Originally posted by: ZimZum
Originally posted by: Acanthus
That has nothing to do with the fact that you dont know system settings or any of the demographics for that matter.
What if NVIDIA users overclock more?
What if theres more NVIDIA cards out there than ATi?
What if its some sepcific stupid error, like IE crashing and autoreporting it...
What if....
Lets say Consumer Reports takes a sampling of car owners to determine which autos are the most reliable. Based on problems that the owners reported. They find chevy Malibu owners report fewer problems than Ford Taurus owners.
Ford cries fowl.
What if they polled more ford owners?
What if the Chevy owners didnt report their problems?
What if more ford owners drive faster?
"What ifs" arent really valid basis for invalidating statistical data.
Are you nuts? That's the ONLY reason for invalidating statistical data. Anyone who's taken a statistics class knows this. What ifs, in the field of statistics, are called lurking variables.
These variables are correlated to the issue at hand, but not causitive. For example, in the Summer, incidence of eating ice cream goes up and incidence of shark attacks goes up. Does this mean that eating ice cream causes you to be more prone to a shark attack?
No, it's a lurking variable. Heat. The increased heat of the summer months cause more people to eat ice cream, and more swimming in the ocean. Hence, more shark-targets.
WHAT IFs are what must be stroven to be eliminated when gathering statistical data, otherwise the conclusions drawn from some data are useless; you'd be sitting here telling me that eating ice cream makes you more prone to a shark attack.
So to compare to the situation above, incidence of crashes and nvidia hardware may be higher simply because more people who have no idea how to use/maintain a PC use Nvidia hardware that came from their OEM or some such. Or there may be another reason.
There are tons of LURKING VARIABLES, which is why we CAN'T state a direct causitive relationship between M$ OCA reports and stability and relianility of GPU drivers.
Thank you, please stop talking now.