Today, Poprivet made these interesting comments ...
Lots of people. Don't forget, all you'll see here are
people wiht problems, not those for whom it's working
properly and as expected. You get the "bell curve" lower
end of things here. [snip]
I agree. Newspapers and talk shows regularly have "call in"
questions about problems or controversial issues. Basically,
the only people who call in are those with problems, or those
violently in favor of or violently opposed to the
controversial question. Statistically, the sample of the
total population of possible responders is so skewed as to be
absurdly invalid. So, just looking at these MS NGs as a
sample, it is but a small microcism of the total installed
base of Windows, and besides newbies or folks coming in with
their very first problem, many of the OPs and repliers are
"regulars". That doesn't make anyone necessarily good or bad,
I'm simply agreeing with you.
If anyone had any real numbers, we could discuss the median
and mean of people's experience on anything we like, but to
really say anything, like "this is great" or "this really
sucks", we would have to be able to calculate the standard
deviation, sigma, and look to the two tails as you say. Plus,
we would need to determine if the distribution curve is
Normal or Gaussian, or skewed in some way to one or the other
end. My belief is that Windows is skewed and whether the
preponderance is that it is a very good or a very bad O/S
depends on where in the release cycle it is as well as
people's definition of "good" and "bad."
