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While Apple and book publishers may find themselves on the precipice of an antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department, filings in a concurrent civil class-action lawsuit obtained by BetaNews indicate that Apple has already admitted to two of the most damaging allegations in the case that the federal government is likely to include.

According to reporting Thursday by the Wall Street Journal, at the heart of the case is the agreement struck with publishers which changed the way ebooks are sold to retailers. This in turn caused prices to increase dramatically, critics argue. Apple is also accused of further controlling the market through a clause in its own contract for iBooks that forbade publishers from permitting competitors to sell books at a cheaper price than the iBookstore.

As I passed through the gates of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last week, it struck me that the protests outside served as a metaphor for a collection of conference keynotes that warned of the impending wireless capacity crunch. Neither had much to do with the sea of booths showcasing creative new data-intensive apps and ever-more capable smartphones and tablets. But sooner or later, both will prove to be disruptive to those who are trying to make a living selling the products on the show floor.

It only took a few days for the demonstrations along the Plaza de Espaňa to chip away at the exhibitors’ bottom line. The protests -- at first by public transport workers and increasingly by students objecting to budget cuts -- swelled from a curiosity into an impediment as they grew larger and more forceful. Traffic sputtered after police blocked the main entrance and forced attendees to exit out the back. Some left early. Others arrived later the following day to avoid the crush.

The days of having to pay to repartition your hard drive without data loss are long gone, and as time has gone on, partitioning tools have become more and more sophisticated, even for those unwilling (or unable) to pay for the privilege.

Take EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition for instance. Already one of the most fully functional free partition managers out there, version 9.1.1 has just been released, adding support for Windows 8.

Marginalized by bigger competitors such as Foursquare and Facebook, mobile location company Loopt was acquired by Green Dot, a major provider of prepaid banking services on Friday. The deal is said to be worth $43.4 million and results in the shuttering of Loopt's current service at an unspecified future date.

Loopt's technologies will be folded into Green Dot's own services. In a statement, Green Dot says Loopt's technologies will form the basis of its planned mobile wallet offering. Loopt's patent portfolio is also of interest to Green Dot, which includes technology related to mobile marketing through real-time location-based messaging. The deal is expected to close by the end of the month.

Shutting down your PC is normally a fairly straightforward process (unless you’re running Windows 8 , but that’s another story). Your work is done, documents saved, applications closed, so you just hit the Shutdown button and Windows takes care of the rest.

If some important task hasn’t completed, though -- a file is still being downloaded, or a video file rendered -- then life is a little more complicated. You can still have your PC shut down automatically when the job has finished, but you’ll need a little third-party help to make this happen. And that’s where Chameleon Shutdown comes in.

The question is really about the "new iPad" that Apple launched earlier this week. I say "Yes", for many people needing to upgrade their computers. Many of you will answer "No". Who is right?

The new iPad is a transformative device, extending on the disruption caused by the original model in April 2010 and its successor a year ago. The 2048 x 1536 resolution display is main reason. For many people, the new iPad will offer the best computer screen they can afford, and, if they get a 4G model, one that is always connected. New iPad is the poster child for the cloud connected-device era.

Friday's big U.S. news might be that more than 220 thousand jobs were added in the month of February, but not everything is as bright and shiny in the world of communications.

The nation's largest mobile network operator Verizon Wireless announced it will be shutting down several of its U.S. support centers and eliminating as many as 3,175 non-union jobs by the end of the third quarter of 2012.

Burning discs has become so fundamental to computing that practically every computer produced in the last decade has a disc burner of some sort built in. But in order to make use of your burner, you’re going to need some suitable software. Windows includes some very basic support for disc burning, but if you want to do much more than copy files from your hard drives onto a recordable disc, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.

The software that is supplied with CD, DVD and Blu-ray recorders is often complicated and packed with endless features you’ll never use. Ashampoo Burning Studio 2012 is a user friendly burning tool that strikes the perfect balance between ease of use and depth of features.

In my last article, "Microsoft, Metro takes our choice away!", I discussed the need for Windows 8 to better use the long heritage of the operating system, rather than try to be something so totally new.

As a Windows software developer I want to see Windows 8 do well on the market, but I realize that end users will dictate that outcome. There is a reason Windows, despite its ups and downs, has become the most popular computer operating system on the planet. It has provided a huge number of people so many choices that it allows them to accomplish many important things. This follow-up article is just one programmer's ideas about how to leverage this power and heritage to make Windows 8 even better.

CyberLink is a company that is synonymous with software that is incredibly powerful yet also incredibly easy to use.  When it comes to the arena of photo editing, there are a number of extremely high-end tools to choose from, and these have a tendency to not only be very complicated to use, but also restrictively expensive. The same cannot be said of CyberLink PhotoDirector, which includes all of the powerful tools you would expect to find in a professional image editing tool, but it is far easier to use than the likes of Adobe Photoshop.

We thought we’d let you in on a deal which will get you the latest PhotoDirector 3, which is retailing with a $149.95 MSRP for only $69.95, saving you a huge 54 percent. Read on.

Windows 8 marks the biggest changes to the operating system's user interface in about two decades. Windows 1.0 and 2.0 retained much from MS-DOS, while v3 brought a totally redesigned graphical UI. Microsoft took the world by storm with Windows 95, further refining the look and feel and introducing the Start menu. The following years and new Windows releases didn’t see major GUI changes.

Sure, Windows XP brought the slipstreamed taskbar and Start menu. Windows Vista added a few new menus, meaningful search box and desktop gadgets. Other changes included Aero Peek, and Previews on running applications. Windows 7 replaced the taskbar with the superbar, providing users more control over and visibility into open applications. For the most part the Start menu is the same as Windows Vista with no changes whatsoever. Windows 8's  new tile-like UI Metro does away with it all and where the desktop motif remains for legacy apps, the Start menu is gone. Why fix something that is not broke? After all it only took over a decade to finally get the desktop prefect.

With the domination of Apple's iPad, the Android-based tablet market has lots of mid-range competition, with different companies jockeying for differentiation.

Archos has a pretty big line of Android-powered tablet products, and today the company announced its G9 family of Android tablets will begin receiving over-the-air upgrades to Android 4.0.3 "Ice Cream Sandwich" today. This line is easily differentiated from the pack of Android tablets because they can be outfitted with a 250GB HDD, giving them vastly more storage than most Android-powered tablets, which tend to utilize flash-based storage and max out at 64GB.

The next version of Windows is nearly here. If you missed it, you can now download and install a fully functional pre-release in the form of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. We recommend following our recent guide to installing it in a virtual environment so your main system is left untouched, but once it’s up and running, what then?

Whether you plan to use the Consumer Preview to familiarize yourself with the next version of Windows, or decide to migrate across now, you’ll want to know how your apps are going to fare. Read on then, for our guide to picking the perfect software packages to help you with your exploration of the next generation of Windows.

Before his death in October of last year, one of Steve Jobs' last big moves was Apple's foray into electronic books. The company announced the platform in March 2010, but the method in which Apple handled its deals with publishers has caught the eye of regulators.

The Justice Department plans to sue Apple and the five biggest book publishers -- including Simon & Schuster Inc, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group USA, Macmillan, and HarperCollins -- and accuse them of colluding to raise prices of books. Apple is alleged to have struck an agreement with the publishers that allowed them to change the way they sold ebooks, and in turn allowed the publishers to take more control over pricing.

I just gotta ask. Apple launched the "new iPad" yesterday, with unexpected branding. It's not "3" or "HD", as rumored, just "new". Preorders started less than 24 hours ago, with the tablet coming to stores (or by FedEx to your home or office) on March 16th or 23rd, depending on where you live. Will you buy? Or perhaps you preordered already?

The new iPad's compelling feature is the high-resolution display, which is 2048 x 1536. That is better than 1080p HD (1900 x 1080). The models with cellular radios offer either faster HSPA+ or 4G LTE -- the latter of which won't be available from all carriers in all markets. Pricing is unchanged, as I expected. Apple typically offers more rather than sells for less. It's tradition. Prices range from $499 to $829. Is that low enough for you? Are the features compelling enough?