D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] Linux around the world

 

On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 11:42 +0100, george wrote:
> UK - must try harder
> 
> http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=340 

I don't think their methodology is particularly robust. Identification
of actual locations from IP addresses, browser ID or other forms of
"detected" variables only gives weak associations.

Another problem is that GNU/Linux users don't necessarily search for
linux but for particular driver names, applications, distributions, etc.

Also:

"It might also be worth pointing out that the results are normalized, so
the size of each region is removed as a factor. In other words,
everything is in proportion to the size of the region (the total number
of searches in that region, we assume). That means that larger regions
are not favored over small, as would be the case otherwise."

Ummm, no, actually. Normalizing by the number of searches does not
equate to normalizing by the population of that country. That declared
assumption is very, very weak.

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/


Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part

-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html