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

[Antony Mawer]

On 4/08/2006 11:44 AM, Nikolas Britton wrote:
> 899 bytes * (10^7) = 8.37258995 gigabytes... Remember... Once this
> code is pushed out to hosts you can't change it. 10 years from now
> we'll still have hosts sending in old data.... What was wrong with my
> netcat idea?
> 
> uname -mr | nc statistics.freebsd.org 1234
> 
> It's one, short, line of code and you know exactly what it's doing.
> Simple, Easy, Done.

Part of the idea I mentioned earlier was using a hash of this 
information... so the first time you send it through, you generate a 
hash and store it... then in future you can iterate over the hardware 
list, hash it, compare it against your stored hash, and only send if the 
hardware inventory has changed...

Not everywhere has unrestricted access out to the Internet via whatever 
port they want... I know of many sites that only allow HTTP, and only 
via a proxy...

I guess there's two different goals here... the uname -mr gives vendors 
an idea of what install base is out there when they're considering 
developing drivers/platform support... the hardware inventory gives 
vendors, developers and users an idea of what existing hardware is in use...

... if someone could bring up a list and find out that 500,000 people 
were using such-and-such a driver, it may influence the decision as to 
whether or not to update said driver when architectural changes are 
being made that require updates to the drivers... instead of the current 
system of sending an email out and hoping the appropriate users spot it 
on the appropriate mailing list and pipe up...

-Antony