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What’s more, HP’s Netbook has a keyboard that’s just shy of full-size, meaning you can actually touch-type on it. (Too-small keyboards are one of my main gripes with Netbooks in general.) Even so, the 2133 measures just over an inch thick and weighs a mere 2.8 pounds. It comes with 512MB of RAM (enough for Linux), a 4GB SSD, an 8.9-inch screen, and a built-in Webcam. (See Amazon’s product page for full specs.)

In the market for a Netbook? Amazon has the baseline HP 2133 on sale for $299, down from $499. Right away that solves one of the HP’s main problems: its high price. Best of all, this is a new unit–not a refurb–and you don’t have to deal with any rebates.

Regular readers know I don’t really care for Netbooks, but $299 for an HP 2133 is mighty tempting. Show of hands: who’s pulling the trigger on this one?

Normally $499, the HP 2133 Netbook is now just $299.

The HP 2133 is the one Netbook I’ve actually reviewed, and I liked it well enough, except for two issues: price and performance. But my eval unit came with
Windows Vista and a $799 price tag; the model Amazon is selling has SUSE Linux and costs $299. By all accounts, Linux runs much faster on the 2133 than Vista, so it should be much more usable.

(Credit:
Amazon)

Jajah’s calling rates to and from the United States are about 2.9 cents per minute.

Under the agreement, Jajah will start providing the service for Yahoo’s “Phone In” and “Phone Out” features, which allow members to make calls to landline and mobile phones, starting in the third quarter of 2008. Yahoo’s telephony option is a paid service; Jajah will be responsible for processing the payments, and providing customer support and the network infrastructure.

Last year, Jajah introduced an option to let users place calls without using their computers. It has partnered with would-be rival Jangl to take on bigger voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) players like eBay’s Skype.

Yahoo announced on Tuesday that it’s no longer going to power Yahoo Messenger’s Internet telephony service with in-house technology: the company has inked a deal with start-up Jajah to replace its phone-to-PC and PC-to-phone communications.

Founded in Austria but now headquartered in Silicon Valley, Jajah has amassed 10 million users in two years of operation; Yahoo Messenger boasts 97 million users but has not released data on how many of them pay for premium voice services. Terms of the deal between the two companies were not disclosed.

Capital World Investors increased its Yahoo stake to 10.1 percent, when it bumped up its ownership to 135,542,600 shares, as of March 31.

That’s a 95 percent increase from its Yahoo holdings on December 31.

Yahoo’s largest institutional investor nearly doubled its stake in the Internet search pioneer, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.

One possible driver that led Capital World to double down on Yahoo is Microsoft’s megabillion buyout offer for the company.

This surely suggests that those who love Apple and Microsoft have utterly lost their minds to each brand. But when it comes to the loathing, they coldly find the most vicious yet factual criticisms to stir their negativity.

I only ask because when I watch Olbermann skewer O’Reilly on a nightly basis, I wonder whether he secretly covets his ratings. Or his salary. And when I watch O’Reilly, I wonder whether he covets Olbermann’s penchant for saying what he really thinks.

So the more rational reasons an Apple enthusiast finds to hate Microsoft, the more intense his (or her) hate becomes. (Might this, perhaps, be related to the entirely unscientific fact that there seem to be a few more Apple-loving Microsoft-haters than Microsoft-adoring Apple-haters around at the moment?)

The more I have come to know the two sides, the more their mutual stand-off resembles the kind of love-hate continuum embraced nightly by those two remarkably large-headed souls, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

“This may seem surprising since hate can also be an all-consuming passion like love,” Zeki told the Independent. “But whereas in romantic love, the lover is often less critical and judgmental regarding the loved person, it is more likely that in the context of hate the hater may want to exercise judgment in calculating moves to harm, injure or otherwise exact revenge.”

Love, it seems, is blind. Whereas hate has GPS.

Now, research led by Professor Semir Zeki of University College London may help to illustrate and explain the inflamed emotions that surround two mere technology brands.

(Credit: CC AndiLeBlanc)

Since embracing Incorrectness, I have noticed that the passion of those who love either Microsoft or Apple seems even to exceed a Goth’s passion for black eyeshadow.

Hate is more rational.

What Zeki’s interesting analysis doesn’t seem to cover, though, is whether hate for a thing, person or brand, given that it comes from the same cranial regions, actually reinforces love of another thing, person or brand.

Does hating Microsoft reinforce an Apple fanboy’s love of the brand that bore the
iPod? Or could the strangely close neuroscientific relationship between love and hate actually hide a reluctant and dangerous admiration for the hate-object?

Similarly, is it possible that Apple fanboys secretly covet something about Microsoft? And that Microsofties are desperate for some of Apple’s pips? What might be the object of their hidden, painful admiration and desire?

But here’s what the study, which involved delving into the darkest parts of 17 deep haters, suggested was the main difference between love and hate.

It appears that, although love and hate seem to be rather opposing feelings, some of the same nervous circuits in the brain are responsible for both emotions.

Microsofties and Apple fanboys, please examine your putamen and insula immediately and let me know.

The lovely thing is that the two radical heights of intensity both seem to involve two of the most pornographically named parts of the brain’s sub-cortex: the putamen and the insula.

AMD said Thursday that by the second half of the year, it will be ready to go with the massively parallel “Fusion Render Cloud” supercomputer. And where supercomputers typically are used for rather wonky projects in energy research, weather forecasting, and such, the AMD machine is intended to help in the “deployment, development, and delivery” of high-definition content–and this brings us back to CES–to mobile devices.

To deliver on that promise, chipmaker AMD is working with a company called Otoy that specializes in software and special effects for the video game and film industries.

Think video games and movies. Says AMD:

The Consumer Electronics Show tends to be about small gadgets, the kind that fit in the hand or a pocket, or at least don’t take up too much space on a desk or TV stand.

For Advanced Micro Devices, however, CES 2009 was an opportunity to talk about a supercomputer, the sort of high-tech machinery that even today tends to require at least a modest-sized room.

Cloud computing is one of the most loudly proclaimed topics in information technology these days. Although there are a number of interpretations of what it entails, the basic idea is that applications and heavy-duty processing live in some centralized data center, connected to via the Web, taking much of the workload off individual PCs and other devices.

The Fusion Render Cloud will use AMD gear including the Phenom II processors, AMD 790 chipsets, and ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics processors. It is being designed to break the petaflop processing barrier–in layman’s terms, to run with the fastest of the fast supercomputers–and “to process a million compute threads across more than 1,000 graphics processors,” AMD said.

The system is being designed to enable content providers to deliver video games, PC applications and other graphically-intensive applications through the Internet “cloud” to virtually any type of mobile device with a web browser without making the device rapidly deplete battery life or struggle to process the content. The AMD Fusion Render Cloud will transform movie and gaming experiences through server-side rendering - which stores visually rich content in a compute cloud, compresses it, and streams it in real-time over a wireless or broadband connection to a variety of devices such as smart phones, set-top boxes and ultra-thin notebooks.

Short clips have always been YouTube’s bread and butter, but with the company struggling to generate revenue, the Web’s No. 1 video-sharing site is experimenting with long-form videos.

YouTube has for a long time allowed several videographers with a YouTube director’s account to post videos longer than the standard 10-minute maximum allowed on the site.

Examples of clips available on the site that already surpass the 10-minute limit are an entire episode from Showtime Network’s The Tudors, a series about Elizabethan England, and a 90-minute comedy called Howard Buttelman, Daredevil Stuntman. YouTube was not immediately available for comment

The experiments with longer videos come as YouTube struggles to cash in on its huge audience. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said this several times this year, and lifting the length of videos means that YouTube may get a crack at full-length TV shows and films.

But the company now seems more serious about offering long-form videos more widely. During the Los Angeles Film Festival this week, YouTube began pitching independent directors about showcasing their work on the site, according to a story published Wednesday at the Web site of Fortune magazine.

In the last few weeks, there’s been a debate as to whether “he” or “she” should be used on my page with different volunteer editors taking opposite positions on whether I am entitled to use female pronouns.

In the unique world of Wikipedia, an article’s contents can be changed repeatedly. That means that on matters that are in contention (and apparently my gender is one of those), things don’t get settled but remain in flux. There’s only one person who absolutely can’t weigh in–the subject themselves.

And given that I am here in the nation’s capital this week for the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association annual conference, I thought it a fitting subject for this page as well.

Updated at 12 p.m. PDT with news that the entry is now up for deletion.

While I find it somewhat confusing to have to log in each day to see what gender I am supposed to be, I have found the debate interesting.

Update at 12 p.m. PDT: Well, now the entry has had pronouns removed alltogether–a reasonable compromise in my opinion. However, the post is now up for deletion. If it’s being deleted because I am not important enough for Wikipedia, that’s something I can deal with. But I’d hate to think it’s a matter of having a complicated gender.

After several days of being “he” on Wikipedia, I was pleased Thursday to see that my pronouns had reverted back to the gender with which I identify.

(Credit:
Wikipedia/CNET News)

Unlike in the journalism world, where the Associated Press Stylebook has a concrete answer on how to handle these sorts of things, there is no official “style” on gender matters or many other issues on Wikipedia. (Until a few years ago, one’s anatomy or legal status dictated AP’s assignment of pronouns. In recent years, though, the AP and other news organizations have adopted policies that transgender individuals should be referred to with the pronouns with which they themselves identify.)

WASHINGTON, D.C.–In the real world, I changed my gender from male to female a few years back and haven’t looked back. But on Wikipedia, my pronouns seem to be changing all the time.

But at the same time, the wave of
green-tech companies and initiatives formed over the past four years face some serious head winds.

Driven by these forces, many clean technologies are already starting to crack into the energy industry, which is dominated by huge corporations.

For more details and a list of some of the biggest stories in green tech this year, click here for my year in review.

For example, solar technologies, including solar thermal power plants and thin-film solar cells, are starting to be commercialized. Electric
cars, too, have come to market with many more in the works that target mainstream consumers.

The financial crisis is hurting green businesses, both small ones that need venture capital and more mature ones that need project financing. Without sufficient capital, many start-ups will have trouble bringing their technologies to market.

Consumers and business, too, continue to gravitate to all things green even in the face of greenwashing.

How bright is the future for green technologies in the coming year? On the whole, the picture appears positive but still susceptible to swings in energy prices and political sentiment.

A steady climb in energy prices over the past few years prompted consumers to shift to fuel-efficient vehicles and businesses to invest in energy efficiency. That behavior could change after the precipitous drop in oil prices caused by the recession in the second half of 2008.

The drop in oil prices makes many ventures, particularly those in biofuels, less competitive on price alone.

Meanwhile, some investors in clean-tech start-ups–the front line of energy technology movement–are starting to voice concern over how these companies are being financed.

With an incoming administration that intends to spearhead a comprehensive energy policy and reduce carbon emissions, many expect to have a favorable policy environment for clean-tech businesses.