Upbeat sales reports and forecasts continue to pour in for the PC and chip market, offering yet more evidence that economic recovery has already spurred a worldwide resurgence in spending on hardware.

Are shares of IT vendors set to rise again? Fueled by strong sales reports from Lenovo and NetApp, tech stocks led a broad market rally Thursday that was generally ascribed to news about China's confidence in Europe, which faces a debt crisis in Greece and other Mediterranean countries.

Regulators plan to enact new rules to curb the type of market volatility behind the May 6 "flash crash" that caused the Dow to plunge almost 1,000 points in a half hour. The goal is to head off market gyrations that can be exacerbated by automated high-speed trading.

Apple will report selling another record number of Macs in the final quarter of 2009 when it unveils its financial figures later this month, a Wall Street analyst said Thursday in a note to clients.

In a tumultuous week on the market, the attention of IT investors was captured by a mixed bag of acquisition activity and earnings news from the hardware and chip arena -- a sector that is supposed to help lead tech out of the recession.

A high-level developer for a major Wall Street firm was arrested by the FBI on Friday and charged with stealing computer code that automates high-volume trading on stock and commodities markets, according to court documents.

Blaming the downturn in the financial sector, Sun Microsystems reported a US$1.68 billion loss for its most recent fiscal quarter on Thursday.

The global financial crisis so visible this past month is beginning to take its toll on information-technology spending, though IT security spending is expected to be spared in what many think will be a dismal coming year.

Technology drives just about everything we do, and not just at our jobs. From banks to hospitals to the systems that keep the juice flowing to our homes, we are almost entirely dependent on tech. More and more of these systems are interconnected, and many of them are vulnerable. We see it almost every day.

Economic uncertainty is driving CIOs to halt projects, freeze hiring and pile more responsibilities on existing IT staff.

While most eyes are still on stopping the bleed on Wall Street, smart tech companies will likely take a page out of Warren Buffet's playbook by looking for merger and acquisition opportunities with stocks at multi-year lows.

The ongoing chaos on Wall Street could hold an upside for vendors of risk-management technologies and practices, as well as sellers of compliance management products.

September 2008 will certainly go down as one of the blackest months in Wall Street history. Venerable financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG abruptly vanished or were radically overhauled. Investors lost loads of money -- in some cases, fortunes -- and ordinary taxpayers are now finding themselves funding an industry bailout that could cost a staggering US$700 billion, perhaps even more.