Apple's obsession with secrecy is well-established, and there is quite a cottage industry of bloggers and Apple Web sites dedicated to exposing their secrets. One of the more impressive efforts came during the iPhone 3GS launch, where one site was tracking a shipping vessel from China believed to be carrying the phones. The site even had the manifest.

But other times, all you need is a little carelessness. Case in point: the folks who gave away Apple's upcoming tablet and new MacBooks. In the case of the MacBooks, it was Apple that did it.

The bigger news is the iPad, iTablet, or whatever you want to call it. The rumor mill has Apple releasing this thing early next year. Word is it's basically a large version of the iPod Touch, but with things like windows and allowing multiple apps to run at once. There might even be two of them with different size screens.

Well, New York Times Executive Editor for news Bill Keller committed what we in the profession call "an oops." While speaking at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University last week, the Times newsroom boss was discussing all of the issues of print vs. electronic, pay vs. free, and then said this (at the 8:30 mark).

"I'm hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate..."

This is one of the more unusual mergers on the surface but it does make sense. The 451 Group, a market research and analysis organization, has acquired The Uptime Institute, a consultancy and think tank that is focused specifically on datacenter efficiency and reliability. Both firms are privately-held, and terms were not disclosed.

Usually analyst firms go for broad-based or general purpose firms, but 451 seems to have datacenters on the mind. It also bought Tier 1 Research in 2005, which also focuses on the datacenter.

Uptime founder Kenneth Brill is one of the more well-known experts on datacenter issues and is frequently quoted in the tech press (including us). In his new role, he will be a global spokesman for the organization.

"We are delighted to welcome Ken, Pitt and the 25 other staff of Uptime to join the 85-plus professional staff here at The 451 Group," said Martin V. McCarthy, CEO of The
451 Group in a statement. "The Uptime Institute has a global reputation for integrity, independence and innovation in the areas of datacenter availability - uptime - and IT energy efficiency.

"Particularly now, when the promise of cloud computing can obscure the criticality and vulnerability of physical infrastructure, The Uptime Institute plays a unique role for all organizations for which full-time availability of mission-critical facilities is paramount. The Institute's database of over 4,000 facility 'gotchas' and its comparative benchmarking help users make sound management decisions involving risk and millions in cost," McCarthy continued.

Uptime recently added a professional services business to advise datacenter managers, and 451 seems particularly keen on it. "Uptime Institute Professional Services eagerly anticipates reaching all industries and regions with services defined by technical rigor and long-term operations focus," said Uptime Executive Director Pitt Turner in a statement.

What should have been a slam-dunk deal, Oracle's $7.4 billion purchase of Sun, has turned into a tragi-comedy of epic proportions. If there weren't so many people being negatively affected, this would be downright funny.

Today, that noted economist Ralph Nader come out against the deal and urged the EC to reject it. Nader's Knowledge Ecology International group is joined by the U.K.-based Open Rights Group and the eminent capitalist Richard Stallman in opposing the deal.

TheStreet.com reports Nader sent a letter to European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, warning that Oracle is bad, bad, bad.

"Oracle seeks to acquire MySQL to prevent further erosion of its share of the market for database software licenses and services, and to protect the high prices now charged for its proprietary database software licenses and services," he wrote. "If Oracle is allowed to acquire MySQL, it will predictably limit the development and functionality of the MySQL platform."

Nader should stick to Pintos because he does not know what he's talking about. If any company would want to buy MySQL to kill it, it's Microsoft. Secondly, Oracle couldn't stop MySQL if it wanted to, since it's open source. Both Larry Ellison and MySQL founder Marten Mikos have pointed out that Oracle couldn't kill MySQL if it wanted to, and Ellison has made it clear he has no intention of doing that.

A week before the release of Windows 7, an awful lot of fingernails are being chewed up. There's a lot riding on it for just about everyone in the chain from Microsoft to retail.

For Microsoft, it's a chance to restore its name. CEO Steve Ballmer has said that Microsoft's reputation was damaged by Vista and never recovered. Perhaps Windows 7 can erase some of that.

For OEMs, it's a chance to reverse the horrendous slide in business. They've kept the raw numbers up selling cheap netbooks, but decked out PCs are not moving in the numbers they used to. Businesses are not buying at all, as Dell is finding out painfully.

Now there's a real fear that OEMs have overbuilt PC inventory in anticipation of the Windows 7 launch. They certainly have made plenty. I get press releases almost daily announcing more system launches. A version of Windows that doesn't make you scream is as good an excuse as any for consumers to buy a new machine.

This is not a good way to launch a whole new design of notebooks.

Acer has been forced to issue a recall of the company's consumer ultra low-voltage (CULV) laptops because they may overheat in certain conditions. The problem, though, is not in the Intel CULV processor but the super-thin design.

The affected units are Acer Aspire Timeline AS3410, AS3810T, AS3810TG, AS3810TZ and AS3810TZG, all manufactured prior to September 15, 2009. The problem is associated with a microphone cable, which may overheat when extreme pressure is applied repeatedly to the left palm rest.

"Acer has voluntarily instituted a safety recall program to proactively replace the microphone cable in the affected units to eliminate any risk of overheating," said an official statement by the company. The company also provided instructions on how to check if you own an affected model.

CULV is a whole new style of notebooks attempting to find a niche between regular notebooks and netbooks. They are notable for being extremely thin, very light and having a long battery life. As such, they sacrifice some performance to achieve this battery life.

Both Intel and especially AMD have made big pushes into this space but product has been slow to emerge on the market. More will hit the market with the release of Windows 7 next week.

The continued race to the bottom, or in this case to the smallest possible die size, is going to weed out all but just a few foundry players in the next few years. Gartner projects that by the time semiconductor process technology reaches 8 nanometers, there will only be four to eight left.

The discussion was part of Gartner's semiconductor briefing session in San Jose, where the firm also discussed how the market will grow and change in the next few years. While the market for chips will continue to increase, the number of players will shrink as things become prohibitively expensive.

Moore's law is defined as doubling the amount of transistors in the same area of silicon every two years. In 2004, the 40 anniversary of Moore's law, Intel had 592 million transistors on one device. Its largest chips now, the quad core Itanium and Nehalem-EX, will have 2.3 billion transistors, and nVidia's new Fermi chip has three billion transistors.

If Moore's Law is projected out to 8nm, there will be 75 billion transistors on a chip at the 8nm technology node. Plus, the process technology will change radically. The days of silicon dioxide or even gallium dioxide materials are likely over

At sub-12nm, silicon may no longer be usable. As the industry gets down to 8nm and 5nm, things like carbon or grapheme nanotubes are needed. Below 5nm, molecular transistors may emerge enabling self assembly. Fabrication plant assembly costs at 8nm will double the cost of 45nm to around $10 billion.

Now who can afford that?

A few very profitable companies with high volumes, said Dean Freeman, a research vice president with Gartner. That means Intel, Samsung, IBM's alliance (including Globalfoundries), TSMC, Toshiba, Hynix, Elipda and Micron.

But then there are the companies that make the equipment they use to make the chips. If a supply chain firm drops out, the whole group of semiconductor makers built on their products could fall with them.

This was a switch. Usually when a vendor offers customer case studies, it's the customer with the big story to tell. So I was quite willing to hear IT managers discuss how Intel's Nehalem had saved them money. Remember when Intel launched Nehalem and Pat Gelsinger called it a "cash machine?" Well, as it turned out, Intel had the best story to tell.

Intel said that more than 40 percent of the servers currently deployed and chugging away in datacenters around the country are powered by single-core chips that are four or more years old. That's a lot of old, inefficient 32-bit servers that run at single-digit utilization rates.

Intel had a similar situation of its own. It had 147 datacenters, many of them running single-core processors. In the last few years, even before the economy went into the drink, CEO Paul Otellini and Andy Bryant, who is pretty much a de facto chief operating officer although his title is chief administrative officer*, have been on an efficiency hunt trying to cut costs wherever possible. So those servers had to go.

Diane Bryant, the company's CIO, said that in the past year, Intel has been able to cut its datacenters from 147 to 70, consolidate single-core servers to Nehalem-based by a factor of 10 to one, and in the end, save Intel $250 million over the course of eight years. Just this year alone, thanks to reduced power and cooling and maintenance costs, Intel will save $19 million.

We knew Windows Vista was unpopular, but this is downright funny. A survey by Net Applications found that Vista is already beginning to shrink in terms of market share and those loses are to the gain of Windows 7.

Net Applications is a site monitoring and analytics provider. It gathers data from 40,000 Web sites around the world using an analytics package called Hitslink. Among the many things it gathers are the browser and operating system of each visitor.

Now how can that be when Windows 7 won't be on the market for 17 days, you ask. Simple. The Net Applications survey counts both the Windows RC1 that has been out since May as well as the final Windows 7 code, which has been on MSDN for developers to download since August.

The most recent survey from Net Applications puts Windows 7 at a total installed base of 1.18 percent, mostly because of the RC being so widespread. The company estimates Windows 7 grew by 0.3 percent in August, when the final code became available, and Vista lost 0.2 percent.

Big surprise.

It's a pretty pitiful showing for Vista, which never managed to go beyond 19 percent market share in its maligned three-year history. Windows XP, as creaky, old and downright ugly as it is, still holds 71.5 percent of all operating systems that connected to servers monitored by Net Applications last month.

Figure on both numbers going down fast. There is palpable excitement on message boards over this release, something I've never seen before. People are actually psyched to get Windows 7 and put Vista and XP out to pasture once and for all. For once, the widespread betas worked in Microsoft's favor.

Some stores are already getting their Windows 7 product, which means you can probably figure on someone somewhere blowing the release date and selling early. In some cases, that may be legitimate, as Microsoft is letting system builders pull the trigger early.