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What ground Hewlett-Packard lost in recent months in revenue from personal systems - which triggered last week's surprise shutdown of webOS device operations - it has gained over the same period from enterprise products and services. Paying off in spades is 3PAR, the network storage device manufacturer that HP literally swiped from Dell's hands for a $2.35 billion purchase price. Last June's quarterly report pinned a big star on 3PAR, crediting it with turning the tide in storage revenue to 3% positive, quarterly year-over-year.

The keyword is "federation," which HP is invoking as a replacement for today's storage virtualization schemes.

Now, HP is making good on 3PAR's plan to rethink the infrastructure of storage networks. Today it announced new P10000-class storage systems, and a new class of storage management software called Peer Motion, which HP says utilizes both thin provisioning and peer-to-peer networking to shift workloads faster and more efficiently. The same peer-to-peer concept that eliminated the need for an administrative hub in home networking, is being put to use here by eliminating the need for a separate storage management appliance.

In a major victory for record labels and a major bummer for P2P file-sharers, the Gnutella-based download client LimeWire has been ordered to immediately stop distributing and supporting its software. U.S District Judge Kimba Wood handed down a 17-page permanent injunction today, and an announcement on the Limewire site shutters the site and the client no longer functions.

Judge Wood found earlier this year that Limewire had knowingly participated in copyright infringement "on a massive scale" after the RIAA, along with several major record labels, brought suit against the company. And while the RIAA wanted the site shut down then, Limewire was given a reprieve to build a new copyright-friendly technology.

Here's an idea for you: instead of slowly amassing followers, like on Twitter, or carefully culling your friends list over time on Facebook, making sure everyone is in their appropriate list and category, collect and dispose of friends like you ask for the time or a spare cigarette on a busy city street.

That's what Lokast, the self-described "disposable" social network lets you do - carry your throw-away lifestyle over into the digital world.

A new study commissioned by the European Union has finally proven what many have suspected all along: internet users don't want to pay for content. Period. And nothing is going to change their minds. The report finds, in a surprising contradiction to what industry executives have been spouting for ages, consumers' behavior has nothing to do with the peer-to-peer technology (P2P) that has given rise to all-you-can-eat systems for free downloads of copyrighted content. In fact, many people claim that they wouldn't pay for online content even if all other free options were taken away. This finding has dramatic implications for the future of business, and not just in the entertainment industry, either. If people won't pay for content, how will companies survive?

The EU-funded OpenKnowledge program is a smart toolkit designed to unlock the hidden resources of the web that can't be accessed by web sites and browsers alone. With a small, downloadable piece of Java code, users can coordinate and share information with each other more directly than through traditional means. To highlight the potential of the OpenKnowledge system, researchers have put it to work in three different areas: healthcare services, emergency management, and proteomics research.