Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 13:31:35 +1100 (EST) From: "Tim Clewlow" <tim@clewlow.org> To: "Murray Stokely" <murray@stokely.org> Cc: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org>, freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: BSDstats: New High Water Mark: 25 000+ Hosts Reporting In Message-ID: <66f8907fb3b0da766ce4aad67d2783a8.squirrel@192.168.1.100> In-Reply-To: <2a7894eb0811031601h3ed4c41flf0bc90679da62ecd@mail.gmail.com> References: <47BB6151991A555176831AB5@ganymede.hub.org> <02fb01c93e09$b011e3c0$1035ab40$@com> <2a7894eb0811031601h3ed4c41flf0bc90679da62ecd@mail.gmail.com>
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> [BCCed others] > > On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 3:12 PM, Don Witt <witt@cylogistics.com> > 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. > > 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. > Or count the number of systems that call home, ie count the number of different IP addresses that talk to the *BSD servers to install or update themselves. Tim.
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