Tesco USA to get 'world's biggest' solar roof

Los Angeles-based Solar Integrated Technologies has struck a deal with British supermarket chain Tesco to build what it says is the world's biggest roof-top solar panel installation.

Solar Integrated said on Friday it had won a $13 million contract to put solar panels on the roof of Tesco USA's new distribution center in Riverside, Calif.

"Our BIPV roofing system will... provide a fifth of the depot's power supply, and save 1,200 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year," Solar Integrated Chief Executive R. Randall MacEwen said.

"We believe this will be the largest roof-mounted solar installation in the world," he added.

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Back from the grave! AmigaOS 4 trialled

The Amiga is alive and well —sort of, and AmigaOS 4 was released recently. Ars Technica takes AmigaOS 4 out for a spin to see where the once-popular platform finds itself these days. I wonder if it runs The Secret of Monkey Island?

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Dell probes alleged Inspiron screen issue

Buyers have begun complaining that the displays Dell installs in its Inspiron notebooks may not be up to scratch, and a groundswell of internet users are asking the computer giant to sort out the situation.

Affected LCD panels develop one or more pixel-wide vertical lines. Typically, each line will appear as a single colour or will change according to the colour of the image being displayed.



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Netgear HDX101 200Mbps powerline Ethernet adaptor

It's a neat trick being able to transmit data around your home or office via the mains power wiring. You get a more stable, less interference-prone connection than Wi-Fi and a potentially faster link too. The downside is that there's no roaming, at least not beyond the reach of an RJ-45 cable and however many powerline adaptors you've got dotted around your house.

Just as Wi-Fi is due to get a major speed bump, with 802.11n, so too is powerline Ethernet. The difference: the 200Mbps powerline is here now, while the 380Mbps 802.11n isn't going to be ratified until later this year, though we're likely to start seeing a raft of standard... almost products come in the next few months.



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US tops spam relaying and malware leagues of shame

The US hosted more than one third of the websites containing malicious code identified during 2006. The country also relayed more spam than any other nation last year, according to a study by net security firm Sophos.

Sophos's Security Threat Report 2007 reveals that the US hosts 34.2 per cent of malware sample detected last year, closely followed by China (31 per cent of samples). Russia (9.5 per cent of malicious code samples), the Netherlands (4.7 per cent) and the Ukraine (3.2 per cent) are also contributing to the growing problem of the use of hacker-controlled websites to infect surfers. The UK ranked 19th in the chart, with UK-based website hosting 0.5 per cent of all websites containing malicious code.

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Asus confirms AMD ATI Mobility Radeon X2300

Asus has thoughtfully pre-announced AMD's next-generation mobile graphics chip, the ATI Mobility Radeon X2300, which the Taiwanese vendor today said it's planning to build into an upcoming Core 2 Duo-based notebook.

The laptop, the A8Jr, promises a "visual feast like no other", courtesy of its unannounced AMD GPU. Asus didn't provide any details, alas, but the X2300 is up to running Windows Vista's Aero user interface and uses HyperMemory to boost the graphics RAM available to the GPU.

The leak isn't without a quote from an AMD official, suggesting Asus simply uploaded the announcement a mite early. And to be fair, AMD's admitted it's working on just such a part, by mentioning the name in the most recent release notes attached to its Linux drivers.

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India's space hopes soar as capsule returns to Earth

India's space agency said on Monday an orbiting capsule had been successfully returned to Earth, marking a major step toward the development of a highly prized manned space program.

The capsule was blasted into space as one of four payloads on January 10 from a launch pad 60 miles north of the southern city of Chennai. It splashed down in the Bay of Bengal 11 days later, boosting plans for a lunar mission in 2008.

"(It) landed in the Bay of Bengal ... as per schedule. The mission is a great success," said A. Subramoniam, head of the team that designed and built the capsule at the Indian Space Research Organization.

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Caught in the Web: Top 10 Internet Scandals of All Time

The Web is a great way to deliver information, but it's also a great way to expose, spread, or jump-start a scandal.

A United States senator once said it, so it must be true: The Internet isn't a dump truck, it's a series of tubes. And many a reputation has gone swirling down those tubes, thanks to the Net's ability to expose scoundrels, scalawags, liars, cheats, and fools--and then broadcast the scandal to a billion glowing screens.

The Net's biggest scandals are nothing if not democratic, touching everyone from the most ordinary individuals to the highest office in the land. Not everyone deserved the notoriety. Some were hapless victims of privacy breaches; others were exposed by hackers or misguided crusaders. But in almost every case, somebody ended up getting fired, sued, or mortally embarrassed.

Here then, in descending order, are our picks for the 10 all-time biggest scandals on the Internet.

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Google turns a page on book downloads

Google is reportedly working on a plan that would allow consumers to download books to their computers to be read online or on mobile devices like BlackBerrys.

The Times of London reports that the program would be part of Google's Book Search project, which involves scanning and digitizing thousands of texts at libraries across the world. That project has had its share of controversy, as publishers and authors have charged it violates their copyrights.

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Porn's problem with HD: 'Razor burn'

In a fantasy world that makes an awful lot of real-world money, there's a new wrinkle that's posing a big problem. Literally.

Makers of pornographic movies are moving as fast as anyone to new high-definition formats, but some are also finding themselves in an ironic bind: In an industry built on people baring it all, the vivid HD images are just a little too revealing.

Wrinkles. Pimples. Cellulite. Surgically enhanced breasts with odd lumps. Those are some of the all-too-human flaws leaping off the screen from the skin of those in the skin trade.

"The biggest problem," an actress-writer-director named Stormy Daniels tells The New York Times in a story on Sunday, "is razor burn."

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HP to open lab in Russia

Hewlett-Packard is opening a research lab in Russia, a country that some believe could be technology's next major outpost.

HP's Russian lab will primarily concentrate on core IT issues such as data extraction, information management and utility computing. The country and its university system are particularly strong in computer science and math.

"We will tap into the analytic talent that is there," Shane Robison, an HP executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer, said in an interview. Recruitment efforts are beginning, and the lab will be located in St. Petersburg.

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Independent record labels sign Web distribution deal

Merlin, the new agency representing the world's independent music sector, has agreed to a deal with digital music company Snocap that will allow its labels' music to be sold from Web sites such as MySpace.

The group announced the deal at the annual MidemNet music conference in France, saying it would allow thousands of independent labels across the world to sell digital downloads of their music from their MySpace pages and other sites.

Merlin was launched on Saturday to secure licensing deals with emerging media such as MySpace and YouTube. The group said it would act as the "fifth major" in the world with a view to rectifying the "poor cousin" status of deals previously offered to independent labels.

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Sun servers heading back to Intel chips

Sun Microsystems is expected to resume using Intel's Xeon processors in its x86 servers, according to sources familiar with the situation.

Jonathan Schwartz and Paul Otellini, the chief executives of Sun and Intel, respectively, are expected to share the stage in San Francisco on Monday to announce a broad partnership between the two companies.

The first servers from the partnership will begin arriving soon--in the first half of 2007--and Sun also will sell Xeon-based workstations, sources said.

In addition, Otellini plans to endorse the x86 version of Sun's Solaris operating system, elevating it to the mainstream status enjoyed by Windows and Linux. That means the chipmaker will devote engineering resources to validate the software and help with hardware support such as support for chip power management.

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