Dell’s PowerEdge division is developing a server optimised to run virtualisation software.

Virtualisation allows a single computer to run multiple operating systems in compartments called virtual machines. This both increases efficiency and reduces costs.

The technology can be combined with multicore processors which let a single chip handle the work of two or four single-core models.

However the technologies add software complexity, and require more memory, more hard drives, and increased complexity, all of which pushes up the price.

Dell’s new server will have two processor sockets, which with a multicore processor can provide substantial horsepower, and the machine will be rich in computing resources to cope with a high workload.

The server is expected to be released in the second half of the year.

Microsoft is closing newly launched ‘Soapbox’ video-sharing site, to bolster its defences against pirated content. Current subscribers will be able to continue using the site, but no new subscribers will be accepted.

Since a test version of the site was launched in February, Soapbox has filled up with unauthorised clips from companies such as News Corp and NBC Universal.

This would have been potentially very embarrassing for Microsoft which has entered into an online joint venture with News Corp and NBC, together with AOL and Yahoo, to provide a video network featuring content from major TV networks and film studios.

Microsoft has appointed digital-fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic to create a system to filter clips and prevent the uploading of copyrighted video clips.

Soapbox will be closed to new subscribers for up to two months, until safeguards against pirated content are in place.

Windows users with multiple security programs installed may be in for a rude awakening this morning - the latest update to McAfee Security Suite 9 won’t allow the software to work in conjunction with the free Zonealarm firewall.

According to McAfee technical advisor Bill Chapman, this is due to a software conflict between McAfee Security Security Center and Zonealarm - the result of which is that the McAfee software will shut down and no longer protect a users PC.

The solution recommended by McAfee is to uninstall both Zonealarm and McAfee - but reinstall only McAfee.

While McAfee is under no obligation to ensure its software works with other security products, the recent issue with Zonealarm represents a potential danger to consumers

Zonealarm is one of the most popular free security programs around, with over 60 million users worldwide.

Therefore those users who don’t notice that their McAfee anti-virus has stopped working could set themselves up for serious malware infections.

At present it is uncertain whether McAfee intends to correct the matter, or whether this represents a squeeze on competing security companies.

However, those users who find themselves forced to choose between McAfee and Zonalarm may wish to consider buying the Zonalarm anti-virus package instead - as it’s around a third the price of McAfee’s anti-virus product.

Digital entertainment provider Simply Media has entered into a partnership with JumpTV, which broadcasts ethnic television over the Internet, to provide international television channels to subscribers of ‘Simply TV’.

Simply Media’s new Internet Protocol set-top box, Simply TV, will provide JumpTV channels from Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Customers will be able to specify whether they want channels from particular countries or regions and will also be able to subscribe to individual channels.

Simply Media operates over 25 digital television channels, including 5 satellite channels, and delivers them via its web portal.

The company’s new IPTV powered set-top box will provide Internet television in an easy to operate format.

The Simply TV set-top box service will be advertised to ethnic audiences on and offline and customers will be able to subscribe on a monthly or yearly basis when they purchase a set-top box. Subscriptions range from £3.99 to £19.99 a month.

Simply TV plans to launch its set-top box product in the UK, in Spring 2007. The box is WiFi-enabled and works with any broadband Internet Service Provider.

It was announced in the budget that the government will begin to auction radio spectrum currently used by the Ministry of Defence in 2008.

A study of the spectrum allocated to the MoD will be completed in May 2008. This will identify how much spectrum the MoD can spare. A full plan for the sale of the spectrum will be published when the study is completed.

The government will begin to release the spectrum into the market later in 2008, with the sale continuing through 2009 and 2010.

It could be used by telecoms companies for a variety of services such as wireless broadband access or to extend 3G services.

Winners of the auction will be allowed to use the spectrum licences when the analogue signal is switched off region by region as the UK switches to digital television.

The auction will be monitored by telecoms regulator Ofcom.

Apple TV, which allows iTunes content from a PC or Mac to be wirelessly played on a widescreen television is now shipping in the UK following a one-month delay.

All types of content can be viewed, including movies, TV shows, music, photos and podcasts, via a wireless network.

Operation of Apple TV is easy with a simple and intuitive Apple Remote which works from a distance of 30 feet. The device works with most modern televisions and computers running Mac OS X or Windows XP.

Apple TV provides access to over 400 movies and 350 TV shows in near DVD quality; over four million songs; 5,000 music videos; 100,000 podcasts; and 20,000 audiobooks from the iTunes Store.

Apple TV includes a 40GB hard drive, allowing users to store up to 50 hours of video, 9,000 songs, 25,000 photos or a combination of each.

It can be easily connected to widescreen TVs and home theatre systems and can wirelessly auto-sync content from one computer or stream content from up to five additional computers to a TV.

The suggested retail price for the system is £199 (inc. VAT).

According to a new report from market intelligence company IDC, demand for laptops will overtake demand for desktop PCs by 2011.

Desktop shipments grew 2% to 138.3 million in 2006, while shipments of portable computers, excluding handhelds, increased 26.3% to 82.4 million.

The laptop market is expected to grow by 16.1% year-on-year until 2011, compared with only 3.8% for desktop PCs.

The trend may be due to an increase in mobile workers, improvements in the speed and efficiency of laptops and the increasing availability of wireless networks.

The roll out of Windows Vista is expected to temporarily boost demand for desktops in 2007 and early 2008, but the growth rate will then start to fall again.

Yahoo has launched an Internet search system for users of internet-enabled mobile phones.

The service will start in the US, but will be rolled-out to international markets later in 2007.

The service, called OneSearch, which was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics show in January, will focus on providing local information rather than just a list of web links.

To perform a search, a user enters a postcode or place name and locally relevant information will be provided such as news headlines, weather forecasts, images from Yahoo’s Flickr photos site and business listings.

The search results appear on a single page and are also sorted into categories to make finding useful results easier and quicker. Consumers can call business directly just by clicking a link on the web page.

Yahoo has started offering OneSearch on the 85% of existing US mobile phones with Web browsers and has also secured contracts with Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and LG Electronics to feature its Yahoo Go software, which includes the oneSearch service.

A ultra-fast computer which is 10 times more energy efficient than traditional computers, has been developed at Edinburgh University’s Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC).

The computer, called Maxwell, uses field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). The silicon in FPGA chips can be rewired for specific uses, increasing the computer’s speed by up to 300 times compared with conventional microprocessors.

Computers using FPGA also run more efficiently, more coolly and require less space compared with traditional computers.

Maxwell’s developers believe that the computer represents a new generation of compact and energy-efficient computers.

At the moment the technology is very difficult to program. This problem will be addressed over the following two to three years, when the technology could be put into commercial use. Intel is already exploring possible uses of FPGA.

Maxwell was developed by the FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance in a £3.6m project funded partly by Scottish Enterprise. It was designed and built by two Scottish businesses, Nallatech and Alpha Data with FPGA technology from Xilinx.

Leaders in the telecoms sector have joined to fond the Open IPTV Forum, which will work to define an interoperable end-to-end specification for the delivery of IPTV services.

The forum was announced by AT&T Inc., Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung Siemens, Sony, and Telecom Italia.

The Open IPTV Forum will be fully open to members of the communications and entertainment industries and will develop open standards which could streamline and accelerate the deployment of IPTV technologies. The standards will bring together current, diverse standards into one delivery solution.

The forum aims to maximise the benefits of IPTV for consumers, network operators, content providers, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and infrastructure providers.

The Open IPTV Forum will initially focus on architecture specifications and will look at protocol specifications later in 2007.

It will consider a range of issues, including the integration of content and communication services across mobile handsets and home devices; content protection; and interfaces to provide IPTV services over both managed network environments and the public Internet.

Adobe Systems is planning to release an alpha version of its innovative Apollo software on Monday.

The initial release is aimed at Web developers and programmers, who will be able to download a software development kit and ‘runtime’ software for running Apollo applications from Adobe’s labs site - labs.adobe.com.

Apollo is the code name for an exciting new tool which allows web developers to use their existing skills and tools in HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, Flash and Flex, to build and deploy internet applications on the desktop.

The application will run on Mac and Windows and a Linux version will be developed.

Applications written for Apollo function like normal Web applications but act like locally installed software. Apollo applications can be accessed with a desktop icon and will be able to automatically reconnect when a computer gets online.

Eventually, users will be able to download a runtime to their desktop PCs to run Apollo applications, just as they download a Flash Player to run Flash Web animations.

Adobe’s Creative Suite 3, which will be released this month, will allow people to create Apollo content.

Digital UK has announced that the UK’s digital switchover will start in Whitehaven, Cumbria on October 17.

On that day, the BBC2 analogue signal will be turned off, followed by the remaining analogue channels on November 14.

The two-stage process will be repeated region by region across the UK, with the process scheduled for completion in 2012.

Help and advise will be available to the 25,000 households in Whitehaven and the surrounding switchover area.

Letters explaining the process will be sent to every household and free digital equipment and installation will be provided to anyone aged 75 and over and those with certain disabilities.

Primary school teachers will also be provided with materials explaining the switchover, liked to the National Curriculum.

According to a 2006 report by Ofcom, 48.5% of the UK’s 60 million television sets are now connected to a digital device, compared with 39% at the end of 2005, while 77.2% of homes in the UK now have digital TV.

However, according to pressure group HDforAll, Ofcom’s plans means that nine million Freeview viewers will be unable to watch programmes in high definition. The organisation is calling for Ofcom to reserve spectrum for HD on Freeview and prevent the creation of a two-tier television service.

At the CeBIT trade show, Fujitsu Siemens outlined plans to eventually equip all its laptops with 3G.

Around 30% of the company’s laptops currently feature a built in 3G radio, but eventually all the company’s laptops will offer 3G by default at no additional cost. 3G models usually cost around £41 more than non-3G versions.

Fujitsu Siemens began producing laptops in the Lifebook ‘E’ range with built-in 3G/EDGE datacards following an agreement with Orange in January.

The technology provides high speed access to the Internet without the need to plug a separate datacard into the laptop.

Fujitsu’s latest 3G model, the Lifebook P7230 which sells for £2,054, also includes a conferencing camera. Fujitsu Siemens plans to enhance the model with a high-speed uplink, using HSUPA technology, this autumn.

The company also emphasised its focus on energy efficiency. It installs power-management facilities in all Fujitsu Siemens’ PCs, providing power savings of around 50% compared with business PCs on the market.

Communications company Vodafone is launching wireless mobile data transmission services with speeds of up to 7.2 MBits/s, at the CeBIT technology fair in Hannover, Germany.

The technology, which is based on HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access - a 3G mobile telephony protocol), will provide high speed mobile transmission of large data volumes for Vodafone’s customers in Germany.

The service will provide upload speeds of up to 1.45 MBits/second and will work over the existing 3G network in the country.

The fastest wi-fi mobile broadband download speed available in the UK is currently 1.8Mbits/second using HSDPA.

It has not been disclosed if there will be a UK rollout of the technology.

Google is changing its data retention policy, but privacy campaigners say that the company hasn’t gone far enough to protect user privacy.

Google currently keeps its search logs indefinitely - maintaining a permanent record of keywords used in a web search, the IP address the search originated from and information from web cookies.

Under its new policy, which will take effect at the end of 2007, the company will make the final eight bits of the IP address and the cookie data anonymous between 18 and 24 months after the date of the search. This will make it much harder to identify the individual or computer which carried out the search.

Information on some searches may still have to be retained for longer periods, due to legal requirements.

Privacy advocates, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research center in Washington, D.C., say that the retention period is still much too long and the policy needs to go much further to ensure users’ privacy.

Google is unwilling to anonymise the entire IP address, delete it altogether or anonymise any of it sooner than 18 months because it uses the data to analyse usage patterns, diagnose system problems, and to combat denial of service attacks.

According to a new report from Research and Markets, 80% of households with a computer will have broadband by 2010.

At the end of 2006 there were 16.6 million internet connections - 3.2 million dial-up and 13.4 million broadband connections.

The report suggests that consumers will become increasingly aware of the services available via broadband, leading to increased demand for faster connectivity speeds.

However, Research and Markets expects overall DSL ARPU (average revenue per user) to remain at similar levels until 2010, due to increased competition between service providers.

Research and Markets expects the increase in broadband connections to help increase the take-up of IPTV. However, because of popular alternatives, such as DTT, satellite TV and cable TV, IPTV uptake will remain relatively low.

Broadcaster Viacom, which owns MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures, is suing Google for alleged copyright infringement and claiming $1bn in damages.

Viacom claims that nearly 160,000 clips from its programmes have been displayed on YouTube, Google’s popular video sharing website which allows users to upload, view, and share video clips.

The broadcaster has requested an injunction to stop its material being uploaded to YouTube. It claims that clips from its programming have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

In early February Viacom asked for 100,000 of its clips to be removed from the site under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Google agreed to comply with the request.

Google is developing technology which will filter out clips that infringe copyright and expects to deliver it in the near future.

Intel has launched the Intel Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive – a NAND flash drive which it plans to deliver to PC and server companies as either replacement hard drives or performance enhancers.

NAND flash memory is more commonly used in mobile phones.

Intel’s new drive provides a low-cost solution for storing information in PCs for emerging markets and can be used in PCs or servers to help the operating system boot faster.

The drive comes in capacities from 1GB to 8GB and will cost around half the price of a low-end PC hard drive. It uses standard USB interfaces and has read rates of 28MB/s and write speeds of 20MB/s.

Intel is developing a separate flash memory technology, known as Robson, designed specifically for a laptop. It will be introduced along with HP’s Santa Rosa laptop technology which is expected in the first half of this year.

As part of its environmental focus, HP has released desktop PCs that will meet Energy Star 4.0 ratings - a new energy-efficiency specification for hardware from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

According to HP, three new Compaq PCs – the dc5700, dc5750 and dc7700 -can be configured to meet the new specification.

The regulations will take effect on 20 July 2007. In order to be declared energy efficient, a PC’s power supply must convert 80% of incoming electricity into usable computer power. HP lab tests have shown that this can reduce total system power consumption by up to 52% generating average annual cost savings of between $7 and $68 per PC.

HP’s new business PCs are targeted at companies and government agencies which sometimes employ thousands of computers across an enterprise, using high amounts of energy.

The dc5700 is priced at $800, and the dc7700 at $959. Both models include an Intel Core Duo processor, an 80GB hard drive, 1GB of memory, a DVD/CD-RW drive and Microsoft Windows XP Pro.

The dc5750 is priced at $609 and features AMD’s Athlon processor, 512MB of memory, an 80GB hard drive, a DVD/CD-RW drive and Microsoft Windows XP Pro.

247spares, the UK’s leading supplier of used and reconditioned car parts, has relaunched with a new website - and with a strong recommendation from leading TV motoring presenter Quentin Wilson.

It also adds a series of new video tutorials presented by Deal TV star Andrianna Christofi, to help inform people about the process of ordering parts and spares.

Formed in 1999, 247spares is the largest parts network in the UK and is still the fastest growing, with over 90,000 salvaged vehicles in its inventory. All parts are guaranteed, and parts are available for almost every model of car from 1985.

As Quentin Wilson states, 247spares plays a vital role in the recycling industry, taking quality parts and spares that would otherwise go to waste.

These are removed under strict EU safety and environmental protection regulations.

The parts are also usually much cheaper than bought brand new from car dealerships.

It’s free to use the site and you don’t even need to pay for a phone call - the whole process is subsidised by the industry and you have the option of being contacted when the required part has been found, either by phone call, SMS, or email.

The relaunched website makes it easier for visitors to locate car parts for their vehicle.

By simply entering in their car registration number and selecting the desired part or parts, visitors can quickly and easily find out what the availability options are.

The models available include Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Audi, Bedford, Bentley, BMW, Chrysler, Citroen, Daewoo, Daihatsu, Dodge, Ferrari, Fiat, Ford, Freight Rover, Honda, Hyundai, Isuzu, Iveco, Jaguar, Jeep, Kia, Lada, Lancia, Land Rover, Ldv, Lexus, Lotus, Mazda, Mercedes, Mg, Mini, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Peugeot, Porsche, Proton, Renault, Rolls Royce, Rover, Saab, Seat, Skoda, Smart Car, Subaru, Suzuki, Talbot, Tata, Toyota, Vauxhall, Volvo, and VolksWagen.

247spares has also launched a new motoring news section, in order to report the latest car industry news. Visitors can subscribe to RSS feeders via the feed link.