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From
TNPC issue #3.08...
TNPC Survey Says...
by Dan Butler
April 13, 2000
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!
You can reach Dan Butler at:
mailto:danbutler@TheNakedPC.com
Copyright © 2000, PRIME Consulting Group, Inc. and Dan Butler.
All Rights Reserved.
The Naked PC is a trademark of PRIME Consulting Group, Inc.
ISSN: 1522-4422
You may reprint an article from TNPC as long as you show the
entire article and include the authors byline, excerpt and
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TNPC Survey Says...
by Dan Butler
(This article originally appeared in The Naked PC
newsletter #3.08, subscribe at http://www.TheNakedPC.com)
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