... The Social Security Administration doesn't release its official figures until Spring '05. So what are hundreds of media outlets reporting on?

A Babycenter.com press release.

Give credit to the clever folks at Babycenter.com, a parenting web site owned by Johnson & Johnson. They looked at their many users, ready to answer polls and post birth announcements, and created an annual "BabyCenter Baby Names List." Then they sent out a press release announcing their top names.

... The problem is the press, large and small, happily reported these lists as "the most popular baby names in America in 2004." Despite the clear-cut, in-your-face evidence that Babycenter's lists are not a snapshot of America's babies. Listen up, reporters:

There are no Spanish names on the list.

In 2003, America's real top 100 boys' names included:
Alejandro, Antonio, Carlos, Diego, Jesus, José, Juan, Luis, and Miguel.
Not a one made Babycenter's list, in 2003 or 2004.

Whatever Babycenter is reporting on, it isn't America's babies.

—Laura, Baby Name Wizard

"Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." (The quickest citation is Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps) noted in 1980, but the axiom is probably much older.) Similarly, users think about features, but professionals study upgrades. Many program and most operating system upgrades suck, but those on debian usually suck less. Distributions may add polish, testing, configuration, and so forth over and above the basics, but upgrades are constrained by the architecture. Any upgrade system includes both the technology itself, and the quality of the process and people maintaining the repository of programs. Debian's repository and team are both huge and both very well polished. (To digress, Debian-based distributions you may have heard of include Linspire, Knoppix, Ubuntu, and Xandros. Red Hat, of course, uses Red Hat rpms, and SuSE also uses rpms, I believe. The Other category includes those built from source, with gentoo being the one I've heard most of, and stuff like Slackware which I know has a cadre of adherents but I've never encountered it.) (To further digress, some other famous repositories that I've heard of include CPAN, for perl, with which I've had mostly bad experiences; Windows Update; and bsd ports, which is superb.)

One limitation of Debian's repository, or strength if you drink the koolaid, is that it has very strict licensing requirements, and only limited means to work around them. I'm currently deviating from the pure path on my desktop machine in three ways: I run a proprietary binary kernel module from NVidia to get proper performance from my video card (not for games, but to run my wide screen and let me switch workspaces quickly; I use qmail for email, more because of my invested time in understanding its quirks then because it is still the best, and djb's restrictive source license means that installing qmail requires jumping a few extra hoops for no discernable valid reason (the key trick, sadly, I have forgotten to document three times in a row now, but it involves extra flags forcing the qmail.deb installation without de-installing exim and its dependents); and java, for which these instructions are as a rosetta stone. My point, though, is the site which the title of this posting links to is such a sublime way to present large quantities of data that it's worth installing java to see and feel it.