McDonald`s serves up WiFi

Fast-food chain McDonald`s is about to launch free WiFi service across its 1 200 outlets in the UK, claiming this will make the company the largest provider of free wireless Internet access in the country, reports News.com.

The move is in line with McDonald`s strategy to shift the brand into a higher-end market, currently occupied by trendy coffee bars such as Starbucks.

The company hopes the WiFi service will attract more businesspeople into its outlets. CIO Ivan Brooks said the company expects its existing customer base to respond to the service too.

Google and IBM have announced an initiative to advance large-scale distributed computing by providing hardware, software and services to universities, says Information Week.

The companies aim to reduce the cost of distributed computing research, thereby enabling academic institutions and their students to more easily contribute to this emerging computing paradigm.

"Google is excited to partner with IBM to provide resources which will better equip students and researchers to address today`s developing computational challenges," says Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

Seagate Technology has released its first combination disk storage and flash memory hard drive, joining rival Samsung Electronics in offering hybrid drives that manufacturers say speed the boot-up time of PCs and significantly boost battery life, reports Information Week.

The Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD, which stands for "power savings drive", offers 160GB of traditional rotating disk storage and 256MB of flash memory.

Sony is the first PC maker to offer the new product, making it available in its Vaio SZ650, said Melissa Johnson, product-marketing manager for Seagate. Three other PC manufacturers also plan to offer products with the new drive, but Johnson declined to name them.

VMware has outlined its forthcoming Virtual Infrastructure 3.5, which includes an experimental feature to shut down servers if they are not necessary, News.com.

The feature, Distributed Power Management, monitors how hard servers are working and moves virtual machines to new machines to let unneeded servers be shut down. When workload picks up again, the servers are powered up again, according to the publicly traded EMC subsidiary.

Virtual Infrastructure includes two main components. First is ESX Server, the underlying hypervisor that lets a single physical computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously in compartments called virtual machines. Second is VirtualCenter, which lets administrators monitor and manage those virtual machines.