Michael Tiemann is the chief nerd at Red Hat, a company with more than your average number of nerds. But right now his job is to make sure technology doesn't get ahead of people's ability to use it.

Red Hat is one of the prime participants in a movement that has channeled hundreds of programmers' collective energies into a product, a version of the Linux operating system. The company, which has become the top seller of Linux software and services, employs several top-ranking Linux programmers on its staff and probably has more control over the software's direction than any other single company.

Naturally, there's no shortage of new technologies bubbling up from the company, ranging from software that could standardize the way cell phones switch on to a program that holds records for delivering Web pages as fast as possible.

But Tiemann, winding up his first year as Red Hat's CTO, is focused instead on the Red Hat Network, a system the company just launched to make sure technology doesn't get ahead of the people who use it.

“We feel that the technology industry is at this point where the technology has exceeded a lot of people's capacity to take advantage of it,” Tiemann said in a recent interview.

Naturally, Red Hat hopes to make some money off the service by offering it as a subscription service that will automatically update Red Hat software and other Linux programs offered by Red Hat's business partners, Tiemann said.

Tiemann talked about the Red Hat Network, the new version 2.4 of the heart of Linux, and a host of other matters in an interview with CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland.

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