's meltdown is unknown, but one plan to stop it from happening again calls upon a growing IT trend: open source.

IBM Monday opened the online door to a service that merges some of the best features of social networking with business collaboration tools.

The overall economic cost of Wall Street's collapse has yet to be totaled. But it's clear that IT departments will be laboring under some changed conditions in the months ahead.

IT spending is faring better than the overall economy, and the sector "will avoid a recession in 2008," says Gartner. But in a report sent to clients this week, the analyst firm says it believes IT budgets will show "very low year-over-year growth rates until business growth significantly improves."

The tech sector is experiencing a crash -- not of stock prices, which rebounded somewhat on Wall Street on Tuesday -- but in its ability to take new companies public.

Wall Street's 777-point sell-off on Monday signaled that the US tech sector is unlikely to emerge unscathed by the economic downturn -- with companies being hit in unexpected ways. Just look what happened to Apple, which has been performing strongly in recent quarters.

The collapse of Wall Street may prompt financial services firms to increase their use of offshore outsourcing and cut more jobs in the US on top of the layoffs they have already announced.

Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn't stopping there.