And IndyZ spoke:

However, sometimes it is nice to know how many people visit your pages

But you can't know that. A single "hit" to an image could be 100 people at aol.com, or a hundred people could all hit with images turned off. The numbers are totally uncorrelated. Thus, it's not just vanity that says that hit counters are useless; it's completely unrelated to reality.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker