My schedule is hectic beyond words this week but I want to take time out for the periodic Secretly Ironic Awards for Technology Journalism:
The Junket Award goes to someone who attended Brainshare during a warm spell but came away with the impression that it was “icy,” because he appears to have spent the conference skiing in the nearby mountains: Eric Doyle for the Guardian. He manages to be condescending, insulting, and inaccurate, all at once. Congrats on the trifecta, buddy!
And the Bring-a-Pencil award goes to Elizabeth Millard of Enterprise Linux IT (a.k.a. CIO Today), which (before correction) managed to discuss the brand of Novell Linux Desktop while calling it “Novell Desktop System,” obviously confusing it with the Sun Java Desktop System. She also managed to ignore the “SUSE LINUX” in “SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server” while pointing out the increase in Novell branding on Open Enterprise Server, and overlooked the “Powered by SUSE LINUX” tagline on every copy of Novell Linux Desktop. The much-heralded death of journalism seems to have been caused by a lack of taking some notes and doing some fact-checking. This article gets a special bonus for consulting the notoriously misleading Yankee Group hack Laura DiDio.
To both of you, congratulations: you are the reason that journalists have a bad reputation.
Secretly Ironic 