Get it? Get it?? Yeah, I bet you got it. [tumblr via tumblr via Super Punch]

Dear 2009, thank you for all the stories, the good and the bad ones. Here are the top 10 most popular articles. Now we have to say good bye forever, because 2010 and the new decade are here. So long!

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 2.76lbs 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]

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]

Here's an old gem of a trick for anyone feeling lonely, vindictive, or very drunk this New Year's Eve: with Skype, you can connect any phones in the world, and listen in on the results. Man, what a decade.

Here's the game, as articulated by Reddit user quicksilver 5:

Here's a fun trick - download Skype and set up a conference call by calling two of your friends simultaneously. They'll both answer and be thoroughly convinced that the other has called them. While you sit there at your computer trying to hold back laughter (or with your microphone muted), you can listen to them try and figure out what the hell is going on. If they chalk it up to an accidental speed-dial and hang up, keep calling them and hilarity will ensue.

Here's what you'll need to do:

1.) Get some SkypeOut credit: To call landlines or cellphones with Skype, it costs money. You need to sign up for SkypeOut and buy $10 of credit—the minimum amount available—which should supply you with hours of phone-to-phone pranking. I had some Skype credit sitting around already, because SkypeOut, in addition to offering local calls for a few cents a minute, offers international calls at extremely low rates.

2.) Choose your victims: Who, of all the people you know, would you like to call one another at an inopportune time? Because you can pick whoever you want. Asshole boss and his terrible ex-wife, at 11:59 on New Year's Eve? Why not! Two people who you know will be in the same room at the time? Even better. You can add more than two people to a call, but two is the funniest, since it's less obvious what's going on.

3.) Organize the call: Under the "Call" menu in Skype, select "Start conference call." To add someone to the call they need to be in your contacts, so make sure you've added your victims to your main Skype list first.

4.) Do it: It may take a couple tries to get them to both pick up, but nobody's to alarmed by a phantom call or two—they happen all the time. Their caller ID will read "Unknown" or "Private." After your first call, which your victims will probably write off as a pocket dial, do it again. And again. And again, until things start to feel dangerous. or your conscience kicks in. If you can't keep quiet, hit the mic mute button in the Skype call window; you'll still be able to hear the other callers, but they won't be able to hear you.

And that's it, asshole. Happy new year. [Reddit, Previously]

PSSSSST! Hey, Time Warner Cable! If you tell everyone how to watch Fox shows from their PC, they'll probably start doing it for all your other programming, too! Self-defeating bitterness really is the perfect way to say goodbye to 2009.

The spat between Time Warner and News Corp has been escalating steadily this week, with the latter threatening to pull their content at midnight tonight unless the two sides reach an agreement on subscription fees. Thus far, Time Warner Cable's main response has been to produce silly full-page ads, but now they've pulled out the big guns: spilling the dirty little secret that'll some day put them out of the TV business.

You could watch their how-to video below, but for a full explanation I'd recommend our own Giz guides to living without cable or satellite TV and to home theater PCs. In the meantime, let's all just sit back and enjoy watching two corporate monoliths greed themselves to death.

[Time Warner Cable via All Things D]

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]

The Internet offers an endless stream of cool pictures, but here's a look at the best we've come across this year. Inside you'll find images that amaze and amuse.

Though #imagecache has only been around since March, we've collected some incredible images in these last nine months. Click through to the original posts for hi-resolution images and more information.

Or, as they call it, a "3D bio-printer." Essentially, it allows scientists to build tissue cell by cell. It's that cool sci-fi medical stuff we all dream about.

"Scientists and engineers can use the 3D bio printers to enable placing cells of almost any type into a desired pattern in 3D," Murphy said. "Researchers can place liver cells on a preformed scaffold, support kidney cells with a co-printed scaffold, or form adjacent layers of epithelial and stromal soft tissue that grow into a mature tooth. Ultimately the idea would be for surgeons to have tissue on demand for various uses, and the best way to do that is get a number of bio-printers into the hands of researchers and give them the ability to make three dimensional tissues on demand."

The system includes software that enables engineers to build a model of the tissue before layering cells with laser-calibrated print heads. So, it seems pretty similar to a standard 3D model printer. Hopefully, most of us will live to see the day when we can have new hearts and livers printed on demand. That would be handy. Teeth would be great in the short term too. That whole Polygrip lifestyle where corn cobs and apples could lead to disaster does not seem appealing. [Livescience]

Every year product life cycles in the consumer marketplace grow ever shorter. On the audio side, the latest and greatest receivers become yesterday's news faster than you can say "HDMI 1.4."

Speaker companies show a little more restraint and "refresh" their lines every few years, but even then new models rarely demonstrate actual performance improvements over the previous generations' models. Speaker manufacturer Magnepan doesn't play by those rules; it invests years of development in each of its models before introducing a new speaker. It has to sound better—a lot better—than the outgoing model before it's released to the world.

And not just in the opinion of the designers. New-model Magnepans undergo extensive "blind" listening tests with a wide range of audiophile and non-audiophile listeners (the listeners don't know whether they're hearing the old or new model). The new speaker must consistently score better than the old model before it goes into production.

When I first heard the Magneplanar 1.6 back in 2008 I said it was the best under-$2,000 speaker on the market. Incredibly enough it was 10 years old at the time! The Magneplanar 1.6 has stayed in production for 12 years, but now it's about to be replaced with the new Magneplanar 1.7.

Magnepan, based in White Bear Lake, Minn., builds nothing but panel (boxless) speakers. Not only that, Magnepan designs forgo conventional dome tweeters and cone-type woofers. As I pointed out in my August 14, 2008, blog that's why the company's Magneplanar 1.6 speaker mostly avoids sounding like a speaker. The speaker earned the top position in my Top 10 greatest audiophile speakers blog earlier this year.

The new Magneplanar 1.7 is also a flat-panel design, 64.5 inches tall and a mere 2 inches thick! The new speaker looks a little more contemporary, thanks to its aluminum, wrap-around edge molding. The old model was a two-way design, with a 48-inch-tall aluminum ribbon tweeter and a 442-square-inch mid/bass panel. The Magneplanar 1.7 is a three-way design, with a woofer, tweeter, and super-tweeter. The super-tweeter comes in around 10,000 hertz and is said to produce wider dispersion and better-resolved treble than the Magneplanar 1.6 did.

The other big difference is the Magneplanar 1.7 is a "full-range" ribbon design. The ribbon terminology refers to the way the woofer, tweeter, and super-tweeter drivers incorporate thin-film aluminum foil mounted on a Mylar substrate, suspended in a magnetic field. Conventional tweeters and woofers are "driven" in the center or edge by a voice coil, so the surface of the tweeter or woofer is free to deform its shape as it makes sound. The Magneplanar 1.7's woofer, tweeter, and super-tweeter's entire surface area remains under full control by the signal it's reproducing, so it can't change shape. Translation: it sounds clearer and more lifelike than cone and dome driver designs.

The Magneplanar 1.7 is the first full-range ribbon speaker from the company, and it may be the only such design currently on the market (Apogee Acoustics started making full-range ribbon speakers in the 1980s and went out of business in the 1990s).

I'm using "perfect" in the sense that Magnepan speakers sound less like speakers than any box speaker you're likely to hear that sells for less than $10,000. Down sides? Magnepans need to be partnered with powerful amplifiers, they're picky about speaker placement, and they usually need to be placed a good 3 feet away from the rear wall. The new speaker probably will be just as demanding. I will be among the first to review the Magneplanar 1.7 in 2010, so I'll let you know if it's truly an advance over the Magneplanar 1.6.

The Magnepan 1.7's suggested retail price starts at $1,995 a pair.

Magnepan and Canadian electronics manufacturer Bryston have something special planned for CES 2010. The two brands will be demonstrating new products at T.H.E. Show at the Pink Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and consumers are welcome to drop by.

This story originally appeared on CNET

You'd think that smartphones would have made traditional credit cards obsolete by now, but since they haven't (in the US, at least), Mophie's iPhone credit card reader may be the next best thing.

Its full details will be shared with us next week at CES, but the system will consist of a hardware scanner and a corresponding app. So while the iPhone's API restrictions will prevent you from scanning your card directly into Safari for your next web purchase, there are surely some remote pay possibilities in the works similar to what we've seen from Square—not to mention, it'll pave the way for an entire generation of even lazier credit card theft. [Pocket-Lint via SlashGear]

The 2010 Times Square New Year's Ball is ready to go. They saved money and didn't add any LEDs, but they added new stunning Waterford clink-clink glass panels. Here's the insider look on how they did it, and why.

Anthony Quintano also sent us this video on the setup of the camera that will offer the closest view of the time ball tonight, broadcasting the event to the entire world.

The 102-year history of the Times Square New Year's Even Ball is one filled with technology, death and, of course, pretty shiny lights. See it all unfold in our historical timeline.

(Click the image for a large popout version.)

Of course, for those who don't appreciate the festivity of the ball drop, despite all of the hard work behind the scenes, feel free to ignore the ball's 32,256 glimmering Philips LEDs and turn your attention to your iPhone...because, yes, Waterford has made an app for that.

Happy New Year everyone!

We had few complaints with the Droid, and the Sholes tablet, Occiphobic as it may be, is lustable, without a doubt. But Motorola's alleged next phone, the .35-inch-thick, 1080p-capable Shadow/Mirage, makes Motorola's current Android lineup look old-fashioned.

All we've got for now is a crude rendering and a dubiously sourced Chinese leak, but given the recent spate of Snapdragon-powered Android phones, the specs are within the realm of plausibility: crammed into the slim body, there's a processor capable of decoding 1080p video, an 8-megapixel camera, and an HDMI port, masked by a 4.3-inch, 800 x 484 screen, as compared to the Droid's 3.7-inch display of the same resolution.

If true, this means that there's an Android phone that's at least as powerful as, and thinner than, Google's überbuzzed Nexus One sitting just over the horizon, which strikes yet another blow to the mythos of the be-all, end-all Android device. [Mobile1 via BGR]

"We are ending our sponsorship agreement with Tiger Woods and wish him well in the future." That's from AT&T spokesman Fletcher Cook in an email sent out earlier today. [CNN]

While we're confident that we nailed our 50 worst gadgets of the decade, you commenters reminded us of a few truly awful gems that didn't make the cut. So here are eleven more worst gadgets for your enjoyment and derision.

And please, suggest any others that you feel strongly about. I'll be reading the comments all day, adding the most egregiously bad examples to the list. And if you'd rather view the embedded as one long post, we've got you covered here.

Everyone remembers that story about how a bunch of people were suing Apple for potential iPod-induced hearing loss, even though they hadn't lost any hearing. It got shot down last year, appealed, and today, killed for good. CRANK IT.

The case was a bit odd from the start, in that it hinged on the potential for hearing loss, rather than actual, inflicted hearing loss. It was also odd beacuse iPods, which are evidently capable of pumping out about 125dB of sound through a pair of those crappy white earbuds, already have a volume-limiting function. This is in addition to normal volume controls, which apparently don't provide enough guidance to users to prevent them from techno-blasting their eardrums into mucousy, deaf meat-nuggets. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's decision from last year that iPod could be, and generally are, used safely, and dismissed the lawsuit.

But as my grandfather always used to say, at the center of every frivolous class action technology lawsuit, there lies a grain of truth: iPods and iPhones, if you turn them up too loud, can damage your hearing. So don't, k? [Ars Technica]

Being a geek no longer holds the stigma it once did. In fact, it can be downright cool to be a geek these days. But not all geeks are created equal.

The Socially Acceptable Geek Subgenre Scale is a handy showcase of just where various types of geeks fall in the social hierarchy. And if you're offended because you find yourself near the bottom of the scale, just remember: there's no shame in being passionate about something unpopular as long as no one knows about it. And if you really hate clicking through the gallery, click here to see all of them on one long page. Although while doing so realize that people who whine about galleries are their own subgenre of geek, and it's not very high up on the scale.

Illustrations by Dan Meth.

Hi guys, John Mayer here. I know it's been a while since I've "touched base," but you know I've been pretty busy with my fourth album launch, y'know, the "heartbreak handbook"? About that anti-Twitter girl?

Anyway, Imma here to let you know that I think you should all take a one week digital cleanse. Defragment your mind, man—I'm talking about your mental and psychological hard drive!

Here's what I wrote on my Tumbly-blog-thang about my super-cool idea:

"The cleanse will begin at 9am on January 1. This gives everyone a chance to text and tweet their new year's well wishes, and theoretically begins upon waking up the morning of January 1. The cleanse will end at 9am on January 8.

Guidelines:

*email only from laptop or desktop computers

*cell phones can only be used to make calls, and no text messages or e-mails are allowed - if you receive a text, you must reply in voice over the phone. E-mails must be returned from a laptop or desktop computer.

*no use of Twitter or any other social networking site - this includes reading as well as posting.

*no visiting of any entertainment or gossip sites. (No need to detail which ones - you know what they are.)"

I probably shoulda thought of those people who don't wake up until after 9am on New Year's Day, clutching their vodka-soaked stomachs. But hey, I'm a clean-living soul, remember?

I'll leave you with the final words of encouragement from my blog. Put on Eye of the Tiger, or a super-positive song, maybe even my hit single Gravity if you're up for the power. Say these words with me, people, come on:

"This can be done, people. Do it with me. When we pop back up on the grid on January 8, let's trade stories on what it felt like, how hard it was, and maybe how hard it actually wasn't."

Peace, JM.

———

Wise words from our buddy John Mayer there. Just so you know, we're taking his advice and are hanging up our internet connections tomorrow for a week. Sorry readers—we know you were looking forward to our CES coverage next week, but Mayer's right. Peace. We're off to do some serious defragmentation.

Image Credit: Newsgroper

No, I'm not obsessed with Saturn. OK, I am obsessed with Saturn. But so is Time, who picked this deliciously crispy photo as one of the images of the year, revealing ring bumps as high as the Rocky Mountains.

I'm not surprised, because it's a truly unique moment, one that happens at Saturn's equinox, which is an event that only happens twice in 10,179 Earth days. And this time, we had Cassini there to take this amazing photo, just when the sun illuminates the rings edge-on. As Carolyn Porco—Cassini imaging team leader—puts it:

The geometry revealed structures and phenomena in the rings we had never seen before. We saw this famous adornment spring from two dimensions into three, with some ring structures soaring as high as the Rocky Mountains. It made me feel blessed.

The team used Cassini during a week to take photos of vertical clumps in the ring, and when the equinox happened, they could measure their true size looking at the shadows. According to NASA's Bob Pappalardo at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

It's like putting on 3-D glasses and seeing the third dimension for the first time. This is among the most important events Cassini has shown us.

Well, Bob and Carolyn, Carolyn and Bob and the rest of the Cassini team, all I can say is thank you for an amazing work, and the stunning desktop backgrounds in 2009. [NASA Full Resolution Image]