long standing bugs....

[Richard Gaskin]

Judy Perry wrote:
>>>Bug#: 1525
>>
>>Win95 only; worth doing, but in the meantime will affect less than 2% of
>>all computer users, and usually less than that for most Rev-based products.
> 
> --Perhaps, but it seems to me that either Win95 is supported -- as stated
> by the company -- or it isn't.

But since there is at least one bug that affects each of the supported 
OSes, by that definition none are supported. ;)

I wouldn't mind if RunRev dropped "Window 95" from the list of supported 
platforms. At this point I probably have less than 1% of my customers 
using the 9-year-old OS.

>>These seem like worthwhile things to get done in good time, but they
>>shouldn't be show-stoppers while they're outstanding.  If you're
>>delivering a product you'll really want to spring for XP, as it's very
>>different from earlier Win OSes and by far the most common OS.  If what
>>you're building is just for personal use it should be easy enough to
>>design around these for now.
> 
> --This brings up an interesting point for Rev in general and for DreamCard
> in particular -- just what is the installed Win95 base, especially in K-12
> education?  As more than a few K-8 institutions still have -- and use --
> Apple ][s, (not that I'm suggesting that Rev support the Apple ][),
> perhaps the Win95 installed edu base is large enough to  consider for
> having Rev deployment issues fixed?  (I'm just guessing here; don't
> really know but have a suspicion that, the lower the edu level goes,
> the lower the hardware/OS limitations are).

For DreamCard Win95 may or may not be relevant --  in Jan 2004 InfoWorld 
reported 21 million Win95 users:
<http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/01/12/HNwin98support_1.html>

    According to recent numbers from IDC, as of year end 2003,
    there were still 58 million Windows 98 users, 21 million
    Windows 95 users, and 25 million Windows Millennium users.
    The company said the installed base of desktop operating
    systems users now totals 380 million.

While 21 million may sound like a lot, also consider:

- It's only 5.5& of the total Windows installed base

- Most computers running Win95 lack the power to do a lot
   of the multimedia stuff Rev is often used for, and are
   owned by people who can be safely characterized as not
   buying a lot of new software.

- Even more than with other Microsoft operating systems,
   because Micro$oft stopped updating it Win95 is riddled
   with security holes, so anyone using it for Internet
   access is putting their system and possibly parts of
   their network at risk.

All told, considering TCO it would likely be less expensive to buy $200 
computers from WalMart running Linspire than to maintain those Win95 
boxes over the course of the year.

How RunRev interprets these factors is up to them.  But I can think of a 
long list of bugs that affect a great many more users than not being 
able to load the XML DLL on Win95.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  __________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev