You both didn't understand what I meant by that..
Statistics are only useful if you understand them. The only way anybody can understand statistics is by comparison. If I say it costs 5865 Yen for a brand new bike (a Mongoose) in Japan, how would you know if that's a lot or not if you don't compare it to a medium of exchange that you understand already? (that's assuming that you don't know the value of yen). A simple minded person would say "WOW, 5,865 YEN IS A LOT! THAT'S A BIG NUMBER, SO IT MUST BE A LOT!!" Thats 50 American dollars. That would be pretty cheap actually. What I was saying is that "big number" statistics are useless unless there is a means of comparison. You can convince all the morons you want with "big number" statistics, but that still doesn't make it any more of a useful statistic, it will just get a bunch of morons staring at their monitors in complete and utter astonishment without even knowing what the heck it is they're looking at..
--- edit
I'm not saying the statistic you provided are useless. I'm saying that you didn't provide a means of comparison, such as the current normal traffic produced by the average IRC user, taking into account the average amount of channels joined, the average amount of traffic of those channels, and the outgoing traffic from the user to the server. If you can't state what these statistics are, then your "facts" are useless and cannot be applied in any viable way.
To clarify even more:
The actual importance of your statistics can only be guessed. One cannot take those statistics and actually create a statistical workup of server bandwidth useage and come up with an "allowable" average amount of bandwidth usage that a user should generate using scripts. It only suggests that scripters should go easy on how much bandwidth their scripts should force servers to use.. To me, the "statistics" you provided were useless. The suggestion, however, wasn't.
Last edited by BoredNL; 25/05/03 03:18 AM.
