NEW YORK

Two words apply well for the year just ended: Whoa, Nelly! With the financial markets in chaos, the jobs landscape littered with layoffs, and the most audacious outpouring of federal funds since the Great Depression, most of us are ready to look forward to cheerier times in 2009.

It's dawn at a Los Angeles apartment overlooking the Hollywood Hills. Laura Sweet, a graphic designer in her early 40s, sits at a computer and begins to surf the Net. She searches intently, unearthing such bizarre treasures for sale as necklaces for trees and tattoo-covered pigs. As usual, she posts them on a shopping site called ThisNext.com. Asked why in the world she spends so many hours each week working for free, she answers: "It's a labor of love."

Dresden is one of the great success stories of German reunification. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the capital of the East German state of Saxony remade itself as the center of European semiconductor production, becoming home to major facilities operated by U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices as well as Munich-based Infineon Technologies. When a 1998 Time magazine article dubbed the region "Silicon Saxony," locals embraced the label and even founded an organization by that name to promote industry interests.

Four years ago, the City of New York held an internationl competition to design the next generation of streetlights for the city. The winner? A lighting design firm from none other than the Big Apple itself – a company called the Office for Visual Interaction. If their prototype makes it through the testing stage, it will become the standard streetlight across the whole city.

Apple is pulling out of the Macworld Conference & Expo and several other conferences, stirring debate about whether that is a good move for Apple and the hundreds of third-party vendors who participate each year.

The announcement not to participate after the January conference and to pull CEO Steve Jobs as the keynote speaker comes after two very successful years. Macworld 2007 set a record for attendance, and Macworld 2008 topped it.

The health of Apple CEO Steve Jobs is again at the core of controversy. Oppenheimer & Co. downgraded Apple's stock from outperform to perform and said it would not recommend Apple stock as a long-term investment until Apple provides information regarding Jobs' health and plans for a successor.

Apple's stock opened at $91 Wednesday and dropped to the $89 range during the noon hour.

Delta Air Lines is taking Internet access to the skies this week with the launch of Gogo Inflight Internet service on board six of its planes. Delta is introducing the service with a free trial that lets consumers experience the technology.

Monday's announcement highlights the first of more than 300 Delta domestic planes that will soon feature in-flight Internet, according to the company.

The Free Software Foundation filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit Thursday against Cisco Systems in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The FSF alleges Cisco violated its copyrights, including for GCC, binutils and the GNU C library, in various products distributed under the Linksys brand.

In doing so, the FSF said, Cisco denied its users their right to share and modify the software. Cisco acquired Linksys in 2003.

As print magazine circulation drops in the face of an economic downturn -- and as more magazines and newspapers roll out online-only publications -- Google is indexing old magazines.

Google on Tuesday took another step in its mission to index the world's information, releasing digital copies of more than one million articles from magazines that were on the newsstand decades ago. The announcement follows a recent move to index classic photos from Life magazine.