Tom Comeau, Geek Dad

Okay, maybe not all of astronomy, but I got these numbers yesterday from the people who handle HST proposal submissions:

Platform     Proposals
Mac OS X        492
Linux           297
Windows         115
Sparc Sun        46
Not Given        11

Five years ago, less than ten percent of proposals were done on Macs. This year it’s more than half.

Of course, the more interesting numbers would be the percentage on each operating system for accepted proposals, but we won’t know who is accepted until the end of May.

(Put another way, what I’d like to know is whether the platform used for submission predicts, even weakly, proposal acceptance, and whether the proportion of platforms for accepted proposals predicts future submission platforms.)

This entry was posted on March 11, 2008 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Hubble, STScI. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.