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Re: What is Linux and why is it so popular?

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____/ Terry Porter on Sunday 04 January 2009 04:56 : \____

> On Sun, 04 Jan 2009 04:02:26 +0100, OK wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:04:18 -0600, Terry Porter
>> <linux-2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>>>On Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:32:21 -0500, DFS wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dave wrote:
>>>>> http://www.howstuffworks.com/question246.htm
>>>
>>>> Popularity graph:
>>>
>>>Linux @ 24.2% > Windows Vista @ 19.5
>>>
>>>
>>>Windows      1933    64.4 %
>>>Windows XP   1213    40.4 %
>>>Windows Vista        586     19.5 %
>>>Windows CE   28      0.9 %
>>>Windows 2003 24      0.7 %
>>>Windows 2000 82      2.7 %
>>>Linux        729     24.2 %
>>>Ubuntu       264     8.7 %
>>>Suse 33      1 %
>>>Mandriva (or Mandrake)       35      1.1 %
>>>Fedora       20      0.6 %
>>>Debian       16      0.5 %
>>>GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution)      361     12 %
>>>Macintosh    178     5.9 %
>>>Mac OS X     178     5.9 %
>>>Others       161     5.3 %
>>>Unknown      161     5.3 %
>> 
>> Wow, stats from a wopping 3000 hits... is that a year's worth of
>> visitors on your site, or two years perhaps?
> 
> Jan09 stats, i.e. 4 days worth actually.
> 
> Perhaps you would care to share the stats from your own home based web
> server ?

The stats the trolls point to are not legitimate.

"So I went and looked. Here is the description of the database used by the
Market Share service that everyone seems to rely on:


    We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive
on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from
approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information published is an
aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics. The site
unique visitor and referral information is summarized on a monthly basis. 

WTF?

Is this supposed to be some kind of unbiased sample? But wait, there's more:

    In addition, we classify 430+ referral sources identified as search
engines. Aggregate traffic referrals from these engines are summarized and
reported monthly. The statistics for search engines include both organic and
sponsored referrals. The websites in our population represent dozens of
countries in regions including North America, South America, Western Europe,
Australia / Pacific Rim and Parts of Asia.


Well, that means more data, but does it mean less bias? Or more bias? Here's
some additional information; a summary of features of the sampled population:
# 76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites.
# 43% are commerce sites
# 18% are corporate sites
# 10% are content sites
# 29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers
etc..)

OK. We are asking the question: How many people are running Linux. Maybe we are
asking how many computers are running Linux. These are not the same question.
But the data we have comes from people using the internet to access sites, and
there are two data sets. Mine and theirs."

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/07/is_linux_getting_the_shaft.php

- -- 
                ~~ Best of wishes

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