The SCO Group has been ordered to pay Novell Inc. more than $2.5 million in royalties in a dispute over the Unix computer operating system.

Wednesday’s award by U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball falls short of the nearly $20 million Novell was seeking. Nonetheless, SCO said it might appeal.

SCO originally brought a lawsuit against Novell in 2004 alleging slander of title. SCO asserted Novell hurt SCO’s business and reputation by denying that Novell sold SCO ownership rights when it allowed SCO to take over the business of servicing Unix technology in 1995.

Novell countersued for license royalties. Kimball ruled last August that SCO didn’t acquire ownership rights to Unix when it bought the licensing and development rights from Novell in 1995. That paved the way for Wednesday’s award.

Money problems will likely force NASA to abandon its ambitious internal goal of having a new moon spaceship ready by 2013, a top space agency official told The Associated Press Wednesday.

The agency should still be able to meet its public commitment to test launch astronauts in the first Orion capsule by March 2015, the official said, unless national budget stalemates continue.

But the agency’s own hurry-up plan to get the job done even earlier - with a first crew launch by 2013 - will “very likely” be changed during meetings this week in Houston, said Doug Cooke, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration.

“We’re probably going to have to move our target date,” Cooke said in a phone interview. An actual astronaut moon landing is still set for 2020. Orion initially will just orbit Earth before

The secret to finding the perfect parking spot in congested cities is usually just a matter of luck. But drivers here will get some help from an innocuous tab of plastic that will soon be glued to the streets.

The system uses a wireless sensor embedded in a 4-inch-by-4-inch piece of plastic, fastened to the pavement adjacent to each parking space.

This fall, San Francisco will test 6,000 of its 24,000 metered parking spaces in the nation’s most ambitious trial of a wireless sensor network that will announce which of the spaces are free at any moment.

Drivers will be alerted to empty parking places either by displays on street signs, or by looking at maps on screens of their smartphones. They may even be able to pay for parking by cellphone, and add to the parking meter from their phones without returning to the car.

Following through on a restructuring plan announced in May, Sun on Thursday laid off approximately 1,000 employees in the United States and Canada.

All told, the company plans to reduce its workforce by approximately 1,500 to 2,500 employees worldwide. Additional reductions will occur in other regions including EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. Reducing the number of employees by 2,500 would constitute a loss of about 7 percent of the company’s employees.

“Every part of the company’s staffing infrastructure was evaluated and reductions were made across all levels, including vice presidents and directors,” a Sun representative said Friday morning. The company declined to provide the names of these directors and vice presidents.

Sun has cited the economy as the reason for its recent troubles, which saw the company losing $34 million in the fiscal quarter that ended March 30.

A new type of solar panel that allows light to pass through it like a pane of glass has been invented by scientists who said that it is 10 times more powerful than conventional methods of producing energy from sunlight.

The discovery raises the prospect of using ordinary domestic windows to generate electricity with minimum structural alterations, although scientists have not yet worked out how much it would cost to convert a domestic home to a solar-powered generator.

Instead of coating the entire solar panel with solar cells - the expensive semiconductor devices that turn the energy of sunlight into electricity - the new solar panel works on the principle of concentrating the light, and the energy, at the edges of a pane of glass where it can be collected by the solar cells.

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston said that the “solar concentrator” is made from a film of organic molecules that can be coated on to glass window panes or other surfaces exposed to sunlight. This allows light to pass straight through the window even though it is being used to generate power.

It also means that the expensive solar cells need only be placed around the edges of the collecting area, so that there is little need to track the movements of the Sun for generating maximum power, as well as reducing overall costs.

Toyota Motor Corp plans to install solar panels on its next-generation Prius hybrid cars, becoming the first major automaker to use solar power for a vehicle, the Nikkei business daily reported on Monday.

The paper said Toyota would equip solar panels on the roof of the high-end version of the Prius when it redesigns the gasoline-electric hybrid car early next year, and the power generated by the system would be used for the air conditioning.

Iran’s parliament is set to debate a draft bill which could see the death penalty used for those deemed to promote corruption, prostitution and apostasy on the internet, reports said on Wednesday.

MPs on Wednesday voted to discuss as a priority the draft bill which seeks to “toughen punishment for harming mental security in society,” the ISNA news agency said.

The text lists a wide range of crimes such rape and armed robbery for which the death penalty is already applicable. The crime of apostasy (the act of leaving a religion, in this case Islam) is also already punishable by death.

However, the draft bill also includes “establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy”, which is a new addition to crimes punishable by death.

Those convicted of these crimes “should be punished as ‘mohareb’ (enemy of God) and ‘corrupt on the earth’,” the text says.

Under Iranian law the standard punishments for these two crimes are “hanging, amputation of the right hand and then the left foot as well as exile”.

The bill — which is yet to be debated by lawmakers — also stipulates that the punishment handed out in these cases “cannot be commuted, suspended or changed”.

Companies lose a lot more laptops than they disclose, according to a report published Monday.

According to a study of 106 major U.S. airports and 800 business travelers published by the Ponemon Institute and Dell Computer, about 12,000 laptops are lost in airports each week. Only 30 percent of travelers ever recover the lost devices. Nearly half of the travelers say their laptops contain customer data or confidential business information.

“It’s staggering to learn that up to 600,000 laptops are lost in U.S. airports annually, many containing sensitive information that companies must account for,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute. “IT departments must re-evaluate the steps they’re taking to protect mobile professionals, the laptops they carry, and company data stored on mobile devices.”

A French court ordered eBay Inc. to pay more than $61 million to a high-end fashion company Monday because counterfeit goods were sold on the auction site.

The fashion company, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA, is home to such prestigious brands as Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Fendi, Emilio Pucci and Marc Jacobs, and had complained that it was hurt by the sale of knockoff bags and clothes on eBay.

American Airlines says customers will be able to test in-flight Internet access on two flights beginning Wednesday, with broader service expected to begin in the following couple weeks.

Facing record high fuel prices, airlines are looking at entertainment and information services as ways to make a few more bucks per passenger.

American’s technology partner, Aircell LLC, will charge $9.95 to $12.95 for Internet service, depending on flight length. Aircell and American share the revenue, officials said.

The test will begin on one flight from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Los Angeles and one return flight, said Doug Backelin, American’s manager of in-flight technology. The test service will be free, he said.

The airline would not say on which flights it would conduct the test.

The Federal Communications Commission on Friday said it wants to auction a section of wireless airwaves to buyers willing to provide free broadband Internet service without pornography.

The agency asked for public comment on its plan to auction an unused portion of the wireless spectrum with the condition that the winning bidder offer free Internet access and filter out obscene content on part of those airwaves.

Successful bidders for the spectrum would also be required to provide coverage to at least half of the United States within four years, and to at least 95 percent of the U.S. population by the end of the 10-year license, the FCC said.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has laid out a schedule for the company’s much-awaited WiMAX deployment, which will now be launched in Baltimore in September. Washington DC and Chicago will also get coverage before the end of the year.

While Hesse was addressing NXTcomm his CTO, Barry West, was extolling the utility of their WiMAX network at the WiMAX Forum in Amsterdam, as reported by telecoms.com. He admitted that the original schedule has slipped. Despite having 575 operational cell sites the back office system has proved more complex than anticipated.

“I’m probably two months behind where I thought I would be,” said West, adding that the system now allows the company to “activate a device over the air under five minutes and set up a billing relationship with the customer”.

Amdocs is providing that back-end system, and Sprint will be hoping the company has improved since handling Vodafone’s upgrades.

Hardware to access the network won’t be subsidised, so punters will have to pay the true cost for the PC Card modems, USB dongles or Nokia N810 devices which will (probably) be the only things available at launch. But with Intel pushing WiMAX so very hard it will no-doubt be built into laptops by the end of the year.