On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:19:38 -0400, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:48:05 -0000, El Tux wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:38:44 -0400, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
>>
>>> Tell me, how can an OS that is supposed to be so great, and is free,
>>> still hover at 0.6 percent of the desktop market despite Microsoft
>>> screwing up left and right and don't kid yourself Vista IS a screwup
>>> IMHO anyway....
>>>
>>> Why so many downloads yet so low a usage figure?
>>
>> Maybe because website statistics have long since been discredited as a
>> valid indicator of desktop-OS usage?
>
> Except the fact that they all seem to agree more of less on the 0.6
> percent or so figure.
>
> At least the ones that are neutral in this, like the BBC, or the
> w3schools sites.
But, is it valid to assume that Linux users would be as attracted to BBC
as Windows or Apple users? People who embrace a niche OS like Linux tend
to be individualistic and - according to the wintrolls here - elitist.
Will they get their news from the same place "everyone else" does, or
will they perhaps seek some less-traveled path? Do Linux users spend
the same amount of time surfing the Web or visit the same number of
sites as Windows/Apple users? Does their use of Linux lead to an
interest in different kinds of sites from Windows/Apple users?
When I started using Linux I began spending more time exploring its tens
of thousands of free applications and learning to do all kinds of neat
things with it, and less time puttering around on the Internet. The time
I did spend on the Internet came to be dominated by Linux-related news,
howto's, discussion groups, project forums, and Linux newsgroups.
Pre-Linux, I spent a lot of time on tucows and softpedia digging for
usable software, and on Amazon scouring the user-reviews in preparation
for making costly commercial-software purchases. The first two also
carry Linux software and Amazon is a general retail site, so you'd think
all three would be OS-neutral. Yet, if you'd been using any of those
sites to count OS-hits, you'd have my many hundreds of visits as a
Windows user but no visits when I switched to Linux and no longer needed
them (I don't need tucows or softpedia because I only use distro's with
their own repositories). Think that might skew the results some?
Visit the web-statistics sites, and you often find warnings like this
one:
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
"Caution : stats mislead. Caching distorts raw data; audiences vary for
each site; methodologies vary for each survey; surveys miss or omit
important details; surveys mis-identify browsers or other user agents;
some search spiders pose as browsers; small sample sizes exaggerate
fluctuations; and stats don't count those who stay away because
their browsers are not supported."
"Caution Caution : browser stats may help you decide when a browser is so
uncommon that a site need not support people who use it; and the stats
may satisfy the curious; but the stats are useful for little else."
...
"The best stats for a site are the stats gathered for that particular
site: and even these are skewed by caching and faulty
browser-detection. For example, consider Kerry Watson's Browser
Statistics page: this page uses three different hit counters whose
reports should be comparable; but they are not, in part because of
faulty browser detection."
"Bottom line: use statistics with extreme caution."
Or, how about this one:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
"Statistics Are Often Misleading"
"You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics
can often be misleading."
"Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site. Different
sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional
developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract
hobbyists using old low spec computers."
"Also be aware that many statistics may have an incomplete or faulty
browser detection. It is quite common by many web-stats report programs,
not to detect the newest browsers."
"(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we
are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the
quality of these figures)."
This page is a bit dated but is still educational:
http://www.j3e.de/statistics_lie.html
After explaining in detail many sources of error in web statistics, the
author wraps up with:
"...What do we conclude from all this? The number of hits in a log file
doesn't say anything, it says nothing about how many people are using a
certain browser. Ready made statistics published by so called "analysts"
say even less - they lie. To get statistics which are just a little bit
near reality it's not enough to have a program which analyzes a log
file, it needs some mathematical background and a good understanding of
what is going on there at all. I never saw a webserver statistic that
was not totally dumb."
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