On Monday, just a couple of days before the International Consumer Electronics Show for the year 2011 takes place, chipmaker Intel revealed the specs for its long-awaited second generation Core i3, i5, and i7 processors and the related chipset family code named "Sandy Bridge." Intel's 32nm process chips will be the replacement for the Nehalem architecture that has been in use since 2008.

The most noteworthy qualities of the Intel Core 2011 chips come from their new construction, which integrates the CPU, GPU, and a multi-purpose I/O controller on the same little piece of silicon. What makes this especially interesting is that early testers of the chips say the integrated graphics processor (called either HD 2000 or HD 3000) can actually outperform certain low-level discrete graphics cards. Intel today highlighted the chips' graphical capabilites with "Intel Clear Video HD" for high def, and "Intel InTru 3D" for stereoscopic Blu-Ray playback.

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Holy downloads, Batman, BitTorrent has 100 million monthly active users -- 20 million per day. Average daily downloads: 400,000. That's a whole lot of file sharing, and I wonder: How active are Betanews readers on BitTorrent?

BitTorrent revealed the subscriber data in one of many tech announcements leading into the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, which kicks off with Wednesday evening's keynote delivered by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

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After trading closes down today, Motorola Incorporated is expected to begin distributing shares of its newly spun-off mobile devices company known as Motorola Mobility (MMI). This split has been in preparatory stages for the last three years, and this marks the final stages of the separation. After all of the common stock for the new company has been distributed, Motorola Inc. intends to change its name to Motorola Solutions Inc (MSI.)

Motorola Mobility's CEO and Chairman will be Dr. Sanjay Jha, who has been in the position of co-CEO with Greg Brown since 2008. Prior to joining Motorola, Jha was the COO of Qualcomm Inc. Motorola Mobility's executive staff will also include Mark Rothman as Chief Financial Officer; John Bucher as Chief Strategy Officer; and Geoffrey Roman as Chief Technology Officer.

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"The race for the lead in US. smartphone operating system (OS) consumer market share is tighter than it has ever been," begins a blog post today on Nielsen Wire. The winner is? No one yet. Apple's iPhone leads in total US consumer market share, while most people who recently bought a smartphone chose Android. I'm among them. "This race might still be too close to call," Nielsen asserts.

Perhaps the more important data point is about the broader smartphone category. "In November, 45 percent of recent acquirers chose a smartphone over a feature phone," according to the Nielsen post. That's up from 34 percent in June. Apple and Research in motion are "statistically tied" with respect to US smartphone OS market share -- 28.6 percent and 26.1 percent, respectively. Android's share is 25.8 percent.

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Wavy Gravy famously used to say, "We are all bozos on the bus, so we might as well enjoy the ride," meaning none of us really knows what we're doing. We do the best we can, try to look cool and hope nobody notices when we screw up, when it'd be so much easier to simply admit we're all just trying to figure it out, and let our mistakes hang out for all to see, so others don't have to make the same mistakes. You've got to take chances, and that's what I've done by moving from the safety and familiarity of the desktop to the cloud.

Let me start by letting you know I'm a total bozo when it comes to this cloud thing. I think we all are. It's so new, nobody really knows how to do it all right, and many people are afraid to try. Will their stuff be safe? What if there is no Internet connection? So I'm putting on my red rubber nose and diving into the cloud for everyone to see -- hope you enjoy the ride.

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On November 8, 2010, one of my most anticipated packages arrived from Amazon: a 250 GB Xbox 360 Kinect combo. Kinect is one of the more popular devices to leave the doors of Microsoft. The Redmond, Wash.-based company initially expected to sell two million of them during the holiday season but upped estimates to five million due to high preorder sales. Not a day goes by without reports about how someone has hacked Kinect for some other use besides gaming. I think this suggests demand for natural user interfaces will expand beyond touch, and go mainstream. Couple that with the high cool factor Kinect offers and this could be the device that reinvigorates Microsoft's consumer image. Could Kinect be Microsoft's iPod?

I think so. In case you don't remember, Apple was largely a forgotten company in the mid 1990s. There were no mainstream products, Macs were very expensive for most consumers to buy and most businesses chose the certainty of Windows. Things began to change when Apple cofounder Steve Jobs returned to the company in late 1996 and became interim CEO the next year. In 1998, he launched the trendy, translucent iMac. But there wasn't much room for Mac sales to grow -- most people used Windows PCs. Apple needed something new.

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What should be Microsoft's top priorities for 2011? I've got an answer for that, as I have for seven years now. Rather than make predictions about what the company will do in the coming year, I offer what it should do. The advice is unsolicited, but given nevertheless with the hope Microsoft will make 2011 better than 2010. As I asserted on December 14: "The year 2011 will be make or break."

Unlike past years' advice -- eh, resolutions -- this list is more thematic. Microsoft has a huge perception problem, and as I've so many times asserted: In business perception is everything. The people with the loudest voices, such as analysts, bloggers, journalists, marketers and software developers are pining for companies like Apple or Google. This translates directly to Microsoft's share price, which is moribund and undervalued. In November I asked: "Why won't Wall Street give Microsoft a break?" Perception is a major part of the answer.

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This afternoon, Techmeme published its top-50 tech stories of the year. What's crazy is how few of them are actually news stories. Twenty-one of the top 50 are either tech company blog posts or press releases -- that means corporate issued. Six of the top 10 stories came directly from companies, such as Apple CEO Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" (ranked No. 2) or Andy Rubin's Google blog post about the changes in Nexus One availability (No. 4). The list says something about the tech news you read and who really influences it.

Take for example Rubin's post on Nexus One. Many tech blogs or new sites are still calling Nexus One a failure (I'm not one of them). But clearly somebody was interested in the Google smartphone for it to rank in Techmeme's top 5. Nine Google blog posts appear on the list -- get this -- four in the top 10. Two are about Google's search policy changes in China. With all talk about Apple, Google's influence shouldn't be underestimated -- at least as measured by Techmeme. Including actual news stories, Google makes the list 13 times.

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Lake Superior State University, noted for being the smallest public university in the state of Michigan with a student body of only 3,000, has released a list of words and phrases it has "banished" for the year of 2010. While many of the banished phrases are terms that are abused by media and marketers, some of the terms that top the list are actually those most commonly used by the anonymous masses.

The Lake Superior State University 2011 List of Banished Words is topped by "Viral," the term once used to describe a marketing strategy that turned an ad's viewer into a "carrier" of a marketing message, it has now grown to mean anything that gains online popularity in a sudden, explosive fashion.

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My last set of year-end retrospectives surprises me, and some Betanews readers may feel the same. Many commenters accuse me of shilling for Apple, of being a fanboy, which I always dismiss. But in looking over my own Apple posts over the last year, I see just how biting are the topics or analyses and wonder what are these fanboy claimers reading. As a group, the posts are insightful -- even though some Macheads' blog rebuttals will assert otherwise. From some one in the Mac camp will come the PC fanboy accusation, which also is untrue.

Unlike the top-10 story lists for Google and Microsoft, this one is more thematic, in part because of CEO Steve Jobs' incredible visible influence over Apple in 2010, following a media leave due to liver-transplant surgery in 2009. One of the best ways to understand how Apple operates and where it's going is to understand the mind of Jobs. He gave unusual opportunities to do just that this year. Among the top-five stories on this list, four are specifically about him.

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Users of 4chan may have gotten a taste of their own medicine after the site was knocked offline by a DDoS attack from an unknown origin early Thursday morning. The attack came amid an FBI raid on a Texas collocation facility as part of a wider investigation into an attack on PayPal.

4chan may have been indirectly involved in the attack, which has also been blamed on a group that calls itself "Operation: Payback." Operation Payback is also believed to have involvement in attacks on Visa and MasterCard. In all cases, the attacks were in response to the suspension of accounts associated with WikiLeaks.

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Web retailer Amazon.com has released a few end of the year lists that show what people were buying in 2010. Among its "holiday hot sellers" list, Amazon said Smith Micro's Anime Studio Debut 7 and Manga Studio Debut 4 were two pieces of software that were given the most as gifts, along with Adobe Photoshop Elements 9.

When looking at the rising tide of app store-based software distribution, the popularity of netbooks and ultra slim PCs with no optical drives, and the hype surrounding smartphones, tablets, and Web terminals like Google's Chrome OS, boxed software like these would appear to be under serious threat of extinction. But good old fashioned boxed software serves a major purpose and has a specific group of consumers to whom it appeals.

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Google is often the target of the net faithful's ire for its ever increasing size and so-called "evilness." That distinction may now belong to Facebook, as Hitwise said Thursday the site now leads all others -- including Google -- as being both the most visited and most searched for in the US.

Facebook accounted for 8.93 percent of all traffic for the period of January through November 2010, followed by Google with 7.13 percent. Rounding out the top five were Yahoo Mail with 3.52 percent, Yahoo with 3.3 percent, and YouTube with 2.65 percent.

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It's the question to ask with the Mac App Store launching in one week. Software takes up valuable shelf space Apple could use for other things, particularly in many of its smaller boutique-sized shops. I've asked Apple PR if the company plans to stop selling software at its retail stores but received no answer before posting.

Apple is notorious for pulling the plug on something and pushing the consumer market forward, whether or not it's ready to move. I remember when in 1998, with launch of the Bondi Blue iMac, Apple removed legacy ports, shifting to FireWire and USB. A decade later, Apple ditched the internal optical drive on the original MacBook Air. The newer model replaces the hard drive with solid-state storage. There are many other examples and some quite displeasing to consumers, when Apple releases something new incompatible with what its customers already have.

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One of the major advantages Barnes and Noble's Nook e-reader offered over Amazon's Kindle was the ability to lend other users e-books that you had purchased. Today, Amazon closed that gap when it announced Kindle Book Lending.

Just like Barnes and Noble's Nook, Kindle users can now share certain books they have purchased with friends for a period of 14 days. From the "Manage Your Kindle" menu in your Amazon account, you can select "loan this book," and then enter the recipient's e-mail address and name. They do not have to own the Kindle hardware, and can read the book in any of the free Kindle applications. If one receives an e-mail alerting you that someone has loaned you a book, you have seven days to initiate the loan and start the 14 day loan period.

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