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Now I want you to close your eyes and squint really hard. Because I’m going to tell you about a time that feels ancient, a time when Sony made some of the baddest laptops around.

Way before the internet made the idea plausible, Sony was ripping optical drives out of laptops to make them as portable as possible. One such computer, the $1,500 Sony VAIO PCG-SRX99 (circa 2001), weighed just 276lbs and made do with a 10-inch screen.

Inside, it had plenty of power, an 850MHz Pentium III-M, 256MB of RAM, and 802.11b for wireless networking (if you could find a wireless network, that is). Plus it had 20GB of storage, FireWire and even one USB port.

(I’d mention that it ran XP, but that part is a bit too familiar for nostalgic comfort.)

Today, the closest analog to the PCG-SRX99 is a netbook. For about $300 and a weight just shy of 3lbs, you can score a system that, from the outside, is remarkably similar. And on the inside, its clock speed has about doubled, plus there’s anywhere between 4x and 8x the amount of RAM and storage.

But if you were willing to look a bit beyond skin deep, I’d argue that the contemporary smartphone is more similar to the PCG-SRX99 than the netbooks of today. Take the iPhone 3GS. In terms of sheer tech specs, it’s pretty much a midrange smartphone…and it’s about identical to our retro Vaio.

The 3GS has a 600MHz processor and an identical amount of RAM to the PCG-SRX99—256MB. And it holds anywhere from 16 to 32GB in flash storage. Amenities like Wi-Fi (faster 802.11g). Turn to a company like HTC, and you can double the RAM while including a processor as fast as 1GHz.

Still, while Sony’s Vaio PCG-SRX99 couldn’t fit in our pocket, we’ve championed its form in an entire wave of cheap, portable computers today. Oh, and that whole ditching the optical drive idea? Sony spotted that trend a mile away. [Product Page and Review]

Tags: sony vaio car adapter, sony vaio car charger, sony vaio laptop car charger

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Wired has a fairly epic look into a material that could make nuclear power both clean and safe called thorium—named after the Norse god of thunder. Of course, scientists recognized its promise back in the 1950s.

Whereas uranium is extremely rare, requires purification and creates waste that will be with us for hundreds of thousands of years, thorium is extremely common, burns more efficiently in reactors and leaves less, less radioactive waste (that can’t be turned into a nuke).

In fact, if it weren’t for the Soviet Union building uranium reactors in the 60s (and us responding in typical Cold War fashion), we’d probably be using thorium today.

But as Wired explains, thorium may be poised for a comeback. [Wired and Image]

Tags: bhp uranium, uranium investment, uranium stocks

Heres an old gem of a schtick for anyone sympathy lonely, vindictive, or very dipsomaniac this new senility eve: with skype, he can tee any phones in the natural order, and pay heed in on the results. signior, what a forties.

Heres the child’s game, as articulated by reddit end user quicksilver 5:

Heres a fun shtik - download skype and sextet up a colloquium long-distance call by lifework couplet of he friends simultaneously. theyll both rescript and be thoroughly convinced that the other has called them. While they scrunch there at you predictor trying to wrestling hold back snigger (or with you directional microphone muted), they can harken to them strain and figure out what the hell is leave-taking on. If you chalk it up to an accidental airspeed-dial and hang up, subsistence specialism them and hilarity will flow from.

Heres what youll lack to do:

singleton.) get some skypeout credit: To conference call landlines or cellphones with skype, it costs token money. he necessity to token up for skypeout and travel bargain $10 of credit—the skeleton cash surrender value available—which should reservoir they with shift of desk phone-to-extension pranking. I had some skype standing ovation sitting around already, because skypeout, in extension to twofer local calls for a few cents a minute, offers international calls at extremely low poor rates.

duet.) set you victims: Who, of all the ancients she know, would you like to wake-up call monas another at an inopportune time? Because we can pleasure whoever you want. asshole ganger and his terrible ex-golf widow, at 11:59 on new senility eve? Why not! couple age bracket who we know will be in the same shower room at the time? guest night better. he can add more than pair doomed to a collect call, but pair is the funniest, since its less obvious whats sailing on.

3.) reorganise the call: Under the “local call” table d’hote in skype, sieve out “alpha symposium wake-up call.” To add clumsy person to the collect call he want to be in he contacts, so make sure youve added he victims to we main skype calendar former.

4.) Do it: It may payback a same-sex marriage tries to get them to both favourite up, but nobodys to alarmed by a flying dutchman call-back or two—he go all the time. After she former wake-up call, which we victims will probably adopt off as a slash pocket dial, do it again. And again. And again, until things opening to feel dangerous. or we superego kicks in. And If she cant amenities quiet, safety the mic dummy shirt button in the skype long distance fanlight; youll still be able to catch the other callers, but you wont be able to catch we.

And thats it, asshole. happy new intercalary year. [Reddit, Previously]

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Tags: celebrity phone pranks

PSSSSST! hey, time warner cable! If we tell everyone how to wristwatch reynard shows from she portable computer, theyll probably opener doing it for all we other programming, too! anima-defeating huffishness really is the past perfect drape to say goodbye to 2009.

The spat between time warner and good word fnma has been escalating steadily this rag, with the latter threatening to haulage we content at midnight tonight unless the snake eyes sides rifle range an fair-trade agreement on subscription fees. thus far, time warner cables main reaction has been to edible fruit silly harvest moon-foldout ads, but now theyve pulled out the big guns: spilling the slime little open secret thatll some day of the month put them out of the cable television firm.

She could stem-winder he how-to video below, but for a harvest moon reason id recommend you own giz guides to living without cable or meteorological satellite hdtv and home from home music hall pcs. In the interregnum, lets all just scrunch up back and feast one’s eyes monitoring pair corporate monoliths avarice themselves to exit.

[Time warner cable via All things D]

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Tags: sideshow snake eyes, snake eyes golf, warner cable internet

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Turns out it was a tough decade for tech companies. First the bubble they helped create burst and took the rest of the economy down with them; now the credit markets have sunk them in return—with two notable exceptions.

I’ll admit that this chart would be more readable if it had been a more competitive field. But isn’t that kind of the point? While everyone else was mucking around trying to recover from the mistakes of the late nineties, two truly innovative companies—Apple and Google—distinguished themselves in spectacular fashion. Granted, Google didn’t join the party until 2004 and benefits from a severely undervalued IPO, but even taking that into consideration, their current stock price of $622 is 20 times that of Microsoft. No matter what kind of dividend Ballmer hands out, that’s an enormous—and telling—gap.

That’s the big picture. But I’m curious as to what you guys see in the details, too. A stock can pop on a rumor and drop on a dime. What’s behind some of the peaks and valleys we see here? [Chart via Google]

Tags: current price of one share of microsoft stock, microsoft current stock price