Slashdot Mirror
Top U.S. Tech Cities
srizah writes "Wired.com claims to have used a 'scientific methodology' to rate the top 10 tech towns in the US. They use some very reliable indexes, like 'Craigslist postings per capita' or 'Number of attendees at local meetings of dorkbot'. The usual suspects (Seattle, San Francisco) show up on the list, but some might surprise you. From the article: 'Raleigh-Duram - The jocks here may get worked up about college hoops, but the tech set is passionate about Linux distros and Mac-PC holy wars. North Carolina's Triangle is ground zero for Red Hat, SAS Institute, and an IBM center. Bonus: The area hosts two World Beer Festivals a year.'"
Come on, nothing about Provo/Orem? Home of SCO AND Novell? Nothing says tech like "Most mentioned on Groklaw".
'Craigslist postings per capita'. Because we all know the number of Craigslist posting is about as scientific as one can get.
Does the scientific methodology involve personally sampling the beer festivals? Would be curious to see an equivilant evaluation in england heh :)
The geek that actually likes Windows. I got cookies.
How did this filler article get on Slashdot?
They have icons in the article that don't appear in the legend. AUSTIN has a spot for an icon without an icon. Somehow, the Bay Area doesn't have a university rating, even though it has Stanford and Cal.
I could go on, but I wasted enough of my time, and yours.
What about places like Los Alamos (LANL), Albuquerque (SNL, LM etc.) or Batavia (FNAL).
If by tech they only mean CS related stuff, then sure, that list makes sense.
But Los Alamos has some of the smartest and best people and has a lot of "real" tech.
I mean, if particle accelerators, rocket science and weapons tech. don't constitute real technology while AJAX is counted as a technology, I must be missing something.
Surely that's a negative index. What an utterly useless franchise.
- chad
It's "Durham". Jesus, Slashdot editors can't even copy and paste now? Is that a Linux problem?
But seriously, RDU shouldn't be a surprise. We have Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State all within 30 minutes or so from each other, and we have Research Triangle Park here. Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill was a great, cheap place to enjoy the dot-com boom. We've got IBM (10,000+ employees), Cisco, a small MS office, whatever MCI is now (worldcom?), Nortel, Ericsson, Red Hat, and tons and tons of start ups.
Also, UNC-Chapel Hill is home to Sunsite, which became ibiblio. So yeah, it's dork heaven, but without the SF prices.
Lots of suburban wasteland hell. Personally, I'd rather eat glass than go back to working there. So many boring IT companies doing boring stuff too. Yuck, but I guess somebody has to do it somewhere.
Assuming we can measure these, of course:
* PC boxes per capita
* Bittorrent activity
* Secured wifi networks per capita
* Wikipedia contributors
* Middle-aged men/women with same legal residence as parents
* Slashdot accounts
* Cowboyneal
*...others?
What about [insert city or region here]?! It has [insert club, university, or company here]!!! Because I live here or went to school here, it MUST be in this list!
Carl
Vote Libertarian
I assume you are talking about Irvine, California. It sucks for sure. Too many "planned communities" around there. Barf.
The rule of thumb for me is: if you have to do a U-Turn to get to a business on the left side of the street, I don't want to live or work there.
Irvine does get bonus points for the UC-Irvine mascot being the Anteater, however.
Vote Libertarian
Okay, who's next?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Portland, Oregon, had a free wireless project downtown FIVE YEARS AGO.
Is Circuit City really sponsoring this? I'd have thought they'd have chosen Fry's, instead, for a techie store.
The Portland area actually has both, actually.
And wtf is dorkbot? This seems all about promoting pet projects (or sponsors).
Slashdot should be able to pull a majority of our IPs and figure out what general area we are browsing the web from. Then you could compare how many unique hits you got from a particular state/providence/country vs the entire population of that area and get a "geek index". Might want to toss something in there for volume as well for corporations/schools, etc. Would not be completely accurate but a hell of a lot closer then the "circuit city index".
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
While it's clearly true that Austin is surrounded by Texas, that's not actually a downside. Texas has some of the most beautiful landscapes I've ever seen, and the close proximity of many interesting geographical features (Hamilton Pool, Enchanted Rock) is a definite plus for Austin.
Having grown up there, I'd say the actual downside is that Austin is surrounded by Texans.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Hewlett Packard is based in Silicon Valley. They may have an office in Portland, but the company's history is in California.
Only a true geek would describe lovebird calls as "pinging."
Well done! But you should have continued and called it the lovebird "handshake" protocol.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
The usual suspects (Seattle, San Francisco) show up on the list, but some might surprise you.
I looked at the list, and in fact it was mostly the usual suspects. I mean everyone knows there is a big tech presence in Raleigh/Durham and Austin. About the only really surprising inclusion is Orlando, and it was the most poorly justified of all of them. Substitute Portland, OR for Orlando on their list and you have basically the conventional wisdom on what the major tech centers in the US are.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre