Hardware: Claiming its new BladeCenter system can perform like a supercomputer, IBM has started selling the first machine based on its multicore Cell processor. The QS20, naturally, is aimed at companies with compute-intensive tasks, such as oil exploration, medical imaging, or digital animation. Ongoing: A spokesman for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer says that the state has enough evidence to formally charge people within HP and outside contractors in the pretexting scandal that has rocked the company enough to create a shakeup among the highest ranks. App dev: Microsoft and Sun might be bitter rivals — and nowhere more so than in the Java vs. .Net development trenches — but “a bid for peace for between two warring camps” has been thrown down in the form of IronPython and Sun’s hiring Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter, maintainers of JRuby, the JVM-based Ruby implementation. All of which leads Jon Udell to ask in this week’s installment of Strategic Developer, “Can’t we all just play nicely together?” The news beat: Business Objects states intentions to buy ALG Software for its corporate performance management wares. Skype taps video calling to bridge Macs and PCs in the new Skype for Mac 2.0 beta. And Sun teams up with Accenture on identity-enabled SOA in a deal that will see the companies create a center for developing custom services. Technology Industry