Fri, 24 Oct 2003

Just a provincial American

Opps! I'll still stand by the conclusions I came to here on file swapping and iTunes, but an astute reader from outside North America pointed out a rather silly discrepency in the numbers.

Re-reading the original linked news items, it's obvious that some of the numbers represented global network utilization, while a survey cited in the same paragraph represented American numbers for client downloads.

I'll take the rap, even though the linked item wasn't exactly explicit about the source of the data cited. It's obvious, going back over it, that there was some serious apple-and-orange mixing going on here.

I didn't do any actual calculation in the piece, which is a good thing, as I was working with half-baked numbers. Still, I think the point of the piece, which was inflation of actual file sharing data by the folks with a vested interest in making "piracy" appear to be more prevelant, still stands, even when the entire globe is calculated in...

I do try to avoid "American provincialism" ... but I sure screwed up on this one! So - opps! Sorry!

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