On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 09:19 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote: > I don't buy into your survey..and the fact that you have concluded that > only 19% of current users make use of torrents. It is true that 19% of > the people that knew about your survey, and that chose to respond, use > torrents. Nothing other than that can be inferred. Surveys are not 100% reflective of reality nor does any reasonable person claim them to be so. That being said, they certainly have the potential to be a lot more objective a measure of reality than any single person's opinion or guess. It's a nice logical tactic to disprove the utility of surveys completely and to attempt to discount their results completely. However, arguing over whether or not surveys are a valid object measure is really not an appropriate topic for this list. We must make the assumption here that the many years of research, money, and effort that have gone into constructing and developing tools, processes, and methods of devising surveys, running surveys, and analysing the results of surveys were not for naught. If you need any single example of the inherently flawed nature of surveys still somehow rendering results that reflect reality, look at the US presidential vote exit surveys over the past few presidential elections and how accurately they reflected the actual vote. 80-something people is enough participants in a survey to assume a reasonable margin of error so don't go making excuses that enough people weren't surveyed either. So let's make the assumption that surveys are a useful tool and leave it at that. If you are uncomfortable with that assumption then we can't engage in this discussion together, I'm sorry. > Are you saying that 19% is an insignificant portion of the community? > What percentage must it be to garner consideration? What is the > threshold? What is the margin of error in the survey? If I told you the margin of error of the survey (not difficult to calculate) would you even understand how to interpret it? Did you read the survey analysis and see that the percentages were additive? Did you notice that the numbers in the piechart don't add up to 100%? This is because users were able to select more than one download method. So if someone used both torrents and mirrors, they were counted in the 19% of torrent users. > While this is purely anecdotal..... My dad is 84 years old. He had > been a long time MS-Windows user. I got tired of trying to fix his > Windows problems via long distance. Last year we talked about it and he > agree to move to Linux. One of the first questions he asked me was "can > I download it with bittorrent?". That is probably due to his addiction > to "The Pirate Bay". The point is, torrents are not only for the highly > technical. Anecdotal evidence about your 84-year-old father is not an appropriate response to quantitative and objective data. If you are willing to step outside of your immediate surroundings and gather some actual data to inform the design we would obviously be more than welcome to consider it in our design processes in the future. > But, isn't it time to let this go? The Get Fedora page has now been > modified. One can now find the torrents from that page. It may be a > bit more obscured than I would have it...but it is there. You're the one who continued to post to the thread... ~m -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
