SAN FRANCISCO, June 1 (UPI) — A strategic pact between California’s DRI Energy and Fat Spaniel Technologies offers a one-stop solution for builders and building owners seeking solar roofs.

DRI Energy, a California provider of roof integrated solar energy installation services, and Fat Spaniel Technologies, a provider of critical information services for distributed energy generation systems, announced Thursday the new partnership at the kickoff of the 2007 Pacific Coast Builders Conference in San Francisco.

Pacific Coast Builders Conference is considered the premier annual gathering for the West Coast’s leading architects, designers, builders, contractors, suppliers and other industry professionals.

“Fat Spaniel Technologies offers the most comprehensive solution on the market for metering and monitoring solar energy systems,” said Timothy Davey, DRI Companies’ chief executive officer. “By coupling Fat Spaniel’s Web view with DRI’s turnkey solar installation services and our Lumeta line of highly aesthetic, roof integrated solar products, we’re offering a high-value solution to our customers: an attractive solar-powered roof and a Web-based monitoring system that makes the most of the clean energy it produces. It’s a perfect fit.”

DRI Energy, a subsidiary of DRI Companies, designs and builds roof integrated solar power systems for commercial and residential roofs. DRI Companies is also the provider of the Lumeta line of Roof Integrated Photovoltaics, including the Solar S Tile — the first solar powered version of the popular roofing tile product.

The Fat Spaniel energy monitoring system provides a simple, accurate Web view of solar energy system performance. The data is used by system installers to schedule service visits and optimize the installation for peak performance, and by owners to track and display solar energy generation and usage.

LOS ANGELES: Time was, a movie studio could pack up a picture and all of its assorted bloopers, alternate takes and other odds and ends as soon as the production staff was done with them, and ship them off to the salt mine. Literally.

Having figured out that really big money came from reselling old films - on broadcast television, then cable, videocassettes, DVDs, and so on - companies like Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures and their brethren for decades had been tucking their 35-millimeter film masters and associated source material into archives, some of which were housed in a Kansas salt mine, or in limestone mines in Kansas and Pennsylvania.

A picture could sit for many, many years, cool and comfortable, until some enterprising executive decided that the time was ripe for, say, a Wallace Beery special collection timed to a 25th-anniversary 3-D re-release of “Barton Fink,” with a hitherto unseen, behind-the-scenes peek at the Coen brothers trying to explain a Hollywood in-joke to John Turturro.

It was a file-and-forget system that did not cost much, and made up for the self-destructive sins of an industry that discarded its earliest works or allowed films on old flammable stock to degrade. Indeed, only half of the feature films shot before 1950 survived.

But then came digital. And suddenly, the film industry was wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, were not as durable as they used to be.

The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the councils report surfaced just as the Hollywood writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the reports startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.

Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” - that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film - pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault.

All of this may seem counterintuitive. After all, digital magic is supposed to make information of all kinds more available, not less. But ubiquity, it turns out, is not the same as permanence.

Milton Shefter, a longtime film preservationist who helped prepare the academys report, said the problems associated with digital movie storage, if not addressed, could point the industry “back to the early days, when they showed a picture for a week or two, and it was thrown away.”

Shefter and his associates do not contend that films are actually on the verge of becoming quite that ephemeral. But they do see difficulties and trends that could point many movies or the source material associated with them toward “digital extinction” over a relatively short span of years, unless something changes.

At present, a copy of virtually every studio movie - even those like “Click” or “Miami Vice” that are shot using digital processes - is being stored in film format, protecting the finished product for 100 years or more. For film aficionados, the current practice is already less than perfect. Regardless of how they are shot, most pictures are edited digitally, and then a digital master is transferred to film, which can result in an image of lower quality than a pure film process - and this is what becomes stored for the ages.

But over the next couple of decades, archivists reason, the conversion of theaters to digital projection will sharply reduce the overall demand for film, eventually making it a sunset market for the main manufacturers, Kodak, Fujifilm and Agfa. At that point, pure digital storage will become the norm, bringing with it a whole set of problems that never troubled film.

To begin with, the hardware and storage media - magnetic tapes, disks, whatever - on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: According to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.

NEW YORK: Imagine a television set so thin that you could roll it up and carry it in your briefcase. It is not as far off as you might think.

Sony is selling a futuristic TV in Japan that is only about an eighth of an inch, or just over 3 millimeters, thick. The new televisions, which have begun arriving in Japanese stores, have an 11-inch screen and cost 200,000, or almost $1,800, according to Jon Reilly, a product marketing manager at Sony Electronics.

The sets replace the bulky backlighting of typical LCD televisions with a thin film that glows with colors even when viewed from the side. Sony announce the United States release date and pricing in January, Reilly said.

The Sony TV, called the XEL-1, owes its saturated colors and superlative slimness to the emerging technology of organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs.

OLED displays are produced not by the fluorescent bulbs of LCDs, but by organic chemicals deposited on film that shine brilliantly when a current passes through them.

The Sony sets are the first mass-produced flat-panel TVs in the world to use this technology, said Paul Semenza, vice president for display research at iSuppli, a market research firm in El Segundo, California. Other companies have shown prototypes of TVs. Smaller OLED panels are in use in some cellphones and portable video players.

OLEDs could produce extraordinary displays, Semenza said. “The thinness and visual quality are stunning,” he said.

But, he said, OLEDs posed no imminent threat to the increasing popularity of LCD televisions.

“LCD manufacturers have tens of billions of dollars invested in the current process,” he said, and that money could lead to LCDs with thinner profiles and crisper images that crowded out OLED competitors.

“LCDs are growing fast, and basically taking over the market,” he said. About 76 million LCD televisions will be sold worldwide this year, and about 99 million next year, iSupply predicts. By 2011, sales of 165 million LCD sets are forecast. In contrast, he said, only about 13,000 of the new OLED televisions will be sold in 2008.

Consumers could buy a 50-inch LCD television for about the same price as the much smaller Sony OLED, he said, largely because of engineering yields, the percent of sets that come off the manufacturing line ready for use.

But OLEDs may gradually become more popular, said Paul Gagnon, an analyst at DisplaySearch, a market research firm in Austin, Texas.

“Theres speculation that beyond 2015, OLEDs could advance to become a creditable threat to the LCD flat-panel business,” he said.

OLEDs have technical advantages. LCDs typically use white light filtered into primary colors and remixed.

“You lose some of the breadth of the color spectrum that you see in the natural world,” Semenza said. “but OLEDs, depending on the materials and processes, produce highly saturated individual colors that are then combined to make this broad color spectrum and wide viewing angle.”

OLEDs also have the potential to be produced cheaply. “The materials emit their own light,” he said, “so you dont need the back or side lights of LCDs, or theoretically all of the color filters.”

Small OLED panels were already starting to catch on in mobile displays in Asia, said Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media, a market research firm in Norwalk, Connecticut.

“The OLED displays on mobile phones have the same advantages as the TV - wide viewing angles, great colors and thinness,” he said. “All of those factors are very attractive if you are going to run TV and video on cellphones.”