One thing that strikes me about Chrome OS and Litl is that neither bother trying to do everything Windows or Mac OS X can do. Not even close. I don’t think either even bothers trying to serve as one’s primary computer.

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Unless you’ve just arrived in 2009 on a time machine, you know that smoking isn’t good for you. Did you know, that smoking isn’t good for your computer, either? It’s true, at least according to Apple (AAPL).

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Scientists at IBM’s (IBM) Almaden research center have built the biggest artificial brain ever–a cell-by-cell simulation of the human visual cortex: 1.6 billion virtual neurons connected by 9 trillion synapses. This computer simulation, as large as a cat’s brain, blows away the previous record–a simulated rat’s brain with 55 million neurons–built by the same team two years ago.

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Norwest Venture Partners on Wednesday announced that it had closed a new venture-capital fund sized at $1.2 billion. That’s nearly double the size of the Silicon Valley venture firm’s last fund in 2006, which closed at $650 million.

The new fund is unusual in this day and age amid a tough fundraising environment brought on by the recession. What’s more, many venture capitalists argue that funds need to be smaller to get back to the basics, especially since venture capital isn’t an industry that necessarily scales upwards.

Here’s what Promod Haque, NVP’s managing partner, had to say about all this:

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Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay (EBAY), is launching a for-profit news startup in Hawaii, where he and his family live. This is important news, and not just because he’s involved.

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Hourly wages below a dollar. Firings with no notice. Indifferent bosses. Labor brokers that leech away months of a worker’s hard-earned wages. A corporate shell game that leaves no one responsible.

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China’s factories have long churned out high tech products. A big question facing Silicon Valley–underscored in a survey released Monday by Intel (INTC) and Newsweek–is how big a role the country will play in dreaming up those gadgets.

The survey found optimism among Chinese respondents and pessimism among the Americans. Some 63 percent of Chinese believe their country will overtake the United States in technology innovation over the next 30 years. Only one-third of Americans believed the U.S. would still lead over that period.

Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, agrees that China will reduce the innovation gap with America. But that doesn’t mean that surpassing the U.S. is inevitable. “Speaking personally, there’s no reason for that to happen,” he said.

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On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

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It took a mediator–and a trip to Maui–to break the biggest logjam in landmark settlement talks between Intel (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Before arriving at the agreement that ended years of acrimony and legal wrangling between the world’s largest makers of computer chips, representatives of each needed to answer one fundamental question: How much money would change hands?

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Yet another News Corporation (NWS) executive is talking about Google (GOOG), and yet again, I feel like they have no concept about how Google interacts with their web pages. Which is frightening, since they’re being very vocal about how they’re supposedly wronged by Google. Please, someone, give them a search marketing 101 course.

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When Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) announced the $2.7 billion purchase of 3Com Corp., it let the world know that H-P intends to compete fully with Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) in the corporate data center.

With its strength in Ethernet, 3Com (COMS) gives HP a major piece of the pie, but it still needs a few more slices if it wants to be a one-stop-shop for data centers. One such slice it might go after next is application acceleration, said Catharine Trebnick, a senior research analyst with Avian Securities.

Application acceleration appliances speed up the delivery of programs from a data center to the people using it, using methods such as balancing the workload across machines.

Prior to HP’s announcement yesterday, many analysts speculated publicly traded F5 Networks Inc. (FFIV), a leader in this space, was a likely acquisition target, but most now have soured on that idea.

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Cisco (CSCO) and HP (HP) have been duking it over their visions for the next generation data center architecture and the battle is just getting interesting. Cisco entered the server market and HP has countered by purchasing 3Com for $2.7 billion.

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Atherton, Calif., is the mansion Mecca for many of Silicon Valley’s tech multi-millionaires. And so far in 2009, even though home sales and median property sale prices in the town have slowed from a year ago, The Wall Street Journal found that there hasn’t been as little activity as some techie buyers might think.

So how do some real-estate agents who sell homes in Atherton see it? Catherine Marcus, a real-estate agent in the area for Sotheby’s International, says that home sales in the posh town were slow at the beginning of the year. “Nobody was buying and it was very scary,” she says. But “listings since July and August are getting snapped up,” she adds.

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Eric Schmidt is brimming with Bay Area pride.

In the 33 years that the Google (GOOG) CEO has lived in the Bay Area, Schmidt says he has watched a long list of regions try–and fail–to create technology capitals of Silicon Valley’s scale.

“You can tell them by doing a query on Google like Silicon X, or something like that,” he said in an interview last month. “The Silicon Glen, that was Scotland. Silicon Alley, that is New York. Just do the search. They are all there.” He continued, “They have had some success but they aren’t the scale of Silicon Valley yet anyway.”

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Microsoft (MSFT) announced more layoffs today, and I was one of them. This was a total surprise to me, and management offered no explanation. This is pretty standard procedure, mostly for legal reasons, but none the less left me with a cold feeling…but only for a minute or two.

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