Met Office: Invest in supercomputing to tackle climate change

The UK Met Office has called for increased investment in its computing infrastructure to enable it to maintain its leading role in climate change research. The weather and climate monitoring organisation's research formed a large part of the recent Stern Report, which projected a calamitous economic impact if climate change is not tackled. But, the Met Office says, much more work is needed if it is to fully answer the questions that policy makers and the public are now asking about climate change. ...more

SuSE announces 8.2

SuSE has unveiled version 8.2 of its Linux-based operating system on home turf at the CeBIT show in Hanover. Claiming to be Europe's most popular and the US's fastest-growing Linux distribution, the company is confident enough to be targeting home users with this latest edition. ...more

Full details of IBM e-servers released

IBM has officially released full details of the rebranding of its line of servers. Essentially, the term "eserver" will prefix a notional sub-division of its existing range of products. The most obvious change is that the AS/400 identity will be subsumed within one of a range of "Series". ...more

Microsoft betas Vista-bound WinFS file system

Microsoft has unleashed a beta version of its Vista-bound WinFS file system for Windows XP. Originally highlighted as a key part of Vista, WinFS was dropped from the launch version of Vista a year ago, but has now reappeared ahead of expectations, albeit in beta, on Microsoft's MSDN developer network. It's still not due as an official part of Vista until next year, however. ...more

Google Books turns a new page at Princeton University

Google has signed up another venerable institution, Princeton University in the States, to share the content of its libraries with Google Book Search. Google's controversial plan, to digitise and archive for search purposes all the world's books and historical documents, has advanced a stage further with another Ivy League recruit. It had originally co-opted four university libraries at Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Michigan, and these were followed more recently by the University of California, the University Complutense of Madrid and the National Library of Catalonia among others. ...more