RE: 7.5 release? - How you can help

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

Hi Erik,

On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Erik Jessen wrote:

> Well, just to ask, how many people on this list know anybody still
> running 98?

I know some who still do. I think that is primarily used on 
laptops nowadays. 98 (including 98SE) enjoyed a somewhat extended 
lifetime because Me wasn't exactly Microsoft's best release (to 
put it nicely). And a lot of organizations I have dealt with run 
on a 4 to 5 year upgrade cycle, which means 98 is still out 
there, and, yes, people do install games on their organizations' 
computers.

> What about putting counters on the downloads for the various OSes, so
> you can tell what OSes are going out of favor?  This is only of
> long-term use, of course, and won't help with source-code downloads.

Well, actually browsers usually do provide not only their name, 
but also the OS they are running on. If one assumes that the 
browser OS is the same one which Xconq is going to be compiled on, 
then one can get a fairly decent picture about what platforms are 
being used for Xconq.

But since Xconq seems to be a fairly low volume download, one 
would need to have an extended sampling period to create accurate 
statistics. And the sampling period would likely have to be longer 
than the time it would take to fix issues on the platform(s) in 
question.

  Regards,
    Eric