President Barack Obama's 2011 budget proposal, released last week, would flatten federal IT spending and require federal agencies to consolidate IT operations.

The IT budget is getting far less attention than the administration's plan to scrap NASA's program for a manned mission to the moon , but its call to implement the best practices of successful private-sector data centers could lead to a radical transformation of federal IT operations.

Microsoft is offering a second release candidate for its ASP.Net MVC 2 technology, which enables developers to build Web applications using a model view controller pattern.

Buying your next laptop computer or smartphone online could suddenly get a lot more expensive if a little-known U.S. Department of Transportation proposal to tighten rules around the shipment of small, battery-powered devices by air goes through, says an industry group opposing the move.

Chinese police have shut down what they called the country's biggest hacker training Web site and arrested three people linked to the site, local media said Saturday.

Police in the central province of Hubei began probing Black Hawk Safety Net after finding some of its members used malicious programs provided by the site to commit cyber crimes, according to newspapers including the People's Daily, the official paper of the Communist Party.

Leo Apotheker has resigned as CEO of German ERP giant SAP, the company disclosed on Sunday. The decision was by mutual agreement with SAP's supervisory board, and is effective immediately.

The U.S. EPA is wrapping up work on an Energy Star program for data centers that it hopes to launch in June, EPA officials said this week.

The goals of the program are to give organizations more incentive to improve the energy efficiency of their data centers, and also give them a way to track the results of efficiency projects over time, said the EPA's Alexandra Sullivan, who described the program Thursday at the Green Grid data center conference in San Jose, California.

Microsoft will no longer offer Linux or Unix versions of its enterprise search products after a wave of releases set to ship in the first half of this year, the company announced in an official blog post Thursday.

IBM's Lotus division has taken another stab at Microsoft Office, releasing a beta 2 version of Symphony 3.0, its free suite of productivity applications. Released Thursday, the beta is the first version of Symphony that is based on OpenOffice 3.x. Users have been asking the company to make Symphony's features more competitive with Microsoft Office, the dominant productivity suite among corporate users.

Oracle has rushed out a patch for its WebLogic application server, two weeks after a Russian security researcher posted details of the vulnerability.