VIC REEVES ONCE MUSED that 76.4 per cent of all statistics are made up and, here at the INQ, we take the ramblings of anal listers with a cargo ship full of salt in most cases.
But we couldn't help being intrigued by a recent set of numbers published by Net Applications which seemed to suggest that non Apple computers running dodgy installs of OSX have pushed poor old Linux into seventh place as far as operating system market share is concerned.
And Mac fan sites including 9 to 5 Mac are pointing out that the likelihood is that any machine using OSX but failing to report a valid version number is probably a Hackintosh (a non Apple PC hacked to run the heavily-protected and proprietory Apple operating system).
Mind you... we'd love to know how many of the 63.76 per cent of Windows XP users are using totally kosher, bought-and-paid-for versions of the Vole's finest work. µ
Internet Explorer on OS X would often report the hardware architecture, and not the OS. Probably because it was designed to run in 'classic' (i.e. shitty old OS 9) mode, as well as OS X. IE for Mac dates from the old dual boot days of Apples, see?
...it also turns out Camino/Chimera, the "nativised" Mozilla browser, doesn't (or didn't) report the OS version in its string: http://zytrax.com/tech/web/browser_ids.htm Same goes for SeaMonkey, although it looks like Firefox itself did start to at some point. Oh, but those nasty "hackers" picked up a copy of "OS X Hacks" from O'Reilly and learned to do hackery things like... installing software? Nope; Safari prior to version 3 also doesn't report the version, apparently.
NetApplications is reporting the web hits to its clients websites which are leaning to business sites in USA/Europe. They have almost no hist on those sites from Brazil, Russia, India and China where real growth happens. The Mac numbers, in particular exceed by a factor of 3 the published unit production from Apple in filings with the SEC. GNU/Linux passed Mac OS in 2003/4 and has been growing rapidly ever since. MacOS is tied to Apple hardware by licence and is fairly static at 3% of PCs. In Brazil, a recent quarter had 20% of PCs installed with GNU/Linux in the factory. No way is MacOS ahead of GNU/Linux except perhaps in some niches like large businesses. Most of us are individuals and small businesses.
as if all the data is taken from search engines. Perhaps the order is to be expected. Linux users know just about everything and all the others are looking for 'how can I overload this operating system with Linux'
Unknown? What the heck is that? Some alien software, that the guys out in Groom lake are running on their captured flying saucer? Woo? Maybe some h4x0rs have stolen the flying saucer! And, anyway, on another note... Who's the poor sod using the Hiptop? I think we should be told. (I suspect it's Tom, actually: he sounds the bitter, thwarted type, that resents anything to do with technology that doesn't require an intimate knowledge of Active Directory settings.)
Robert: "The Mac numbers, in particular exceed by a factor of 3 the published unit production from Apple in filings with the SEC." Gee, maybe they didn't make all those Macs in one year. I'm typing this on a 2002 G4 tower. I have three core-duo machines, but they aren't noticeably faster than this one for surfing, so I continue to use the G4 frequently. From the percentage of machines running Tiger, there are a lot of old Macs out there still in service. GNU/Linux passed Mac OS in 2003/4 and has been growing rapidly ever since. 2004 is ancient history and things have changed. The Linux geeks are dumping their rigs for MacBooks by the droves. Many find no advantage in Linux over OS X, plus they get access to commercial software and a way to sync their iPhone/iTouch.
How can you call Apple's Mac OS X "Heavily Protected"; when, compared to 88% of the Operating Systems on that list (the many flavours of Microsoft Windows), the Mac OS has no protection at all. There is no arcane serial number to key in, no Internet verification, no holographic whatchamacallits, no Genuine Advantage, nada. On second thought, you could say that the Mac OS is even better protected than Windows, because Apple utilizes the honor system.
OS X has an open source back end...it's a lot less proprietary than windows. Less so than Linux ;)
Should read "more so" than Linux
The Unknown operating system is probably OpenVMS (VMS). VMS was developed by the great company Digital, but now belongs to a minuscule PC maker called hp. The name Unknown probably comes right out of the hp marketing department. Not knowing what VMS is, hp probably put it into the box of obscure *MS products. Notice that somehow Unknown's market share increased by a factor of ten within less than a year. That's right! :-) Now I have to stop being so sarcastic, or my coffee gets too bitter.
Hackintosh overclock PCs with similar CPUs. See why it is so popular by overclockers and Apple MAC fanboys. browse.geekbench.ca The statistic is incomplete what about celular phones, pda, or similar wireless devices. Some modern appliances dont even resemble linux interfaces. And all of them access the www. The linux participation in the global market is higher. Looking forward to your comments. Yuri.
This is an inaccurate conclusion if I ever saw one! First off, "no version reported" ≠ hackintosh. Hackintosh running Leopard will report OS X 10.5. The version is software version, not of hardware. A hackintosh differs from a real mac only by its hardware, so we are looking at the totally wrong metric. Second, Safari/Leopard installed using the retail DVD, running on a Dell, reports this user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_6; hi-in) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.27.1 Clearly, 10.5.6. The platform is reported as MacIntel perhaps because the processor is a Pentium M instead of a Core or higher (thus not recognized as bona-fide mac, but as generic MacIntel). So right there you've got an example of a hackintosh which does not fall in the "no version reported" pool. Thirdly, dubious speculation like "the likelihood is that any machine using OSX but failing to report a valid version number is *probably* a Hackintosh" is useless. Whenever you make a claim, either verify it empirically, or back it up with some sort of reasoning. There is no reason Safari, a software program, will report the OS *software* version number any differently based on the *hardware* it is running on.