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Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet)Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet)Posted Jan 14, 2003 9:32 UTC (Tue) by beejaybee (guest, #1581)In reply to: Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet) by hazelsct Parent article: Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet) It's hard to count linux desktops installed - lots of people never pay or advertise in any other way the fact that they are using a linux desktop system. Mac desktop usage can easily be (over)estimated by sales of Mac systems. Windows desktop usage can easily be (badly over)estimated by sales of "Wintel" PCs. My guess is that Google Zeitgeist measured linux usage by sales of boxed linux sets from the "major players" and compared that with sales of Mac systems. Don't trust anyone's figures unless they're truly independent of sales outlets. Other people may well get different results, and I certainly do _not_ condone scanning random address spaces. However, if I run "nmap -O" on my employer's address space, during prime time, I see about 10 times as many Windows systems as linux systems, with Sun Solaris running at about half the level of linux, Netware about half the level of Solaris and everything else (including Macintosh, but ignoring embedded systems like network printers, switches, routers etc.) just the odd few. This measure may underestimate the proportion of Windows & Macintosh systems, since my impression is that senior staff who are less likely to actually have their system running are very likely to have Windows or Mac OS installed, and very unlikely to be linux users. Once there is significant penetration of linux on the desktop (& notebook) systems of staff at a senior executive level, world domination is just around the corner! As it happens my job description (as security coordinator for a university) specifically includes scanning our local address space for vulnerabilities. I would _strongly_ advise anyone wishing to check my figures against their own to check that you have proper authority to scan any systems that you do not _personally_ administer. Unauthorized scanning is probably a disciplinary offence, even if it is not specifically outlawed in your jurisdiction. As for "fearing the penguin" - Microsoft should have _nothing_ to fear, since they are so convinced that their system is superior in every way. So just why are they so fearful?
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Microsoft should 'fear the Penguin' (vnunet) Posted Jan 16, 2003 8:43 UTC (Thu) by webinfo (guest, #9107) [Link] Macintosh 2.61%, Linux .27%, Solaris .08%, FreeBSD .01%, all others less than .01% each -- for Jan 14th, 2003There are many caveats, please read on ... Hi - I work for WebSideStory. We provide web stats in an ASP model to a large group of the very highly trafficked web sites on the net - E.g. Disney, Best Buy, ESPN, Cisco, etc. Our big customers are largely US commercial web sites. We also provide service to medium, small and tiny web sites (we have a free product) all over the globe. This means that stats on 10 to 15 million unique web surfers a day pass through our software. We do this absolutely anonymously. No IP addresses or anything else personally identifiable is ever reported, just aggregated statistics. 10 to 15 million is a very large sample size. The percentages given above are what we saw yesterday, Jan 14th, 2003, from non-Microsoft operating systems. Keep in mind who our customers are and what sort of web surfers they will attract. For example German academic web surfers will certainly be under reported. Still, 10 to 15 million is a very large sample size. Also keep in mind that this information only pertains to computers that people use to surf the web. Computers that are used strictly as servers (Microsoft or Linux) are not represented in the above stats. With respect to the immediately preceding discussion of Mac vs. Linux market share the numbers that I give at the top won't be absolutely accurate. They're just an additional set of data points that should be factored into whatever guestimate the readers of this post would care to make about Mac vs. Linux market share. On the other hand retail box sales and/or the empirical observations of one administrator at a large academic institution won't be entirely accurate either. As far as OSs go I'm relatively agnostic. On the other hand I certainly wish the open source forces the best of luck in their "quest."
Zeitgeist is not based on sales Posted Jan 25, 2003 4:46 UTC (Sat) by barrygould (guest, #4774) [Link] My guess is that Google Zeitgeist measured linux usage by sales of boxed linux sets from the "major players" and compared that with sales of Mac systems.
In General, the Google Zeitgeist keeps track of what people search for on Google.
see here:
Barry
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