Samsung trumps Sharp in LCD race

Sharp, which helped propel the market for liquid crystal display (LCD) televisions, is no longer the world's leading maker of the flat-panel TVs, reports USA Today. Rivals surpassed the Japanese company in unit shipments last year for the first time, say research firms iSuppli and NPD Group's DisplaySearch.

"This is a significant blow to Sharp," iSuppli analyst Riddhi Patel said. "While its market share had been declining, Sharp had managed to maintain a considerable distance from its competitors. However, this is no longer the case."

Both research companies found Samsung Electronics rose to the top spot, although they differ on Sharp's relative ranking.

The Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) has won a significant endorsement from Red Hat, CNET reports.

Red Hat, the dominant Linux seller, will include KVM - a new virtualisation technology that lets Linux computers run multiple operating systems simultaneously - in the next version of its hobbyist Linux version, Fedora, CTO Brian Stevens said.

The endorsement comes on the heels of another significant KVM achievement that bodes well for its adoption: Linux leader Linus Torvalds accepted KVM into the main Linux source code tree in February.

The energy consumed by data centre servers and related infrastructure equipment in the US and worldwide doubled between 2000 and 2005, reports InformationWeek.

A new study shows consumption is driven by users hunger for everything-Web, from video on demand, music downloads, Internet telephony and more, says the study's author, Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford University and staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Microprocessor vendor Advanced Micro Devices commissioned the study.

The spike in power consumption was also due to a number of other trends, especially the proliferation of "lower end servers" costing under $25 000 in the US and worldwide, says Koomey.

General Electric (GE), the company known for washing machines, wind turbines and jet engines, is putting its name on a line of digital cameras and photo printers, BusinessWeek reports.

The products will be sold worldwide with the GE brand, although they are being designed and marketed by a new company, General Imaging. The start-up will unveil the consumer gadgets at the annual Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas in March.

Prices haven't been announced, but the cameras will be available to American consumers in mid-April.