The state of the state? "A train wreck," says one official.

If the world’s eighth-largest economy were a member of the proper religious order, it’d be time to call in a priest to administer last rites.

Name almost any serious malady and the state of California has it: the nation’s highest marginal tax rate coupled with an abysmal public education system; the most home foreclosures; a free-falling commercial real estate sector; lame-duck governor with no legislative support and a disdain for an annual budget process that he refers to as kabuki theater; unemployment somewhere between the official number of 12% and the whisper number of 18%; a 20% drop in year-over-year revenue; municipalities that have either declared bankruptcy (Vallejo) or are on the verge (Los Angeles); and a black-box permitting process that scares away business investment even while every week, 3,000 more taxpayers migrate to greener pastures.

Californians may be a can-do lot, but faced with all that evidence and much more, the political and economic leaders who spoke at the Milken Institute’s annual “State of the State” conference held yesterday at the Beverly Hilton could hardly have been more dour. “It’s a train wreck, and it’s getting worse,” said Bill Lockyer, California State Treasurer. Added former Assembly speaker Bob Hertzberg, now co-chair of governance reform group California Forward, “A high-speed train wreck.” More

Vista was too bloated for many corporate PCs to handle when it arrived three years ago. Its successor, Windows 7, is a better fit. Photo: Microsoft.

Rewind three years. One of the harbingers of doom for Windows Vista, Microsoft’s much-maligned operating system, was a survey that showed half of corporate PCs were too old or anemic to upgrade from XP to Vista. In other words, to get the new software, companies would have to spend a fortune on new computers.

Most never made the upgrade: 92% of PCs in the United States and Canada are still running XP, according to Softchoice, an IT consulting firm.

So it’s a good omen that Softchoice, the same firm that issued that fateful Vista study, is singing a very different tune about Windows 7. This time, its survey of 450,000 corporate PCs in the U.S. and Canada shows that 88% can handle the upgrade. More

Shaw is the latest non-technologist to ascend at Intel. Photo: Intel.

Who rules techland? Increasingly, it isn't the inmates.

In May, when Craig Barrett retired as chairman of Intel (INTC), the choice of his replacement marked a momentous occasion for the granddaddy of the semiconductor industry.

That Jane Shaw became nonexecutive chairman of Intel is a big deal, but not because she is Intel's first outsider to chair the board or because she is the first woman.

What makes her role noteworthy is that she is the first non-technologist in that seat. Yes, she has a science background, with a doctorate in physiology and a career in the pharmaceutical industry. But she's not a technologist in the Silicon Valley sense. More

Changes in computing mean software companies need hardware-savvy employees

By Sam Blackman, CEO and co-founder, Elemental Technologies

Blackman: Your next hire might need hardware chops. Photo: Elemental Technologies

Whether we knew it or not, we’ve all been relying on something called “Moore’s Law.”  Back in the 1960s, Intel (INTC)  co-founder Gordon Moore noticed that the number of transistors that could cheaply be placed on an integrated circuit had been doubling every two years.

That meant that central processing units, or CPUs — the chips that drive computer performance — were getting twice as fast in that same time period. That amazing rate of technological change has held up for more than 40 years.

Moore’s Law is why we take it for granted that the cell phone we carry around today is more powerful (and cost us less) than the top-of-the-line desktop computer we bought ten years ago. It is also why we’re not surprised that in less than a decade the Web has changed from a place to look at ugly text pages to a place to watch high-definition TV shows.

But after 40 years, Moore’s Law is slowing down. More

Interview by Scott Cendrowski

Mike Splinter, CEO of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based Applied Materials, recalls the best advice he ever got.

Mike Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials

Before I joined Applied Materials (AMAT), I worked at Intel (INTC) for two decades. I recall a session with Andy Grove. It was 1984, and Grove was talking about Intel culture to a group of new employees who were coming in at a senior level. I was running Fab 1, a Santa Clara factory that made chips.

In his talk Grove advised us to always assume it's your responsibility. By that he meant to take on a job, even if it wasn't yours. That's a general thought, but it creates specific action and works across almost any situation, from picking up garbage on the floor to a new product idea.

If you automatically assume it's your responsibility and do something about it, that makes the company better. Those who can recognize that are the ones who end up being more successful.

Mike's greatest tips

Engage your audience. When talking to a group, give the audience a challenge or an objective. It makes the presentation much more memorable.

More

Computer makers hope that stylish new laptops like Hewlett-Packard's Pavilion dm3 will lure shoppers away from low-cost netbooks. Photo: HP.

There’s going to be a PC retail showdown this holiday season. Let’s call it the netbook vs. the nymph.

In the netbook corner: the cheap, small, underpowered laptops that are all the rage lately. Asian manufacturers like Asus first introduced them, and consumers love them because they handle documents, e-mail, and web surfing for as little as $300. The big PC makers offer their own models, but also secretly hate that netbook fever is sucking the profits out of the industry.

In the nymph corner: a newer class of svelte yet powerful laptops that could steal some attention from netbooks. (The industry calls them “thin and light,” but hey — nymph is more fun.) Like their competition, nymphs are slim — some of them less than an inch thick — and they often eschew extras like DVD drives for the sake of portability. Perhaps best of all, they do a solid job running Microsoft’s eagerly anticipated Windows 7 operating system, which arrives next month. More

Steve Jobs, having overseen the development of a 10-inch 3G-enabled wireless multi-touchscreen tablet computer from his home, office and hospital bed, is finally satisfied with the latest incarnation and will be bringing it to market in early 2010.

That's according to a report Friday by AppleInsider's Kasper Jade, who first broke the story that Apple (AAPL) was working on such a device nearly two years ago and has been pursuing it doggedly ever since.

His piece describes a tortured four-year development effort, burdened with the "baggage" that any pet project of Steve Jobs' will carry.

"Under the critical eye of Jobs," Jade writes, "contours must be precise, each pixel of the interface has to match a particular vision, and there can be no fault — no matter how slight — or it's back to the drawing board.

More

One of the themes cropping up again and again at this year’s Brainstorm technology conference is the pervasive use of social services like Facebook, and the frustration that while they dominate the consumer world, they aren’t quite right for large enterprises. More

On The Kudlow Report on CNBC, Jon Fortt discusses whether the tech rally still has legs.