世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com continued its recent series of surveys investigating people’s habits around technology, with this survey, performed in conjunction with Cross Marketing, looking at desktop setup and mass-storage devices. They interviewed by means of an internet questionnaire 300 people from all over the country. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and the age grouping too was split into six equally sized samples, with the samples of teenagers (ages 18 and 19 only), twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, and so on up to those in their sixties each containing 50 people.

One of the things I’ve noticed with my colleagues at work is that a lot of them have at least a third of their desktop covered with icons, using it as a temporary (more like semi-permanent!) holding area for mail attachments, current projects and the like, a behaviour I never really understood.

One other custom I’d like to see investigated by this series of polls is one on how people use filtering on their mailer. Again, I’ve noticed my software engineer colleagues often have a huge inbox with a massive amount of unread mail (we’re talking thousands!) then manually moving mail into target folders. Similarly, not many turn on message threading, nor do they archive their inbox, which seems to me like a massive waste of time.

Q1: How many hard disk partitions does your personal computer have? (Sample size=300)

One	29.0%
Two	37.3%
Three	13.0%
Four or more	8.3%
Don’t know	12.3%

Note that this is not the number of physical drives, but the number of logical partitions.

Q2: What kinds of optical drives does your personal computer have? (Sample size=300, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
CD-RW	137	45.7%
CD-ROM	129	43.0%
DVD-RW	116	38.7%
DVD-ROM	101	33.7%
CD-R	97	32.3%
DVD-R	78	26.0%
Other	20	6.7%
No optical drives attached	16	5.3%

That comes to a total of 678 drives, or an average of almost 2.4 drives per drive owner. Whether combined CD-RW and DVD-RW drives, for instance, were counted once or twice is not indicated.

Q3: How many icons do you have on your desktop? (Sample size=300)

Zero	0.7%
One to five	9.0%
Six to ten	25.7%
11 to 20	36.3%
21 or more	24.0%
Don’t know	4.3%

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