Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
If one wants to look at anything other than the statistics as provided by Net Applications, one has to subscribe to something called "Geolocation Upgrade" and pay - the options cost anything from $US300 to $US1000.
But on that page, one does get an indication of the reach of the statistics. One option available is geolocation segmentation - "country, region, designated market area, city and postal code and combination reports for browsers, operating systems and search engines." And it adds: "Postal code segmentation is for the US, UK and Canada only."
Another option, titled demographic upgrade, is available for the US only. No mention of China, India or Brazil, three rather large countries where sizeable numbers of the six billion humans who populate our world live.
It is surprising that nobody has thought to ask these questions - it doesn't take much intelligence to do so. There has been considerable angst among some at what they call under-reporting of the degree of Linux take-up on the desktop.
There are others who have expressed delight with the figure and used it to mount an argument which we've heard ad infinitum - that the year of the Linux desktop has finally arrived. Or maybe, it's at the backdoor, knocking furiously.
Last year, there was a survey with some equally rubbery figures put out by an Australian company, Waugh Partners which cast a favourable light on open source. I raised similar questions at the time as the people involved were unwilling to provide answers to queries about the data.
Whether the figures favour GNU/Linux or not is unimportant. What is important is that the FOSS community retains its ability to rationally question the methodology behind the figures and then, and then only, break out the champagne.
Else, we are no better than proprietary software companies that use statistics to spread FUD and wrong perceptions among computer users.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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