Novell's openSUSE has been getting some press lately. To move along their gamble for enterprise Linux, they conducted a massive survey (of sorts) in which they have compiled the ratings of some 27,000 + users and have come up with a profile of the folks who use Linux.

No, wait. That's not truly *all* Linux users. It's only openSUSE users. Sample bias and all that. To quote the questionnaire:

And then, there's the fun in noting the "Document Properties" of this PDF file:

Is it just me or is there some delicious irony in that?

Anyway, so, basically, this Apple Macintosh created pdf file is a *general survey* of opinions and usage experiences of openSUSE for the developers and those working in and around openSUSE. Nothing more, nothing less. It shows that the majority of users are males in their 20's who consider themselves computer savvy (quick, act surprised). However most are not IT types the survey concludes. But some of the interesting facts the survey came up with were:

• Some 70% of users Dual boot both Windows and openSUSE Linux. (This means not even the people who have jumped on the Linux bandwagon have altogether abandoned Windows).
• Almost 90% have a DSL/Broadband internet connection. (Which is useful as most Linux distro’s need updating right after installation–how's that for an end-user OS?)
• Over 70% chose the KDE interface instead of Gnome when using OpenSuse Linux. (Good to know. Haven't we had it with Gnome lovers–guys, Gnome just looks butt-ugly.)
• Over 85% indicated that they have no involvement with openSUSE and don’t even file bug reports. (Ha!)
• Over 60% use OpenSuse Linux was private use. (Not surprising, because openSUSE is the non-enterprise version. Who conducted this survey?)

A quick glance at the grand survey will reveal several oddities. For instance, "Question 4. What's your profession" ? Now just about anyone who can spell Linux knows the number one profession among Linux users…um, and it's the one profession that can legally get away with being 98% male (a good friend of mine is 98% male), with an age of around 25–30. Duh? Some of the final questions in the survey were interesting–about various aspects of the OS, such as hardware support, stability, security, software and so forth. On a scale of 1 to 5 most scored the OS in the 3 to 4 range. The highest rating 4.56 was for price. Is that indicative? Hmm. For a free OS..

This is a classic (and moronic) PR damage control after the flak that Novell picked up by getting in bed with Microsoft. A survey clearly written for corporate clients, reapplied and repackaged for openSUSE users as a ruse to appear committed to open-source and Linux.

Rob Cringley reports that IBM Global Services (including them unlucky souls from PricewaterhouseCoopers) will go in for massive layoffs, to the tune of 150,000. Reason? The usual. Cost efficiencies from offshoring to India.

I hate to prick the balloon but that cannot, and should not, be the reason for such a whopping round of layoffs. I have worked with PwC on the technology strategy side, the "management consulting" bit. This unit of the auditing monolith was later famously acquired by IBM (after being called "Monday" for about a couple of weeks–I bet Wolff Olins, the brand consultancy, must have made pants of money on that fun little vacation of imagination). I have since worked in several digital and interactive outfits, more from a marketing/media perspective, but only gained a better understanding of what makes technology-centric companies tick. Which is why this announcement is a bit difficult to comprehend.

What a Technology Manager Should Think Before Outsourcing

Let's say you've got small project. This project has 5 or 6 guys working on it. They've been at it for years, have written a good bit of the core underlying platform, and as such, know everything about it and can generally tell you exactly where the problem is if you call them with a problem.

Now you fire all those guys and hire a bunch of guys from some Balakambastan at 1/6 the original team's salary. Even if the original team hangs around to train the new guys, the new guys have to ramp up from scratch. And you can rest assured, these kinds of handovers are seldom whole-hearted. Even if this new breed of cheap programmers is excellent, it's going to take the team a good 6 months to a year to get comfortable with any decent sized code, regardless of how stunning the documentation is. During that time the overall application design will get slightly worse as they try to implement new features in ways that don't fit in with the original application design.

In the mean time you've got 150 other tech companies realizing that people in the rapidly growing market of Balakambastan will work for peanuts and they'll all move in to the country. Now your new team of programmers are realizing that they can get more peanuts if they do the same sort of job hopping that was prevalent in the 90s dotcom heydays to get more peanuts. So over the course of the next year your new team is replaced by even newer people, whom you have to pay a lot more money, and who are completely unfamiliar with your code base again.

So now you're paying your latest bunch of Balakambastanis as much as you were paying your original programming team, but these new guys have little to no experience with your code base. Well done!

The truth is — you can only save money in this manner if you buy into the delusion that people are pluggable resources, or that experience counts for nothing (yes, I have also seen people with 30 years of useless experience, but I speak of actual, good quality experience here). To people who believe that in theory you can get as much done with a summer intern as you can with someone with 20 years of technical experience, my simple advice: give it a shot. One of my favorite quotes:

Outsourcing is great and all, but done en masse, and with such stupor, it only reflects the senseless mismanagement of a giant corporation. Stop by ibmemployee and you will see wherein lies the real malaise of a giant blunder of this nature. A picture is worth a thousand words:

First they called it Video on Demand. Then they called it the big bad world of broadband video, which would overtake everything. Next, Youtube, then Googtube, and the promise of User Created Content. It even made its way into small portable devices such as mobile phones. Now, IPTV and the promise of Joost and Zattoo. Conan O' Brien gets it dead right:

Remember the Windows error reporting screen? Apparently, it's success has prompted Microsoft to adopt a whole new quality management program designed to allow its Windows programmers to share users' pains. Hence the "We Share Your Pain" or WSYP program.

No point regurgitating what's extensively and pain-stakingly documented on their IT's Showtime website. There's even a video to introduce you quickly to the whole program, which I highly recommend watching before you click on to the website:

NYT is running a misleading (to put it mildly) article titled "Corrupted PC's Find New Home In the Dumpster" which basically advocates throwing out your old PC and getting a new one if you get infected by worms or viruses.

The story mentions a chump with a "Computer Science PHD" who, upon realizing that his comp was infested with worms trojans and other creepy crawlies, sent his machine packing and bought a "400 US$ Dell".
:withstupid:

This induces frowns on so many levels, I don't have enough time to make a counterpoint. How much did Dell or HP pay to get this story in the door? If you see that 400$ Dell will ya let me know, thanks.

Windows users, once and for all, get yourself these utilities and live happily everafter:

It's about time Joe and Jane stopped thinking a PC is like a blender, it doesn't just sit there and do stuff. You need regular maintenance. Buying a new machine won't cut it, much like any other machine. It takes much less time to maintain a PC than to buy a new one altogether. One would hope NYT would realize *at least* that much before allowing this punter journalist to step on his soapbox.

Can't get enough nerdiness on Slashdot and Kuro5hin? Starting Sept. 6, PBS will broadcast a Web-exclusive downloadable series featuring the best of the nerd lot.

Dubbed NerdTV^{â„¢ ?}, the series of 13 one-hour shows will be hosted by technology columnist and industry insider Robert X. Cringely.

Cringely, author of "Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date," will interview such nerd notables as Pay-Pal co-founder Max Levchin, original Macintosh programmer Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Joy, father of Berkeley UNIX.

In a column on pbs.org last week, Cringely offered a bunch of nerd-friendly production and format specs for the series and stressed that NerdTV will be distributed under a Creative Commons license, which means viewers can redistribute the shows at will. Which is an interesting development, the CC license is beginning to be heralded among music circles as well, because it affords an artist the ability to remix and mash licensed songs as they see fit for non-commercial purposes. Personally, I can't wait to make my own 'remixed' versions of Cringely's show for my own nefarious purposes.

If, like me, you're tired of running into loads of spam on Technorati and Feedster these days, you know how exciting the prospect of blog-only searching by the two big tyke search engines is. At Technorati, I even have old posts coming up as new, occasionally followed by no search results at all, one time and huge list on the same results the next time. If this fascinating Business Week article is any indication, these scalability issues are anything but going away.

Google would be the first usual suspect to introduce this functionality with it's acquisition of Blogger, but looks like Yahoo has been making most of the first strides (e.g., Creative Commons search).

Now, Steve Rubel exposes Yahoo's stealth blog/RSS search engine, which has since been taken down. From Rubel's screenshot, it looks like Yahoo simply applied its web search engine to a corpus of blog posts, i.e. yet another Feedster.

Read all about these interests from SearchEngineWatch here.

Coming soon.

Looks like search engines have a long way to go before they can truly mine relevant bits of information.

An Associated Press writer had a go at the leading search engines — Yahoo, Google, MSN — against the more focused ones like Answers.com from GuruNet, Ask.com.

Wonder why Vivisimo was not included, its clustering technology is the cat's pajamas. In my own makeshift test, testing all the questions mentioned in the above review, Vivisimo and Clusty threw excellent answers for pretty much every question. Good reason why I'm now an addicted convert.

On the heels of Google Wallet comes Paypal's announcement to launch a web payment system that will allow site owners to offer paid content without their readers having to leave the site. eBay made US$ 233 million with Paypal in the first quarter of 2005 so the business merits are clear.

In plain English, Paypal is now offering payment processing capabilities of a merchant account and gateway, like one from Worldpay or 2Checkout, without the added hassle of redirecting through an external website.

Currently, if you want your site to offer paid content, you can use Paypal but your site's users have to pass through a Paypal interface. With Website Payments Pro, that'd be unnecessary. Here's how Paypal describes it:

The Paypal site provides a handy demo so you can get a good sense for how this works.