From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Nov 4 00:23:48 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C9CF0106567A for ; Tue, 4 Nov 2008 00:23:48 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from murray@stokely.org) Received: from rv-out-0506.google.com (rv-out-0506.google.com [209.85.198.236]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A66508FC08 for ; Tue, 4 Nov 2008 00:23:48 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from murray@stokely.org) Received: by rv-out-0506.google.com with SMTP id b25so2694034rvf.43 for ; Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:23:48 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.140.141.16 with SMTP id o16mr426910rvd.209.1225756868422; Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:01:08 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.141.151.6 with HTTP; Mon, 3 Nov 2008 16:01:08 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <2a7894eb0811031601h3ed4c41flf0bc90679da62ecd@mail.gmail.com> Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 16:01:08 -0800 From: "Murray Stokely" To: witt@cylogistics.com In-Reply-To: <02fb01c93e09$b011e3c0$1035ab40$@com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <47BB6151991A555176831AB5@ganymede.hub.org> <02fb01c93e09$b011e3c0$1035ab40$@com> X-Mailman-Approved-At: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:31:43 +0000 Cc: "Marc G. Fournier" Subject: Re: BSDstats: New High Water Mark: 25 000+ Hosts Reporting In X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:23:48 -0000 [BCCed others] On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 3:12 PM, Don Witt wrote: > This is very cool. What is up with NetBSD and OpenBSD. Are these numbers > accurate? These numbers represent the number of people that have installed a program to report usage, and are almost completely uncorrelated with actual usage rates. There needs to be a big warning at the top of these very misleading reports. Also, the massive spam to many different lists is not ideal. Any guess at actual "usage" numbers would be many orders of magnitude larger, and PC-BSD would be a rounding error to other BSDs used in large hosting environments (nothing against the great work being done by PC-BSD, just a fact based on desktop vs server focus). I continue to believe that sending out these numbers which massively undercount all operating systems is very counter-productive, but I've said that before. If you want to get better numbers you could try to survey all web servers on the internet, identify the host operating systems by server responses, tcp/ip timing characteristics, or other heuristics. You could alternatively mine google analytics / webserver log data for large websites if you want client numbers, or countless other data sources that would give you far more data than this self reporting mechanism, and with a much better sample than the very biased mechanism used for these numbers. - Murray