Came here to say this. And your experience pretty much mirrors my experience. I was just getting ready to go to college when the news came through. At the time I started checking CNN site was melting while Slashdot was still up and running providing news and help. It was indeed one of the finest hours of Slashdot.

With both engadget and Gizmodo getting their hands on the "next iPhone" in different bars in different cities, it is difficult to believe that somebody actually lost the phones. Either both engadget and Gizmodo got fooled or this is more a marketing campaign than lost phones. I would bet on latter.

Solaris, Java, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org, everything is staying according to Thomas Kurian and Ed Screven. Only thing I didn't hear about was OpenSolaris. There is also going to be an Oracle Cloud Office, online docs like Google Docs.

Thanks for summing up the situation quite well.

Where I work, managers are mostly promoted from their engineering positions than hired. And it is usually the good ones who get promoted. So whether they end up being good managers or not, they do continue to be good technically. Ours is a big company, so we do have our chaff. We have managers who were good technically, but wanted to have the "easy" life of management or managers who were promoted to management where they shouldn't have been promoted. This group is a minority though and the members of this group usually get sidelined from the people who do actual work.

Also, at least in my company, management life is not completely easy life. Tech is the better life and higher you get in tech, the more you get to go home at a regular time. For many of the managers, they need to work with teams in different countries. There are managers with teams in India and China, having conference calls managing their teams during nights and meetings during the days with their bosses and peers. There is flexibility on when and how you work, but that flexibility works both ways. As a manager you are expected to be available at mornings and evenings beyond the working hours.

You have to know tech either way, whether you continue to be in tech or go in to management, you have to know the tech and update yourself continuously if you want to hold your own. With that in mind, if management does make you happy, go for it.

Pretty much all the Big Companies will have operations in all the countries in the report. I can tell for a fact that my company does. So I don't think the big companies argument holds water. Btw, the report has the criteria for measurement and the criteria are fairly objective.