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McGraw-Hill. Ever heard of them? If you’ve picked up any textbook written in the last hundred years or so, chances are they published it. Well, their CEO just spilled the beans on Apple’s not-so-secret surprise on live TV.

Going beyond confirming that it’s the much-fabled Tablet, Terry McGraw confirms that they “have worked with Apple for quite a while” on this – so unless this guy has gone on a crazy binge, it’s pretty likely he knows what hes talking about. He goes on to matter-of-factly state that the tablet will be based on the “iPhone operating system”. The words, straight out of McGraw’s mouth:

“Yeah, Very exciting. Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable. So what you are going to be able to do now is we have a consortium of e-books. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in e-book format on that one. So now with the tablet you’re going to open up the higher education market, the professional market. The tablet is going to be just really terrific.”

The recession brought layoffs to many white-collar companies, prompting tenants to downsize their offices and sometimes plead for rent reductions. Strapped landlords saw their revenues fall as fewer tenants paid less money to occupy their buildings.Southern California property professionals are saying good riddance to 2009's rising office vacancies and falling rents, and conjuring hope for somewhat better times later this year.

Real estate brokerage Colliers International tellingly headlined a recent report: "2009: End of a year gone bad." And the folks at Voit Real Estate Services began a retrospective with the line: "Let's just say it's nice to have 2009 behind us."

Perhaps the best news coming out of the fourth quarter was that the ongoing rise in commercial vacancies slowed noticeably, and many expect the rental market to finally bottom out by the middle of this year. Unfortunately for landlords, though, it may take a long time for their buildings to fill up again. That means more bargains ahead for tenants.

Overall office vacancy in the fourth quarter in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties was 18.5%, a substantial jump from 14.4% a year earlier, according to commercial real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield."Vacancies are up, and I believe they will continue to go up this year as we have continued job losses," said Joe Vargas, leader of the company's Southern California offices.

Rents vary widely by neighborhood, but average monthly rents landlords asked for at the start of negotiations fell to $2.41 a square foot from $2.68 in the fourth quarter of 2008.

For most companies, last year's theme was "hold the fort," never mind "grow the business." Few expanded into a larger space, even if they did move. More than 40% of all lease transactions in 2009 were renewals at the same amount of space or less, Vargas said.

"In a normal year, people upgrade or need more space" when their leases expire, he said. "Last year was about controlling expenses."

An office market recovery is on hold until companies start hiring -- and keep hiring, brokers agree. Right now, many firms have shrunk but are still renting the same amount of space they had in fatter days. Before they can grow enough to expand into bigger offices, they need to do enough hiring to fill up what they already have.

"All the vacant space out there still doesn't reflect all the jobs that were lost," said Whitley Collins, regional managing director of real estate brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle.

Shadow space, as leased but unused space is often called, is impossible to measure accurately, but there is surely enough of it to slow the commercial real estate comeback. Office leasing growth usually lags behind economic recovery by six to nine months, Collins said. A local office market recovery might be as much as 18 months behind the economy now because of shadow space.

Also worrisome for landlords, Collins said, is that the recession provoked business owners to look hard at how they use office space and try to find ways to cut back. Efficiencies such as smaller work areas for employees and shared "hotel-style" offices for professionals who travel frequently may become permanent.

Law firms, which traditionally have had large, opulent offices, got religion during the recession, Collins said. Some firms that once set aside 700 square feet per attorney have cut back to about 500 square feet each, he said.

Among the few categories of businesses that are demanding more office space are healthcare and education, Vargas said. "People are going back to school to trade schools and universities to [help] find their next job," he said.

Downtown Los Angeles was among the most stable office markets last year even though some of its largest buildings have substantial amounts of empty space, brokers said. Vacancy rose to 16.7% in the fourth quarter from about 14% a year earlier, but asking rents have fallen only 13 cents per foot to an average of $2.92 and downtown landlords are the most successful at getting close to the rates they want, Cushman & Wakefield said.

The larger Westside office market has been more volatile, but landlords there still seek the highest average rents at $3.43 per square foot, down from $4.12 a year earlier.

Orange County also has been volatile. Its offices were nearly filled during the boom years, but vacancy has almost tripled since 2007 to more than 20% and rents have tumbled, Vargas said.

Although unemployment is still high and dragging down the office market, the nation's overall economic outlook has improved and that should help, brokers said. Business leaders are breathing easier than they were a year ago.

Need to disappear from Facebook or Twitter? Now you can scrub yourself from the Internet with Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a nifty service that purges your online presence from these all-consuming social networks. Since its Dec. 19 launch, Suicide Machine has assisted more than 1,000 virtual deaths, severing more than 80,500 friendships on Facebook and removing some 276,000 tweets from Twitter.

Once you hand over your log-in details and click Commit, the program will methodically delete your info — Twitter tweets, MySpace contacts, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections — much like users could do manually. What remains is a brittle cyberskeleton: a profile with no data. Users seem to love it. Testimonials range from joyous farewells ("Goodbye, cruel world!") to good-riddance denouements ("Thank you, microblogging. You are, in fact, totally useless"). Suicide Machine is so popular that thousands of people are waiting their turn for their own cyberoffing. "Our server is so busy handling the requests," says Suicide Machine co-creator Walter Langelaar.

Not everyone thinks the proposition is so cool. The uptick in social suicides has put Facebook in a tizzy. In an e-mail to Suicide Machine's founders — Langelaar, 32; Gordan Savicic, 30; and Danya Vasiliev, 31 — Facebook demanded that they "cease this activity immediately," citing a violation of users' privacy. But the founders disagree, saying users voluntarily hand over their log-in details. Though Facebook blocked Suicide Machine from accessing its site earlier this month, Suicide Machine's creators, and the suicides, are continuing. "Compared to the more than 350 million users [on Facebook], we think deleting a few hundred is not very impressive," says Langelaar. "But they picked up on it as a potential threat." LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter have not yet publicly responded.

Langelaar, who is based in Rotterdam, and Vasiliev, who works in Berlin, first met in 2002 during their undergraduate studies. The pair met Savicic while in art school in the Netherlands in 2007. They describe their work as "geek chic." Suicide Machine isn't the first collaborative new-media project for the trio, who also operate media lab Moddr and are members of the Rotterdam-based artist collective Worm. Inspiration for the Web 2.0–suicide idea took root when Worm threw a 2008 New Year's Eve party themed "Web 2.0 Suicide Night." Recalls Langelaar: "The idea was that everybody would be nice and analog."