LJ Index

  1. Total compensation in $billions for the top executives at the top 807 companies in Silicon Valley in last fiscal year: 4.8
  2. Above number as a multiple of the prior year: 2
  3. Percent decline in stock prices of the MN 150 Index, which tracks the largest Silicon Valley companies over the same period: 24
  4. Number of times the word "shit" appears in the first South Park program of the latest season on Comedy Central, according to an odometer that displayed a running count on the screen: 142
  5. Number of emails received by the Comedy Central in response to the same South Park Episode: 4
  6. Percentage of received emails supportive of profanity in the episode: 100
  7. Number of patents issued in the year 2000 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office: 158,118
  8. Position of IBM among companies receiving U.S. patents in 2000: 1
  9. Number of U.S. patents issued to IBM: 2,886
  10. Number of U.S. companies in the top ten recipients of U.S. patents in 2000: 4
  11. Number of Japanese companies in the same top ten: 6
  12. Losses in $millions by Webvan when it went Chapter 11 in July 2001: 860
  13. Number of pages crawled by Google: 1,346,966,000
  14. Number of Google-searched pages in which "sun" appears: 25,500,000
  15. Number of Google-searched pages on which "microsoft" appears: 20,200,000
  16. Number of Google-searched pages on which "dell" appears: 14,700,000
  17. Number of Google-searched pages on which "solution" appears: 13,300,000
  18. Number of Google-searched pages in which "ibm" appears: 11,200,000
  19. Number of Google-searched pages in which "unix" appears: 10,900,000
  20. Number of Google-searched pages in which "perl" appears: 7,650,000
  21. Number of Google-searched pages in which "python" appears: 2,070,000
  22. Number of Google-searched pages on which "linux" appears: 31,600,000
  23. Linux-referenced pages per thousand Google finds on the Web: 2.35

Sources: 1-3, San Jose Mercury News; 4-6, The New Yorker; 7-11, United States Patent and Trademark Office; 12, Wall Street Journal; 13-23, Google, 12 July 2001.