Gotta start somewhere ... how many of us are really out there?

[Atom Powers]

On 8/1/06, User Freebsd <freebsd at hub.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, Nikolas Britton wrote:
>
> > Ok.. lets start from the top, again. Why do we need uniqueness?
>
> We want to count each host reporting *once* ... without uniqueness per
> host, how are you going to know whether to update a hosts record, instead
> of add it as a new host?
>

Maybe I lost the point here, but are you trying to track every FreeBSD
host or are you just trying to show that there is a large user-base?

If you are just trying to show a large user base then you don't have
to keep any kind of uid. Your numbers are going to be off by at least
20% to 30% just from people opting not to opt in; the error margin
from duplicate hosts is going to be smaller than that, especially if
you use freely available public data, like IP address, to track
duplicates.

On the other hand, if you want to keep tabs on every host out there,
how often it has connected, it's uid, etc. Well, that smells too
strongly of big brother for my tastes. Even if it is anonymous.

It's still going to take you at least a release to get it into the
base install. But if you can find a way to use the portsnap data and
get useful information out of the cvsup data you can probably get
numbers now with an error margin as low as 8% to 15%.

Achem's Razor anybody? ( The simplest solution is the best solution. )

-- 
--
Perfection is just a word I use occasionally with mustard.
--Atom Powers--