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Article on the future of Python

Steven D'Aprano steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info
Fri Sep 28 12:33:06 EDT 2012 
On Fri, 28 Sep 2012 06:14:32 -0700, rusi wrote:

> It would be good to pay attention before calling others to pay
> attention.
> 
> http://litmus.com/blog/email-client-market-share-stats-infographic-
june-2012/email-client-market-share-june-2012

Oh my, that's hilarious.

It's a big, flashy "infographic" with lots of graphics and absolutely no 
meaningful information. As pure a case of "garbage in, garbage out" as 
you can hope to see. Hidden in the fine print:

"Data for some email clients and mobiles may be over- and under-
represented due to image blocking."

You think?

I would have thought that the whole Thunderbird-doesn't-get-a-mention 
might have given you a clue that the data there was rubbish. Or that they 
think more people use Yahoo than Gmail. Riiiight. 1% of email users are 
on AOL? Pull the other one, it has bells on.

Three years ago, there were about 2 billion active email users worldwide. 
1% of that is 20 million. There are fewer than 4 million AOL subscribers, 
or about 0.2% (or less, given that total email users are increasing and 
AOL subscribers are not).

The only thing that link is good for is determining which mail clients 
have crap privacy policies.

Thank you for sharing this, it is a great example of the use of bogus 
statistics.



-- 
Steven
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