First a hearty thank you to all who took the time to fill out the TNPC survey. Your answers were insightful and helpful.
We have a winner in the book give away. As soon as we hear back we will ship the book out. More on that in our next issue.
Without going into all of the gory details here are some of the more surprising results we saw.
The vast majority (86%) of you use Windows 98 as your operating system. Surprisingly only around 10% of you are planning to switch to either Windows 2000 or Windows Millennium. Linux came up frequently as something many of you would like to see more of. So watch for more on Linux and other operating systems in upcoming issues.
Not surprisingly Outlook Express (30%), Outlook (22%), and Netscape (20%) were the three most popular email clients followed closely by Other, HTML, Eudora, and Pegasus in that order. Outlook and Other had the highest percentage of users who "had to" use those email clients due to jobs or some other reason.
Two comments came up quite often. First, "When will there be an HTML version?" Presently we aren't considering an HTML version but that may change in the future. We just don't have the extra time it would take to do it right. I'm sure you've received HTML letters/email in the past that wouldn't display properly or caused other problems on your system.
The second comment was to reduce or eliminate the advertisements. While we would all like for information to be totally free, the reality is that it costs money to send TNPC to you. Our sponsors keep the information flowing and barely cover the cost of delivering the newsletter and managing the Web site (if you don't count any of our labor in that equation!). As an interesting aside, many of the HTML newsletters are sent in that format so they can put more ads and even include graphical advertisements. So we try to keep advertisements to a minimum and they are clearly marked. Please help us keep TNPC free by supporting our sponsors and using our Amazon and Beyond links whenever possible.
For the technically inclined and curious, the data from our survey was placed into a secure database using a Perl script. The database was hot-linked to an Excel 2000 spreadsheet in the TNPC Underground Labs. The spreadsheet's Pivot Tables, Graphs, and Filters were updated in real time. All of this with a standard Apache Web server running no proprietary extensions.
Thanks again to all who took the time to help us out!
