Numbers, Volume 21

“You’re over qualified.”

Jobless rates for men and women older than 55 are at their highest level since the Great Depression, government data show. White men over 55 had a record 6.5% unemployment rate in the second quarter, far above the previous post-Depression high of 5.4% in 1983. The jobless rate for older black men was higher — 10.5% — but more than a percentage point below its 1983 peak.

The most remarkable change is in the unemployment rate for black women: 12.2%, far below the historic peak of 20% in 1983. Hispanic unemployment is about 6 percentage points below historic highs, too.

In other words, this recession has shrunk the racial gap in unemployment, largely because white men are doing so much worse than usual.

While it’s great to see said racial gap narrowing – for sure – this kind of stuff infuriates me as I’ve been watching my dad suffer through this. I can’t imagine what junk-yard, dystopia my generation is going to end up in when we’re too expensive for “The Free Market.” It’s enough to make you want to start up a steady diet of Donut Burgers so you’ll never make it long enough to find out.

Care, but don’t ask

According to SearchDataCenter.com’s Data Center Decisions purchasing intentions survey, 84% of 670 respondents said that reducing data center power consumption was important. And yet according to the same report, 36% didn’t know how their power bills compared with the previous year.

Like “green numbers”? Keep an eye on Greenmonk for the new Green Numbers series, like the first one right here.

One man’s “business critical data” is another man’s MIPS in a corner

If Google collapsed or had their data centers in Silicon Valley interrupted with the loss of Google docs, YouTube, Google search, Maps and similarly Microsoft and/or Yahoo went offline… I’d suspect the whole notion that 70% of business critical data resides of mainframes would be laughable. Yes, a large percentage of purely text based transactional data is on mainframes and yes the value of those transactions exceeds any other platform, but that is far from 70% of anything much these days… Increasingly these days startups, SME’s and Web 2.0 business don’t use mainframes for even their text based transactional data.

Snail Mail

In the past 20 years, 200,000 mailboxes have vanished from city streets, rural routes and suburban neighborhoods — more than the 175,000 that remain. In the Washington area alone, half the blue boxes that were on the streets nine years ago have been pulled up and taken to warehouses to molt in storage or be sold for scrap, leaving 4,071 mailboxes remaining in the District, Northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs.

…

That downward trend is only accelerating. The [US] Postal Service projects a decline of about 10 billion pieces of mail in each of the next two years, going from a high of 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006 to 170 billion projected for 2010.

Spiceworks

To date, it appears like the model is working: Spiceworks IT Desktop is used to control 35 million devices. Also, the vendor has encouraged MSPs (who number 65,000, according to Spiceworks) to use its tools to develop services for their customers.

Remember 2005? Totally.

• 43% of today’s top sites were started in 1996 or earlier.
• The three “biggest” launch years, from largest to smallest: 1996, 1995, 2005.
• The sites launched in 1995, 1996 and 2005 together account for almost 48% of the top sites.
• Fun fact: The oldest site in the current top 50 is IMDB.com, which launched on the Web in 1992. The youngest is Bing.com, launched this year.

The News from Walldorf

German business management software maker SAP saw its second quarter total revenues drop 10 per cent compared to the same period a year earlier.

SAP reported total sales for the Q2 period ended 30 June of €2.58bn, compared to €2.86bn for the same quarter a year earlier.

“We’re happy for them, but we chose a different direction.”

Interesting that Verzion is laying off 8000 and had a 21% drop in profit yet claims that it doesn’t need iPhone to do well.

Code by the Numbers

While Google Code Search has been available through Google Labs for some time, DiBona revealed some telling — and potentially — unexpected findings about the state of open source.

He said Google’s found some 2.5 billion lines of open source code spread across 30 million unique files that the search giant’s identified via its code search crawl.

Via James.

VC Cash in Austin, Q2

• NextIO Inc., Virtualization technology, $15 million
• TechSkills LLC, IT certification and medical education programs, $8.35 million
• StoredIQ Inc., Storage management products, $7.63 million
• Nuventix Inc., Thermal management cooling systems, $4 million
• Pyxis Technology Inc., Chip design software $3 million
• Hospitalists Now Inc., Physician group practice, management & consulting firm, $2.5 million
• Molecular Templates Inc., Develops anti-cancer agents, $2.5 million
• Savara Inc., Develops inhalation drug delivery system, $833,000
• LabNow Inc., Develops diagnostic systems, $783,000
• iTaggit Inc. Web-based management information system $100,000
• Zilliant Inc., Pricing software and services, Not disclosed

Still, this is 33% down.

The Good Old Days

Over at an OSBC party, someone mentioned WebGain, which got me to Googling. When us old gray-hairs talk about “the good old days,” here it is, you young whipper-snappers:

WebGain has approximately 100,000 users and led the market for Java IDEs in 2000. The company had 22% market share in 2000, $44.7m in revenue, placing it ahead of number two Borland Software Corp on 19% market share and $40m according to IDC.

See what happened as well.

Disclosure: IBM, Spiceworks, and Microsoft are clients.