In order to be able to make decisions about future Mac OS X support we need to know at least roughly what OS X versions and which hardware our R users are using. Therefore we ask our Mac users to participate in a quick (automated) survey. All you have to do is to type
source("http://r.research.att.com/survey.R")
in R. You will be presented with a choice telling you what information will be send to us - it is just the R version, OS X version, architecture, CPU and memory information. It will look somewhat like this:
> source("http://r.research.att.com/survey.R")
Do you want to participate in the Mac survey?
1: Yes, send '2.8.0.46388/ppc/9.4.0/PowerMac7,3/2/4'
2: No
Selection: 1
trying URL 'http://r.research.att.com/macsurv?2.8.0.46388/ppc/9.4.0/PowerMac7,3/2/4'
Content type 'text/plain' length 3 bytes
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 3 bytes
Thank you for participating.
The above example is sent from a dual-core G5 Mac running Darwin 9.4.0 (i.e. Mac OS X 10.5.4) with 4GB of RAM. Please submit just once form a machine even if you have multiple R versions installed.
(For those curious the survey is conducted by "downloading" the URL shown above to /dev/null (and it is just "OK\n"), so no files are created on your computer)
Thank you,
Simon Urbanek
Aug 20, 2008
PS: If you want to make sure that no malicious user is trying to impose as our server, you can check the R code that will be executed e.g. with:
cat(paste(readLines("http://r.research.att.com/survey.R"),collapse="\n"))
and if you're happy you can just copy/paste it.
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