another milestone

Path: sparky!uunet!bonnie.concordia.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utzoo!henry
From: h...@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: another milestone
Message-ID: <1992Feb2.052315.5856@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: 2 Feb 92 05:23:15 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 23

As many people know, I regularly run statistics on news versions in use
based on analyzing the message IDs in our history file.  Both B and C
News create fairly distinctive message IDs.  (In both cases, there are
other software packages that create similar ones, but those packages
are in use on relatively modest numbers of sites.)  While this measures
only sites that post fairly regularly, and there are a *lot* of silent
sites out there, it's still a cheap way to get some measure of usage.
Last time we compared it to one of Rick Adams's "version" message
results, the numbers matched pretty well, too.

Sometime during Usenix, probably -- the week of Jan 19-25 -- C News
passed another milestone.  I held off an extra week to make sure it
wasn't just noise (the numbers *are* moderately noisy).

As of sometime during that week, by this measure, there are now more
C News sites than there ever were B news sites.

(B News peaked at 2402, early in 1990 when C News was new.  The C counts
for the last two weeks are 2410 and 2419.  The overall pattern for the
last 2.5 years has been C News climbing fast and B News falling slowly.)
-- 
"Breakthrough ideas are not             | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
from teams."  -- Hans von Ohain         |  h...@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry