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I was at the london science museum last week and saw something interesting on the information board regarding one of the steam engines on display. Unfortunately I didn't think to take a photograph / transcribe it, but this blog gives a summary: http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2006/08/engineering-parallels-at-the-s.php

To quote the blog's transcription of the caption:

In 1769, James Watt had taken out a patent that allowed him to dominate steam-engine design and improvement. As a result, other engineers were prevented by law from developing new, alternative designs."

When the patent expired other engineers were able to innovate again, particularly Richard Trevithick. He experimented with using steam under a much higher pressure, and as a result was able to build smaller and more powerful engines, which enabled him to build the first locomotive railway engine capable of hauling a load.

So even the science museum is suggesting that patent's stiffle innovation, and have been doing so for over 200 years

or at least the famous Sun headline on a previous EU strong arm attempt "Up Yours Delors".

Shooting? Shooting?!? You mean, of course, blasting to smithereens, right? That's lulzing at its best.

Windows has 98%? That's surprising given Apples recent sales figures, although I'll accept that Windows is still has vastly the majority.

The BBC published figures in 2005 which at the time showed Linux users at 0.4% (which at the time equated to 100,000). Also, Mac users were running at 4.4% (so presumably 1,100,000 users).

I would be *very* surprised if either Mac or Linux users have diminished in numbers since this time... especially since Apple are doing so well these days, Ubuntu is making Linux more accessible and Vista by all accounts, isn't quite as polished as perhaps it should be.
Ashley Highfield has since posted an update regarding his original figures btw! Interestingly, his high-end figure of 97,600 Linux users is still lower than the figure in 2005. But then, I think Ashley Highfield has already made it clear that he is unqualified to comment on such matter! :P
I'd also venture that the percentage of non-Windows clients will increase in the future; more and more devices have internet access embedded, and few use MS software (iPhone/iPod-Touch, Asus Eee PC, Nokia 770/n800/n810. Plus, loads of smart phones. Due to price considerations, it is unlikely MS will make any significant in-roads into these markets.

So my (somewhat rambling) point is: non-Windows based users *do* represent a significant minority.

And linux is 0.4%. So a lot higher that he says. Nearer 60,000 that 600 http://www.currybet.net/articles/user_agents/2.php

Linux is at 0.4% - if there's 17 million visitors, then there should have been about 70,000 linux. http://www.currybet.net/articles/user_agents/2.php

http://www.currybet.net/articles/user_agents/ states that the figures are just for the front page

I'm a regular visitor to various bits of the BBC web site and I regularly come across other Linux users and just about the one thing we have in common is that we very rarely visit the front page - like most experienced computer users we go straight to sub-site we want.

I'd guess that a lot of Linux users also wont click on a link that says "Windows Media Player" required.

Now I imagine that relates to visitors to the rather useless BBC front page, using the same info as used to compile the blog post at http://www.currybet.net/articles/user_agents/2.php> which claims that only 0.41& of BBC visitors use Linux.

The 400-600 stat is probably also right if they looked only at the stats on WMP media files or something. I know in my case I rarely browse sites requiring flash and never click on RealMedia/WMP links. There is a number of ways they could easily mis-represent the data to show whatever they want.

Also, what about the users that have a Firefox plugin like User Agent Switcher installed.

If they support Unix, then they'd get people who had a bad or esoteric configuration whining "But my computer can't play this video!". Better safe than sorry.

There's just no real reason for them to spend time investing in an OS that has bad netvideo support (no Flash 8+) that roughly 1 in 250 people (see http://www.currybet.net/articles/user_agents/2.php for more info) use.

http://www.currybet.net/articles/user_agents/2.php says that Apple has only 4.4% or so of the browser market.

Is this article really so groundbreaking? I don't get it. It seems to affect, at most, 4.4% of the browser-using population.

Actually, the latest comprehensive browser stats that I saw show 30% of Mac users still using Internet Explorer (link). My anecdotal personal evidence backs this up -- many Mac users I know still don't use Safari.

I think the reason has to do with the whole OS X upgrade thing. A new version of the OS costs $130, and the only way to upgrade Safari is to upgrade the OS. A lot of OS X users never bother to upgrade from the version that came with their Mac. Consequently, they're stuck on versions that either never came with Safari installed, didn't have it as the default browser, or can't run anything better than 1.0 even if they it wanted to.

As a web developer, I have to say that the standards-compliance of 1.0 is pretty poor and a lot of site layouts will break when using it. For instance, an absolutely positioned element will always take its position from the document origin, rather than that of the parent (relatively positioned) container. This is a huge deal that will cause all manner of breakage on most sites using CSS positioning.

If Apple really want to wean people off their Microsoft dependency, and do the right thing by their users, then they should back-port Safari 2.0 to older versions of OS X and release it as an automatic update. If I.E. 6 for Windows is a 5-year-old browser that runs on 10-year-old operating systems, why can't Apple's 6-month-old browser run on a 5-year-old operating system?

GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; en) Opera 8.50
Host: 127.0.0.1
Accept: text/html, application/xml;q=0.9, application/xhtml+xml, image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, */*;
q=0.1
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Charset: windows-1252, utf-8, utf-16, iso-8859-1;q=0.6, *;q=0.1
Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip, x-gzip, identity, *;q=0
Connection: Keep-Alive