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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. ;-)
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.
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
bash: ispell: command not found
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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.*!
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.
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
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read