Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!glacier!reid From: reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.group Subject: Re: more interim results from worldwide net readership poll Message-ID: <5249@glacier.ARPA> Date: Wed, 12-Mar-86 13:41:35 EST Article-I.D.: glacier.5249 Posted: Wed Mar 12 13:41:35 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 14-Mar-86 07:48:40 EST References: <5192@glacier.ARPA> <1994@hao.UUCP> Reply-To: reid@glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid) Organization: Stanford University, Computer Systems Lab Lines: 37 Xref: watmath net.news:4664 net.news.group:5204 Baloney, Greg. Leaving out one site means nothing. Leaving out a backbone site means nothing. For that matter, leaving out 100 sites or 20% of the backbone, means nothing. If a significant fraction of the net (perhaps more than 30%) cannot run the Bourne shell, then it is perhaps worth worrying about making a version of this data-gathering scheme that uses some other shell. As far as I am concerned, this data is already pretty useful with only 1% of the net reporting in. By the time 30% of the net reports in, almost any 30%, I believe that the statistical quality of the readership data will be so much better than any other metric ever applied to the network that nit-picky objections about how this or that site can't/hasn't report in will be vacant. The biggest single problem with the network in its 6 years of existence has been that the loud, angry users get all the attention. What I am doing is collecting data from and about people who would otherwise never respond. I now have information from 1000 people's .newsrc files, and complaints from 7 people that my survey is unfair because it didn't handle their wierd special case properly (can't run csh, didn't find my .newsrc because I keep it in a funny place, doesn't count because I use home-made shell scripts for reading news and they don't update .newsrc, etc.) I have no interest in hearing from all of the hackers. I want to hear from and about the people who would never dream of arguing about things like this, but who are net readers. I claim that my shell script, even if it won't run on your machine, is picking up that data. This data is not perfect. I'll grant that. It might not even be accurate to within 20%. But it is 100 times more accurate than any other data anybody else has. Let's collect this round of data, and look at it, and then talk about ways of making marginal improvements on the data-gathering techniques. Brian Reid Stanford (soon to be Brian Reid DEC Western Research Laboratory) -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA