Greenpeace is pushing harder for cloud-computing companies to cut back on coal and tap into cleaner sources of electricity.

The environmental watchdog group today released its latest rankings of companies, including Google, Apple, and Amazon, that run giant data centers to serve up Web pages and services. Greenpeace now has a "clean energy index" to measure how much electricity from renewable sources is used by these companies.

Greenpeace has been pressuring cloud companies for years to improve the efficiency of their data centers, advocate for clean-energy policies, and disclose energy usage.

This year, Yahoo, despite its dire financial … Read more

Intel today announced the availability of a series of solid-state drives with a 60GB version selling for $89, the least expensive dollars-per-gigabyte drive to date from Intel.

The 330 Series use a SATA 6 gigabit-per-second (Gb/s), giving "consumers a more affordable entry into the accelerated storage performance of SSDs," Intel said in a statement. The SATA 6Gb/s interface doubles the bandwidth of its current SATA 3Gb/s Intel SSD 320 Series. … Read more

Expect the first of Intel's Ivy Bridge chip announcements on April 23, when the chipmaker will unveil its high-performance models, sources tell CNET.

The first Ivy Bridge processors will be quad-core mobile and desktop, an industry source, who is familiar with the rollout, told CNET. More power-efficient ultrabook-specific dual-core chips will come later in the quarter.

Ivy Bridge is the first in a series of upcoming Intel mainstream chips that emphasize graphics and multimedia processing over more traditional compute tasks. And most importantly for consumers, Ivy Bridge chips will power the wave of Windows 8 ultrabooks that will break … Read more

Google Drive could be available to Internet users as soon as next week, based on details that have leaked today.

Although rumors have been circling for a while, it was widely reported in March that Google would launch its own online storage and collaboration service, dubbed Google Drive, at some point in April.

That appears to be very true now, along with some additional details to sweeten the deal. For example, instead of the earlier expected 1GB of free cloud space, each user apparently will be getting up to 5GB of free space on Google Drive.

That actually makes much … Read more

Despite a weak economy and constraints in hard-disk supplies, PC shipments scored a gain of 2.3 percent last quarter compared with a year ago, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker.

Though nothing to brag about, the results surpassed the firm's February forecast of a drop of almost 1 percent.

IDC had anticipated a down quarter due to the sluggish economy, competition from mobile devices, and uncertainty about the impact of Windows 8.

The limited supply of hard-disk drives had some bearing on the industry but not as much as anticipated. Supplies have been constrained since last … Read more

Intel announced its first Atom chip for microservers at a major company confab in Beijing today.

The new Atom, codenamed Centerton, is a system-on-a-chip, which makes it even more power efficient than less-integrated older Atom chips.

Centerton's power envelope -- what the industry sometimes calls TDP or thermal design power -- is six watts. While not as low as the power envelope for Intel's smartphone Atom, six watts is still a lot more power efficient than Intel's more mainstream chips. Those have power envelopes of 15 watts or higher. To date, Atom has been aimed at small … Read more

Yammer is expanding its repertoire of file-sharing and collaboration services for businesses with the acquisition of OneDrum.

The U.K.-based startup brings even more social-minded work tools to the enterprise social network. OneDrum has developed a peer-to-peer desktop application that connects Google Docs with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), enabling users to be able to collaborate, co-edit and share these documents in real time.

Thus, Yammer will be able to boost its own real-time document editor feature, Pages, with desktop sync capabilities, enabling file folders to be shared across multiple users' desktops. Furthermore, new versions and changes to … Read more

IBM on Wednesday launched a new family of data center building blocks called PureSystems. The aim is offer integrated systems that have expertise to automate maintenance, anticipate computing requirements, and scale servers, storage, and networking resources as needed.

The idea of an integrated system isn't unique, but IBM's twist is that it will be more flexible with PureSystems -- four supported operating systems and five virtualization hypervisors -- and build in knowhow from its research team and services engagements.

"These systems operate with a single pane of glass, support multiple architectures, OSes, and hypervisors all with cloud … Read more

My wife works for our local school department as an IT support specialist assigned to the town's largest elementary school. Like many U.S. elementary schools, kids and teachers use a variety of personal computing devices, including PCs, notebooks, and now tablets. (Everyone wants to use these 'cause they're way cool.)

Keeping this veritable Noah's ark full of computing animals happy is more than a full-time job. There are more than 400 of them and they have quirks that give most of them unique personalities. If she comes home and tells me she had time for lunch, … Read more