Back at the beginning of the decade, when the dot-bomb implosion took place, a whole lot of hardware wound up either on eBay or being sold at auction. With the start-up dead, its servers often went for about five to ten cents on the dollar. It was great if you were looking to buy a $50,000 Sun server for $5,000, not so great for Sun's sales people at the time.

Now, though, it seems datacenters are being sold whole instead of piecemeal. The latest case involves Yahoo Japan, which is probably the one bright spot in the company, which is paying 45 billion yen ($478 million) to acquire Softbank IDC Solutions Corp., which operates nine data centers in Japan.

Yahoo Japan is the largest Internet portal in Japan, with 43 billion monthly page views in January 2009. It said it was buying the datacenters to meet growing demand for resources and infrastructure.

The implosion on Wall Street also yielded some bargains. When Lehman Brothers was sold to Barclays plc for $1.75 billion last year, Lehman's NYC headquarters building and two datacenters accounted for $1.5 billion of the deal's value.

In March 2008, JPMorgan bought the assets of Bear Stearns, and like Lehman, Bear's two datacenters and headquarters building were what made up most of the $270 million price tag.

If Second Life is on the way out, as Valleywag insinuates, that datacenter could likely fetch a pretty penny.

The cast pictures for Dancing With the Has-Beens Stars are out, and all I can say is Steve Wozniak is a braver man than I to dress like that (although his dancing partner might be worth it).

He looks a lot slimmer than when I saw him at IDF, too. Maybe it's Photoshop, we'll see when the show starts. If he has indeed shed the girth that will only be good for him. Just don't lose too much like your old partner did, ok Woz?

Well what do you know, Windows 7 is ahead of schedule.

Okay, it's by four days but it's something.

Windows news site Neowin is reporting that Microsoft is is currently testing its first potential Release Candidate of Windows 7 and hopes to release it to the public on April 10. This jives with what I said three weeks ago, just off by four days.

Another blog, GeekSmack, relayed some interactions with Steven Sinofsky, the Microsoft exec in charge of Windows. Among other tidbits, Sinofsky reported 500,000 user reports from the "Send feedback" button on the Windows 7 beta desktop (which I have used several times now). Plus there's TechNet boards, MSDN boards and other avenues of feedback.

I have used Windows 7 Build 7000 for more than a month now and have found very few problems. By far the biggest problem is Windows Media Player 12. It's just plain bad and I'm looking at alternative players now.

I've also found the desktop shuffler to be buggy, too. Windows 7 lets you point to a directory of images and it will randomly display the images at the time interval of your choice. This is great because I've had to use a freeware utility under XP to do just that. Problem is, it has a tendency to stop working and set one image as the wallpaper, so I have to restart it.

But by and large, that's been the extent of my problems. I'm perfectly content to leave it on my main computer until the gold code comes out and can't wait to nuke the Vista directory.

Once again, Microsoft is maintaining the Q1 2010 party line, but hardly anyone believes that any more. I'll stick to the June release date we first reported last year, with the additional hope that the comments from nVidia's Mike Hara are a good indicator of pent-up demand and we'll see a pop in computer sales come Q3.

AMD on Wednesday finally got stockholder approval to spin off its fabrication plants as a separate company, called The Foundry Company, but it wasn’t easy.

Only 42 percent of common stock shareholders showed up for the first vote in Austin, Texas, on February 10. AMD’s bylaws mandate that 50 percent or more shareholders be present to constitute a quorum for business. So the company delayed the vote until February 18. This time they got their 50 percent and the vote passed.

The transaction is expected to close by March 2, 2009. According to the press release, AMD will issue 58 million shares of the company’s common stock and warrants to purchase 35 million shares of its common stock and (ii) 35 million shares of the company’s common stock upon exercise of those warrants to an affiliate of the Mubadala Development Company PJSC.

So now AMD’s fabs will have the expense of doing their own upgrades to keep pace with Intel, TSMC and countless Asian fabrication companies. Even with the new Abu Dhabi investments, keeping pace with Intel won’t be easy. It just announced a $7 billion investment in 32nm manufacturing. AMD is just getting to 45nm, although it is allied with IBM, which does have 32nm in the works for next year.

As if competing with Intel and the Asian fabs wasn’t enough, The Foundry Company is also starting up just as the chip market screeched to a halt and the need for manufacturing has plunged. TSMC has cut production by up to 30 percent in recent months.

Embarcadero Technologies, the database tools vendor that acquired Borland's tools line, including Delphi and JBuilder, has taken all of its tools, both its own and Borland's, and put them into a single license, all-in-one package called Embarcadero All-Access.

All told, it's quite a collection, totaling 18 application and database development tools. They range from rapid application and Web development (Delphi, JBuilder, C++Builder and 3rdRail) to database design and development (ER/Studio, Rapid SQL, DBArtisan) to database management (Change Manager, Performance Center).

Embarcadero did it for a number of reasons, according to Jan Liband, vice president of marketing at Embarcadero. Developers may find themselves using more tools than before as companies lay off staff and work gets consolidated. Or they may have to reverse engineer someone else's work in another toolset.

Then there was the main complaint: it was too expensive to buy all the products separately. So the company put everything onto one license for $2,250.

Up to now, that makes it a packaging story. Here's where it gets interesting. Embarcadero is offering what it calls the InstantOn feature that allows for developers to quickly load a tool into memory if they need it for a one-time task. When they are done, the program exits memory without being installed.

This saves the hassle of install, since many developer machines are locked down tight. After all, your developers might be interfacing directly with production database servers. The IT department won't allow anything to be installed on those machines without their approval. Now it's possible to load up a tool for a quick one-shot job without having to go through the install hassle.

There are three licenses: Workstation, for an individual; Network Managed Named User, which allows a user license to float between workstations; and Network Managed Concurrent, which allows All-Access licenses to be shared among users in an organization.

Embarcadero All-Access is available now.  

No, not that Steve. I've given up on him. This message is for Mr. Sinofsky, whom I trust is a regular reader.

Steve, you have managed to do something that I have never seen in all my time covering the tech sector, and that is create genuine excitement for a Windows release. Windows 95 was met with trepidation because of the 16/32-bit thunking. Win98 was met with a "meh" sentiment. It was an improvement over 95 but nothing to jump up and down over. ME was a flop. Things got a little better with Windows 2000 and XP because we finally put 16-bits to rest, but no one was actually psyched about it.

And then there was Vista.

As you noted in the Engineering Windows 7 blog, people don't want to go back to their old OS. I'm in the same boat. I use XP at work because I have to, and retain Vista on my home machines only out of backwards compatibility concerns. Thus far, I have not had to do so.

With Windows 7 rounding the bend toward Release Candidate status, it's impossible to maintain the current party line that it will come out in Q1 2010. No one beta tests software for a year, except maybe Blizzard Entertainment (hey Blizzard, just release StarCraft II and Diablo III already, I don't care what state they are in. I'm used to bug-riddled games. I play EverQuest.).

Clearly you anticipated questions about a release date because you addressed it in the blog post. Back in September I learned of (and reported on) the June 3, 2009 target for release. Thus far, the other days from the internal calendar have been met: the first preview code at the end of October, which was at PDC and the first wide beta in early January. I know your next target date is April 14 for the RC and have known since September.

Right now the country is in a funk. People couldn't even get terribly worked up over the Super Bowl. Sales are plunging across the board in the tech industry, except at Apple. It's time to create some excitement and give people something to look forward to. It's time to energize the sector and give OEMs some optimism for the first time in a long time. They have been suffering through drops in sales by as much as 50% year-over-year.

Windows 7 will drive PC sales not because people will need a new computer, but because people will no longer hesitate and balk because they know a new PC means being saddled with Vista. Yes, it's a better OS and the Apple FUD commercials are grossly unfair, but Apple has managed to reduce Vista's public credibility to mulch.

Nothing else has people fired up or excited this year. Announcing Windows 7 will ship this summer will give people that excitement, both consumers and your OEM partners alike. I thought Steve Ballmer would say it at CES, with that huge audience listening, but was wrong.

The next big event is CeBit in March, but you don't need big events any more to get the word out. That's 20th century thinking. This is the era of Twitter/Facebook/Digg/Fark/Technorati. Just say it on the Windows 7 blog and the Mars Rover will know about it in under an hour.

So say it.