The grid that will process data from the Large Hadron Collider has undergone stress testing, with Cern and other organisations trying to gauge its limits.

The tests, called Scale Testing for the Experiment Programme '09, threw huge amounts of data around the distributed computing project, which uses dedicated optical-fibre networks to distribute data from Cern (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) to 11 main computer centres in Europe, Asia and North America.

The hot weather the UK has been experiencing in the past week or so doesn't seem to have caused too many headaches in IT departments across the country.

The latest silicon.com CIO Jury poll asked tech chiefs whether they'd taken any extra steps to protect their technology infrastructure during this week's heat wave, with nine of the 12 revealing they haven't.

Tests of the computing grid that will manage data from the Large Hadron Collider experiment showed the systems successfully handled large amounts of information, according to Cern

Airlines should scrap in-flight entertainment systems because they cannot compete with the thousands of songs and scores of movies that can be stored on modern media players, according to an aviation expert.

The pace at which airlines can update the selection of film, music, games and technology offered to passengers is being outstripped by constant advances in storage and functionality on media players, according to professor John Hansman, director of the International Technology Center for Air Transport at MIT.

In the future, your mobile phone could become your holiday concierge, reminding you to check-in the minute you arrive at the airport or automatically ordering a taxi for you when your plane lands.

It's a vision that airline passengers could see become reality within the next 12 to 18 months, according to Jim Peters, CTO at airline IT supplier Sita.

The company has also made it possible for enterprise and education users of Google Apps to share templates for documents, spreadsheets and presentations internally

June saw plenty of activity on the hardware and software fronts - including a peek at prototypes of a new kind of mobile gadget that's a cross between a smartphone and a netbook, from Freescale. The chipmaker was showing off so-called 'smartbook' prototypes at the Computex show in Taiwan. The design pictured above is intended for vertical displays.

Click here to see more smartbook prototypes.

Several vendors are racing to build datacentres that will enable them to offer more internet-based services to consumers and enterprises over the next 10 years

Considering hitting the shops at the weekend? Looking for inspiration? Check out the latest in our series of gadget mini-reviews, courtesy of silicon.com's sister site CNET.co.uk, the home of technology reviews. For the full review and details, click on the link below.

What is it: 10.1-inch netbook with long battery life

It is likely Microsoft will offer a "Family Pack" version of Windows 7, according to language in a leaked test version of the operating system.

This week enthusiasts started buzzing over wording in the licence agreement in the test build that suggests Microsoft will have an option to buy a licence for Windows 7 that covers up to three PCs in the same household.

A vulnerability in the way iPhones handle text messages could be used to track the location of the handset, turn on the microphone, or turn the phone into botnet zombie

Apple expects to have a fix later this month for a vulnerability in the iPhone that could allow an attacker to gain control of the device remotely via SMS, a security researcher said on Thursday.

An attacker could exploit a weakness in the way iPhones handle SMS messages to do things like use GPS to track the phone's location, turn on the microphone for eavesdropping, or take control of the device and add it to a botnet, Charlie Miller, co-author of The Mac Hacker's Handbook and principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, said in a presentation at the SyScan conference in Singapore. The presentation was covered by IDG News Service.