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Linux Last in Deja Network OS Poll
Kwikymart writes "A poll on Deja News of network operating system rates Linux dead last in all catagories. Funny thing is it rates the same number (1.7) in all the catagories (Scalability, Reliability, Administration and Cost). Looks like somebody that doesn't like Linux sure likes to write perl scripts!" That "somebody" also seems to like GNU Hurd a whole bunch; it was the top-rated network OS. ;-)
I'm reminded of the Suck parody. Merely posting the story seems like a waste of energy. Must be a slow news day, eh?
Okay, so maybe I'm just crabby and bitter(er than usual) because of all the idiots in my neighborhood playing with fireworks till 3:30 in the morning preventing me from sleeping, but honestly, who gives a damn if Linux is last in Deja.com's network OS poll? How is this news? The world's not going to end because of it. The sun will continue to shine, the earth will continue to spin, and LIFE WILL GO ON.
Last. Well, that's it, I'm fdisk'ing all my systems and installing the "unstoppable" Windows NT. I'd install Hurd, but I like my bugs professionally programmed, thank you.
:)
BTW, the unnamed catagory linux seemed to have scored first in is being consitent.
if (post == 'not funny") {
&Re-read(@slashdot);
} # That or I'm just drunk atm!
David
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As I type this, the last article (Am I Alone) has a sid of 00/01/01. This article, posted later, seem to have a sid of 99/12/31 ? Though the intro line bit does say 4:10 am, jan 1 2000, hmm....
/. needs more y2k checking. :)
Had a few to drink, but double checked these numbers... right as of 5:40 pst... maybe
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/. automatically inserts spaces in long things with no spaces to stop people screwing up the formatting on purpose; unfortunately this can break URLs. Take out that space and it'll work...
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Xenu loves you!
For a search of Linux, as an example, see how this clean little hack works compared to this usual dejanews search.
Ok, we all know web polls are worthless. But Deja is trying to pass itself off now as a source for hardware/software reviews, and the average user is going to look at that poll and say "Gee, Linux must not be that great after all" without even reading the comments, which are mostly positive.
Unfortunately the way the comments are posted, it's hard to refute some of the FUD that's been inserted in there because there is no opportunity to answer a specific review, because you don't know where your reply would even end up in the sequence.
Deja needs to take a hard look at their polling system and work out these kinds of issues if they want people to take it seriously. Perhaps even a form of user moderation ala Slashdot is in order here.
1. We love Linux. The site is run almost exclusively on Linux and all the techies have a KDE or other Linux desktop to do development work.
2. We are well aware that it is possible to spam the rating votes. Thank you for revealing this huge, well guarded secret! We might as well fold up and close the site down due to this amazing detective work. {/sarcasm}
3. We do in fact have robot-vote-scrubbing software, and these votes against Linux will probably be detected as robotic before long and removed from the system. That's just my guess, it's not really my department.
4. If you're using Deja ratings to decide which MP3 player or toaster to buy, great. That's really what they're designed for. If you're using a simple 4-category self-selected numerical vote to determine which NOS to deploy across your enterprise, you need to have your head examined.
5. We may not have many 'Deja only' forums to discuss Linux in, but we certainly carry comp.os.linux.*!
Last time I looked at one of these, it had all sorts of absurdities such as BeOS being rated above Windows 95 for application availability etc. Okay, it could have been a BeOS fan vote-stuffing but more likely it's just a combination of people not thinking at all carefully, wishful thinking (at least where Be apps are concerned) and total subjectivity of the assessments. It's like trying to describe pain to your doctor - "it's sorta like really sore, about here, feels kinda a dull pain" - your description of exactly the same pain probably isn't going to match anybody else's.
Plus the fact that with the obscure operating systems, the only people likely to be voting are the BIG fans of those OS's...this will skew results even more.
I think the accuracy of this poll is summed up by the fact that I just gave BSD a rating, and it immediately jumped up to #1.
One doofus reloading over and over until Linux comes up, then entering "1" on all categories, can affect a lot of change in the standings. Ignore it.
Ok, maybe this poll was way unaccurate (or maybe not), but sending 10000 Linux zealots to "correct" the poll is not going to make it any better. Every time slashdot links to a poll the results get skewed and the poll becomes worthless. Remember when Inprise/Borland did their poll of if their development tools should be ported to Linux? They had to disregard most of the votes that came in after slashdot had linked. And this was not a poll about who is your favorite Pokemon character, but valuable market research.
My wife did that. Once in Nov-Dec 98 and again in Nov-Dec 99.
Her biggest complaint about Linux in '98 was that it didn't have a lot of the software she considers essential (Eudora, AIM, ICQ) and many features of the software she tried (Tk/TOC for AIM, early GICQ, KMail and Netscape Mail) were missing.
A year later (and an eMachine bought in March), GICQ is still missing a few features, but it looks and feels a little more like ICQ from Windows. GAIM is a decent replacement for AIM in her opinion, and she's using TkRat for e-mail.
Her biggest complaint today is that KDE doesn't feel consistent--really, she's complaining because Netscape uses its own Motif-like widgets, GAIM and GICQ use GTK widgets, and TkRat uses Tk widgets.
Arghhh! Now, she wants an iMac. The reason: everything will look and feel consistent, and she'll be able to use Eudora again, official versions of ICQ and AIM, and she can even get IRC and MUD clients for it. Oh, and she wants the eMachine to turn back into a Windows box so she can use Microsoft Publisher again. Ironically, she doesn't want to use OS 9--she wants Mac OS X with the BSD core.
In summary, her end-user testing said that for Internet power-users, Linux/Mandrake 6.1 isn't up to snuff...yet. But it's a hell of a lot more usable and closer than it was a year ago.
Me? I'm waiting until her Mac starts crashing and I get to put Yellow Dog on it.
Chris
Isn't this exactly the sort of article that should get the "Jihad! JIHAD!" penguin icon from Suckdot? :-)
o/~ Join us now and share the software
All this "poll" demonstrates is that Deja ratings, just like any other poll where the pollees select themselves, is essentially meaningless, especially when the tally can be trivially stuffed.
In a different arena, Comics Buyers Guide used to permit anyone to vote for their annual awards using copies of their ballot. This lasted until the year of the Duckslide, when Carl Barks fans openly stuffed the ballot box and won all but one of the categories (Barks didn't have any painted comics published that year). As a result, they now require you to use the original ballot from the CBG. The ballot can still be stuffed, by buying large quantities of the CBG, just like reliable polls can be rigged by careful wording and ordering of questions. Open voting is a nice idea, but it's trivial to abuse, and we really don't need to get worked up over it.
Moreover, the media, should they ever catch wind of this, will surely refer to it as a `hacking incident', as they have before in similar situations. It would be unfortunate to see Freenix and hacking tied together that way.
The URL(I) linking to this story is using a very interesting date.
I wonder if this will effect how the stories are archived at a latter date?
Will a story search in Feb turn up a tons of stories on New years eve, and nothing in Jan and Feb?
Just curious.
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from the take-it-with-a-big-grain-of-salt dept.
There ya go.
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If you had been tracking that poll for the last weeks.
OS/2 was #1, with BSD as #2, Linux #3
Then BSD was #1, with Linux as #4
Then Windows was on top, BSD #2 and Linux as dead last.
Anyone who things that poll says ANYTHING useful, is delusional.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Okay, take a *nix box and type:
5 &CR3=5&CR4=5&CID=11997&P DID=5281"
:-))
lynx -accept_all_cookies -source "http://www.deja.com/rate/user_rate.xp?CR1=5&CR2=
You only have to put this in a while (1==1) loop (and remove the ~/.lynxcookies file) and withing 10 minutes linux wil be on 4.9, 4.9,4.9, 4.9 with 100.000 votes
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If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
Firstly - linux is not last anymore ;) - probably due to the slashdot effect, lots of people hyped up the linux scores.
Apart from that, the rating system used by deja is not really fair.
Using people to rate different os-es results in people rating their os of choice high, and the other ones lower.
This results, in turn, in people over-rating and under-rating their own and other operating systems because they can see the results already.
A better system would be 'what is your system of choice' and give a couple of os-es to pick from (the slashdot way).
It's so clogged with feature creep (like these inane polls) now that you have to go through 2 queries just to do a simple "All newsgroups, all messages" search on a single argument. I understand the desire to avoid stagnation and add value to a site, but this is ridiculous.
I've switched to Remarq for my newsgroup searching. They seem to understand the value of simplicity.