Hardware :: Ways Of Measuring FLOPS

I've found various programs and methods to measure FLOPS, but I don't seem to understand them. What is wrong with the following?

test-flops.py
Code:
#! /usr/bin/env python
float_increment = 1.03 # random
start = 57.24 # random
floating_point = start

for i in xrange(10 ** 6):floating_point += float_increment

Code:
PROMPT$ time ./test-flops.py
As far as I can see, this times a program that performs 1 million FLOPs (namely incrementation).

This outputs about 1.2 seconds on my (reasonably fast) machine, giving 840kFLOPS, which is much too low.This post may be in the wrong section; a C translation increments the result by three orders of magnitude (ie, py sucks), but this is still considerably less (~ 7-fold) than published values.