On Thursday 31 March 2005 22:51, Will Edgington wrote: > GANNS.com writes: > Smart developers target the popular platforms, XP in most cases. My > [non-OS-specific] site visitors are 58% XP, 19% 2k, 14% 98 (are > these guys in the stone age?), and 9% Mac, Linux, etc. > > Heh. I know someone that still has a MSWin _3.1_ laptop.
And I have a laptop - in regular use - 486 DX2 with 8MB RAM, 120 MB HDD, dual booting MS_DOS (very occasionally) and ZipSlack linux (quite often) - i.e. no GUI at all, just command line interface (the screen wouldn't support a GUI anyway). A very useful tool for some applications, though running LL testing (or even trial factoring) is effectively beyond its scope. The University of Ulster ran a laptop with 4.77 MHz 8086 processor, 1 MB RAM, no HDD, DOS 3.1 in the computer room as a console terminal until December 2004. Despite having to hide it from the Millenium Bug Inspectors. AFAIK one of the most critical functions in the University is _still_ running on a 133 MHz Pentium system - which has adequate power for the job. > > And your stats are possibly skewed; my web browsing is biased towards > MSWin XP but my other computer use is 95+% RedHat Linux and SunOS. Umm. Occurs to me that web browsing on a non Windows system is inherently safer - at any rate if you're using a version of Windows more "advanced" than 95 - the point being that the presence of Internet Explorer intimately woven into the OS represents a reef which may tear the bottom out of your ship, even if you believe that you're using a safe alternative browser. Setting up Firefox or Opera on a linux system so that e.g. Java works properly does take more effort than doing the same on a Windows system but IMO the extra security is more than worth the effort. Remember that security includes privacy of your data as well as overt threats from viruses, trojans etc. So far as I'm concerned the factors keeping me running Windows at all are multimedia applications - in particular Photoshop - OK there are OSS alternatives but inertia takes some overcoming, and Photoshop does do a rather good job of image editing (despite its obscene overheads...) Macintosh would probably be a better platform than Windows for these applications, but expense of converting proprietary software licences is a major factor. Just my 2c worth. Brian Beesley _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
