Based on the amount of people downloading updates, Canonical recently guessed that there are about 12 million Ubuntu users worldwide.

Right - and there's about 350 million Firefox users in all, so that 12 million is <5%, which is what made me wonder.

Via: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/

I guess it's more then that. They are aware that those few users influence exponentially more users.

I would concur. I certainly hand out a few CDs of every release to interested friends and colleagues. I happened across an anesthesiologist just yesterday playing tunes in the OR with his Hackintosh. Not Ubuntu, but I'm willing to bet he's tried that too. So I think the people who are starting to look seriously into alternative computing is on the rise and in a variety of sectors, not just male college geeks and their friends.

There are millions of people using Linux. A few percentage of desktop users worldwide is not an insignificant number.

no. by end of 2010 (tentative).

I wish they'd hurry up, Yahoo's Slurp is the worst crawler I've seen. The other day it had 113 connections open to one of our sites. Jeff Atwood has also blocked them from StackOverflow because they were taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth and generally behaving like tools.

I love flickr, but Yahoo Search needs to die.

MSN is far worse.

On several of my sites, it routinely requests URLs that are 1) blocked in robots.txt and 2) have been 404 for years

> Also, isn't Bing powering Yahoo's search these days anyway?

don't think just yet.