Holidays are usually pretty quiet:

Google Earth honors the fallen.

Read Sprint’s Pre launch guide.

Lenovo to use Nvidia’s Ion.

More about AT&T’s Palm EOS.

Safari 4 practices poor housekeeping.

Goal one for Pre: browsing.

Gotta love the name “Wooo.”

iPhone-painted New Yorker cover.

Iran blocks Facebook. (Twitter? MySpace?)

A more Mac-like Linux.

What do you do after everybody in the country has already signed up for a two-year contract to get a cheap cell phone? Looks like AT&T thinks that signing them up for a two-year contract to get a cheap netbook might be the next step. The company has announced that it’s experimenting in company-owned stores in Atlanta and Philadelphia with various package deals for mobile broadband and DSL service, some of which involve subsidized netbooks (or “mini laptops” in AT&Tspeak). Sign up for both mobile broadband and DSL for two years, and the cheapest of AT&T’s netbooks goes for $49.99.

The deal reduces the cost of the computer to half of what RadioShack charges for its discounted netbook. Of course, since AT&T’s offer requires both mobile and home data plans, the monthly cost is a lot higher.

The most interesting thing about AT&T’s test–other than the prospect of buying a computer for less than the price of a high-end steak–is that it’s not limited to one model from one company: It’s selling an Acer Aspire, two Dell Minis, and the LG Xenia, as well as Lenovo’s ThinkPad X200 (a full-sized ultraportable laptop). If it likes what it learns in Atlanta and Philly and rolls the offers out nationwide, your local AT&T store could end up devoting a meaningful amount of its floor space to computers. I’m still wary about committing to contracts to get cheap hardware–especially cheap hardware in categories that are evolving as rapidly as netbooks are–but I’ll be interested to see if these offers make sense to enough consumers to make them worth AT&T’s while.

What’s transpiring this fine morning?

Hey, Woz is gainfully employed!

Fake parking tickets install malware.

Lenovo struggles, dumps American CEO.

GoDaddy’s cheesy ads work, alas.

HP unveils a Netbook Linux.

Bill Gates bugs conference attendees.

The new Macbook’s running late.

Hankering for a 240GB iPod?

Microsoft joins celebrity gossip race.

Facebookers compile “25 Things” lists.

Will Snow Leopard track you?

Boy, Windows Mobile is behind.

Xbox 360 owners love NetFlix.

The crummy state of the economy continues to bring crummy news for the tech industry: Lenovo announced today that it’s letting 11 percent of its workforce go as part of a broad restructuring. It’s also reducing executive compensation by 30 to 50 percent (sorry, guys!).

Buried in its press release is one tidbit that might be a plus for Lenovo customers: It’s relocating its customer-support call center from Toronto to Morrisville, North Carolina, the company’s main North American site. If this involves Toronto staff losing their jobs, it’s regrettable for the folks who are impacted. But I’m a big believer that tech support staffers provide the best help when they work most closely with the rest of a company’s team. And it’s good to see that Lenovo isn’t reacting to economic pressures by relocating tech support to another country where language issues could stand in the way of solid tech support.

Lenovo’s upcoming ThinkPad W700 mobile workstations are loaded with high-end features, including Intel Core 2 Quad CPUs and Nvidia Quadro Express graphics, RAID storage, and built-in Wacom pen tablets. But one feature is as close to being genuinely jaw-dropping as anything I’ve seen on a laptop in a long time: an optional secondary 10.6-inch LCD display that sits to the side of the main 17-inch screen. (There it is on the left–I’m not entirely clear on where the secondary screen goes when not in use–whether it slides, folds, or detaches.)

My first take on the second screen was that it was wretched, pricey excess. But the W700 is aimed at CAD users and other types who want all the power they can get their hands on, and all the screen real estate, too. Portability is not top-of-mind for these folks, and I’ll bet that a meaningful minority of the people who buy the W700 spring for the second screen.

The W700ds (hey, wonder what the “ds” stands for?) will start at around $3600 and will ship in January.

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When I first tried to compare the cost of Macs versus Windows PCs, I said that “Are Macs more expensive?” is one of computing’s eternal questions. It’s not, however, one with anything like an eternal answer. And the pricing analysis I did in that first article was rendered obsolete last Tuesday when Apple unveiled its new MacBook–which turned out to be a substantially slicker computer at a higher price point.

So it’s time to compare Apples and oranges Windows computers again. Let’s begin with a standard Mini-FAQ on the research effort that follows…

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