When the company dumped a press release on our desk saying that it would be opening a new data centre in Cheyanne, Wyoming it did not mention that its cloud will be similar to the one which was created by our dog.

The Data Plant will be the software giant's first zero carbon data centre and will rely on human and animal waste er... bi-products to provide its back end with lecky.

Writing in his bog, Sean James, Microsoft's senior research program manager for data centre advanced development, said the company has been committed to getting to the bottom of more efficient and sustainable data centre infrastructures since 1994. The post said that Microsoft is taking another step in that journey [surely it is sitting down, ed].

The new plant will be operated out of the Dry Creek Water Reclamation Facility, or a sewer as the rest of us know it.

It will convert the waste to bio gas extracted from wastewater treatment plants, farms, landfills and rest homes for the elderly.

James said that by capturing and reusing biogas on premise with its data centres, Microsoft will be able to significantly reduce its carbon emissions while producing beneficial uses at the same time.

Only time will tell if this proves yet another Ballmer sewercide business plan or will flush Microsoft's bottom line with success.

The company also indicated that it will donate to the Apache Software Foundation for software development and app porting.

According to Slashdot  Dell's "Zinc" servers run on the Calxeda EnergyCore chip.

This is an ARM-based processor tailored for use in data centres running specialised workloads. Dell's earlier effort, dubbed "Copper" was released in May. Neither is commercially available and Dell says it would bring the hardware to market at an "appropriate time".

It looks like Michael thinks that the ARM-based server market is approaching an inflection point when it will start to make inroads into the x86 market.

While it might not want product on the shelves right now, it would be the right time to foster development and testing of operating systems and applications for ARM servers.

Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager for Server Solutions at Dell, wrote in a statement that Dell is working hand-in-hand with the community to develop and test workloads for leading-edge hyperscale environments.

Dell recognises, he said, the market potential for ARM servers, and with its experience and understanding of the market, is enabling developers with systems and access as the ARM server market matures.

Support by Dell gives backing to Calxeda, which unveiled its roadmap to 64-bit ARM processors through 2014.

Dell's Copper system used Marvell chips, and involved partners Canonical and Clouderag. Dell is also staging clusters of the Dell "Copper" ARM server within the Dell Solution Centres. 

Researchers working at the RMIT University in Melbourne have successfully used piezoelectrics, which converts pressure into an electric current.

Mixing this with a thin film technology found in microchips, they think they have come up with a way to make laptops self-powered, says PC Authority.

The idea is still under testing to see if it is practical for low-cost laptop integration, but according to Dr Mandu Bhaskaran, co-author of the research, the development taps all the right keys.

Of course, if you don't do much typing you could see your laptop run out of power quite quickly. It would encourage companies to buy these keyboards to make sure their users are always typing.

Still, the company will not know if you are using the computer to type emails to your mates, so it might not be such a big work enhancer.

The biggest challenge will be to get the power demands of computer chips down to be able to use the technology.

Despite the best efforts of chipmakers, the power drain for chips is still too high for this sort of technology.

However, the team has come up with other ideas for devices. These include integrating it into running shoes to charge mobiles - or as a power source for pacemakers. Rather like this.

A tablet is the chocolate teapot of IT at the best of times and the bigger it is, the more potentially useless it could be. Having a keyboardless netbook that is the same size as a monitor really takes the biscotti, as they say in Rome.

Needless to say that has not stopped Lenovo, which thinks it can mirror Jobs' Mob's success by having a tablet that is bigger than anything he could dream up.

Senior marketing specialist William Cai told TechRadar  that Lenovo has to work out the battery problems for such a mega device. With a screen that large you would probably go through your battery by the time you have booted up.

Then there is the small matter of needing to be the Incredible Hulk to be able to carry it.

"It's obviously not for full mobility use, but it could be moved from room to room in the house and used with a full keyboard, or as a television," he said.

Then he suggested the first decent use of a tablet we have heard of.

"You could lay it on a table top and use it for family games," he suggested. We don't think he meant Twister, and practising creating families is a great game for two. In the tablet market we have mostly seen Steve Jobs using the tablet for family games with his customers.

To be fair to Lenovo it sounds a lot like a more portable version of Microsoft's Surface computer. If it is , then it will cost an arm a leg and there will probably be cheaper ways to play family games.

However it also seems to be a low powered version of an all in one PC, which on the face of it would be a less portable, better bet.

It supports the new SATA 6 GB/s interface thanks to its server grade Marvell 88SS9174 control chip alongside NCQ. The SSD M2S also features a 128 MB DDR cache buffer and, so claims Plextor, has a one-of-a-kind algorithm to manage memory blocks and keep reading errors reduced.

Next to its bad block algorithm, it also makes sure data is written into memory blocks uniformly.

This is supposed to increase the SSD's life span, while keeping it from slowing down after its been in service for a longer period. The amount of memory wipe-outs is also apparently decreased. Needless to say, it also supports Windows 7 TRIM command.

Continental punters will be happy to know the SSD M2S will be launched in the next couple of days in Germany and Austria and will be available from Alternate.de.

It comes with capacities of 64 GB (€169.90), 128 GB (€299.90) and 256 GB (€589). Sequential read speed varies from up to 370 MB/s to 480 MB/s, depending on size. Plextor says it offers a three year warranty in the EU, Switzerland and Norway, defect SSDs will be replaced within five days.

The name was trademarked with the US Patent and Trademark Office last week and was discovered on BNet.

We initially wondered if Google was planning to rename its rumoured upcoming attempt at social networking, Google Me, to Speedbook. As a kind of middle finger up to Facebook over its recent lawsuit against teaching community TeachBook.

But that was just a flight of fancy on our part. The category Google filed the “Speedbook” trademark in was “computer hardware” - which gives a pretty big hint at what it might be planning to use the name for.

The Chrome OS is a fast-boot Linux-based operating system which gives the bear necessities for getting online - offering a faster boot-up time and overall experience. Given the super-fast speeds Google is saying Chrome OS will deliver, it seems just about right that it may plump for “Speedbook” as a name for its range.

Google has already confirmed that it plans to release the Chrome OS in Autumn of 2010. There has been speculation that it will target the netbook market first before going for tablets, letting its Android OS take the fight to the tablet market instead.

Acer is rumoured to be the first company that will deliver a Chrome OS device, with some early speculation that it would have released a netbook as early as June. This was quashed by Acer, but we're half holding our breath and expecting it to ship a Chrome netbook some time this year.

Dell also signed a partnership with Google to deliver Chrome OS on a range of laptops, suggesting that it will have a broader market than just netbooks. Given how stripped down we hear Chrome is in comparison to Windows it could be a limiting experience.

The truth is we don't really know. It's not clear if either of these third-party devices will utilise the “Speedbook” name. The fact that Google has trademarked it suggests that it may attempt a foray into the hardware market as it did in the mobile sector with the Nexus One.

The smartphone was technically good and received positive reviews but poor marketing led to poorer sales until finally it was rebranded as a developer phone. 

Google didn't make the phone itself - it teamed up with HTC. We wonder then, if a netbook is on the way, who it might team up with for its Google Speedbook offering. Acer is a likely candidate.

That said, in early July Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that Google most likely won't need to launch its own Chrome device. Circumstances may have changed since then. There could be a surprise product launch some time soon.