Frank Wales said:
Admittedly, I've only met Jem a few times, but I feel I ought to defend his honour here by pointing out that I don't believe he's the misleading type.
I apologise, I did not mean it as a personal attack. Sorry.
I can't recall the last time I was blocked from content on bbc.co.uk.
I can, it was when a page required me to have ActiveX to view a video. And yes I did inform the BBC about it, they ignored it until I sent on official complaint. There official response to this complaint was download ActiveX and shut up. Richard Lockwood said:
Andy - ordinary people do not generally use Linux as a desktop OS.
Is there such a thing as an ordinary person? Any way my point was that the true figure may not be quite as low as stated. I did not say it would be greatly higher, certainly not higher than WindowsXP (by a long way). I would be quite surprised if it was more than 10%. Richard also said:
No - you really dislike statistics when they prove something that doesn't meet with your approval.
Well that statement that statistics prove anything is inaccurate. Statistics can be flawed, especially depending on how they where conducted.
Here, for example, you find a figure you wish was a lot higher, and then come up with a load of reasons why it might be inaccurate, without providing any evidence for a single one of them.
I would have thought they where all self explanatory, evidently not. Many studies have shown that Junk email makes up 90% of all email. Why are you assuming that the same people are not using websites to launch attacks? Have you never heard the phrase "comment spam", have you never seen a "captcha", they're not there to look good. Stick your email address on a public website, wait a bit and see if you get spam. How do you think they knew that was your email address? Because robots do trawl the Internet looking for email addresses. The BBC site is more likely to be hit by these as lots of places link there so it's easy to find. Jason Cartwright wrote:
but add that these numbers are probably generated by some pretty sophisticated 3rd part software that the BBC employs.
But we don't know that do we? Have you ever seem how bad user agent sniffing is? I was using a PC running FireFox on Linux that transmitted the word "Linux" in its user agent. I was told by a major website that I was running "Netscape" on "Mac OS". I can see how it got Netscape, FireFox is derived from the Netscape code base, but how it got from the word "Linux" into the word Mac I don't know. And this was for a user agent that was stating it's OS as Linux. If major Internet companies have problems with recognizing the word Linux I doubt they could recognize the different distributions either. Jason Cartwright wrote:
> bbc.co.uk uses ActiveX Where?
Hm, my mistake it was on a BBC site but not under the bbc.co.uk domain, I could look for other examples on bbc.co.uk but for now this will suffice. http://www.bbcworld.com/content/clickonline_archive_PC.asp?pageid=666&co_pageid=1 This site now appears to be dead. On 28/03/07, Gordon Joly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Cam we assume that global stats (of random websites) show a higher number of Linux web clients that this, such as "wget" and "telnet www.example.com 80"?
What has telnet got to do with this? Seems analysis is via User Agent header it would require the telnet user to actually add a user agent string by hand, I have never bothered with that as it's extra typing and isn't required for a valid request. (Admittedly I rarely use telnet for http connections, the last time was when a FireFox claimed a site was redirecting badly, turned out the server was 302ing to itself). Also telnet is not only a Linux client. Telnet exists on Windows, it's just most Windows users haven't figured out its there. Andy -- First they ignore you then they laugh at you then they fight you then you win. - Mohandas Gandhi - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
