Hewlett-Packard has trumped rival Dell’s bid for data storage company 3PAR, despite firing its chief executive Mark Hurd a fortnight ago amid sexual harassment allegations.

HP, which is being led by chief financial officer turned interim chief executive Cathie Lesjak, said its bid is “substantially superior” to its rival, and said it is ready to seal a deal once 3PAR’s board ends its takeover agreement with Dell.

The data storage company is so attractive to both computer manufacturers as it will allow the victor to expand their ‘cloud computing’ offerings, which involves providing remote storage in a virtual ‘cloud.’

Shane Robison, HP’s Executive VP and Chief Strategy and Technology Officer said in a letter that the new offer forces 3PAR’s board of directors to reconsider its previous merger agreement with Dell.

Most of us are now familiar with the heated relations between Adobe and Apple, especially after Apple’s strict move to remove support for Adobe’s CS5 professional software. Steve Jobs, CEO Apple has posted his views online about the relations with Adobe and the future of Flash and streaming media, especially on mobile devices.

The letter defends Apple’s claims about the shortcomings in the Flash player and how it’s not suited for mobile devices such as iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Steve has pointed out several defects in the product and compares it with the alternatives such as HTML5. According to Steve, Apple doesn’t support propriety web development software. This is because the close standards don’t allow community to bring changes in order to meet demands of user base. Thus Apple supports HTML5 which is both light and open-source. Steve also negates the claim that without supporting Flash, Apple users are deprived of the complete web experience. He claims that majority of the streaming websites including YouTube are supported on iDevices out of the box.

He further criticizes the performance and security features of the Flash product by commenting that Flash is both unsecure and requires high system resources which in-turn reduces battery timings of mobile devices. As compared to H.264 video standard which is hardware decoded on iPhone, the flash media only runs in software which requires almost twice the hardware resources, thus decreasing the battery life to almost half. Flash based applications such as games and utilities are not suited for touch-enabled devices, thus these applications fails to bring a better user experience.

Steve also comments on the company’s move last month to ban Adobe’s CS5 flash to iPhone compiler which will disable Adobe’s move to port flash applications onto iDevices. Apple claims that third-party applications are not optimized to run on the iPhone and proved to be sluggish. The intermediate layer also restricts the developers to make full use of the underlying hardware which results in poor application performance and value.

In short, Steve Jobs believes that unless Flash improves in the areas listed above, he doesn’t see it to become viable in coming years. You can read the complete script of the Steve’s letter here.

Apple announced the iPhone SDK 4.0 last week which will bring several new changes to the already rich API. Most notably, the new license agreement bans the porting of application from other platforms, specifically targeting Adobe’s Flash CS5.

Most of us are familiar with the heated ties between Apple and Adobe, and with the release of the new SDK, the relations will only worsen. Adobe is releasing the next version their Flash product, the Flash CS5 professional today that will bring many exciting features to a large base of developers. The flash to iPhone compiler is being regarded as the flagship feature of the new release. This will allow the developers to compile the flash code into a native iPhone application and bring thousands of already existing flash applications and games to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

However, Apple explicitly banned this porting from languages other than C++, Objective-C or JavaScript.

“Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs.”

Thus submitting any application on the App store that is ported from flash will directly violate the license agreement. According to Steve Jobs, CEO Apple, “Intermediate layers produce substandard apps”. This news is a hard blow for Adobe as well as the flash developers who were waiting for the new platform for months. However, Kevin Lynch, CTO Adobe has declared that the iPhone packager will remain a part of the new release. He further pointed that if anyone is stopping the developers from using this new feature, its Apple. There is also a possibility that Adobe might move to other hand-held platforms such as Android, which would bring it in direct competition with Apple.

It’s likely that the iPhone packager leaves some traces of the flash application code. However, it’s uncertain for now if the native iPhone apps and those complied by the iPhone packager can be separated. Anyways, now the ball is in the developers’ court. Either they can maneuvers over the new agreement or stay confined in the Apple’s boundaries for iPhone developers.