The Power of NAMBLA (Dr Roy and Pogson)

Reciprocated by Pogson.

Taking a brief detour around the learned Dr Roy’s post, I note that

Google could do more to suppress a suppressive regime, but Google is a business. That whole scene it made in China was a good PR move.

I’ll leave you to figure out what his devious, rat-like little mind means by that.

Microsoft is, however, Voldemort™, and not a business at all, and certainly not a murderous Stalinist dictatorship. It’s an IllegalMonopoly™, which is far worse than any of that.

Consequently, it is extremely important to show that Microsoft is losing out on the browser wars.

What? You didn’t see the connection? Both Dr Roy and Pogo-san do. And you can’t argue with that level of expertise.

What you do, see, is you find a site that monitors statistics for Web usage. For your purposes, that site has to do this on a monthly basis. You then wait until one or more stats for the latest month in question give you the answer you want, and publish them.

Genius! But there’s more.

Obviously, selective quoting is absolutely vital. Both Dr Roy and Pogo-san quote the following:

“From May to June, W3Schools shows XP down 0.7% of share and GNU/Linux up 0.3% and MacOS up 0.1%.” (Pogson)

I’ll get to the real stupidities later.

Pogson, in his role as God of Prediction, follows this up with the classic

“Clearly the share of that other OS is shrinking and much of the fall-off of XP is going to GNU/Linux and MacOS.”

What Pogson (and Dr Roy) do not share with us are the figures for other Microsoft OSes. (There’s one for Win 2003, would you believe, but I’ll spare you that one.)

Vista: -0.7%
Win7: +0.9%

The codicil “... but the remainder is being mopped up by Windows 7, a natural upgrade to both XP and Vista” is conspicuously absent.

Now, I promised you a review of the real stupidities. They are many, and here are three of them:

• W3Schools is a site in Norway that sells web development consultancy. It doesn’t claim that its statistics are representative of the wider web in any way. In fact, it cautions you (not Pogson and Dr Roy, obviously) against misuse of statistics.
• No methodological information is provided. Who knows how many individual users there are, or how many repeat visits there are, or even how many clicks it takes to get to the Linux version of a page as compared to any other?
• Who, other than Pogo-san and Dr Roy, really care?

In Pogson’s words:

“Now, I don’t take web stats for gospel especially when there is clear bias in favour of that other OS and Apple, but if consistently calculated the same way each time, I find them useful indicators of trends.”

(I would cite this as a clear case of “experimenter’s bias,” incidentally, except that it’s a clear case of monumental self-admitted blind ignorance.)

In Schestowitz’ words:

“It’s probably the trend that matters.”

And in the words of W3Schools, added at the bottom of their tabulated statistics:

• “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” — Benjamin Disraeli

• “Then there was the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches.” — W. I. E. Gates

• “The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.” — Oscar Wilde

• “First get your facts; then you can distort them at your leisure.” — Mark Twain

It has to be quite disheartening when your single source of information has already pointed out that you’re a lying sh*thead snake-oil salesman who wouldn’t recognise the truth if it crawled into your inner ear and blew on a vuvuzuela, hasn’t it?