Those sample statistics seem quite outdated... Windows XP is not mentioned even, and it would be interesting to see how much XP gas gained versus it's "internal" competition against 98, 95 and even ME.
I found an article on MacCentral stating that the same source found MacOS still around those percentages by Jan. 2002 in global usage, as measured by internet browsing, with Switzerland and Japan, for example, having above average Mac usage share of 6-7%.
TheCounter.com has some global statistics for several months, including stats for OS usage in the web, interestingly it shows Windows XP in the 12th place below Linux and Unix.

Basing your choice of operating system on what verybody is using? I'd buy the last Mac in the planet if Apple went under and keep using it for as many years as possible for my home computer, it seems a very remote possibility anyway. It's not much of loyalty, it's that the system works fine for me and I know how to use it.
You forgot the Amiga OS Glenn... but that doesn't surprise me since it became a footnote and came from Commodore, a company that became a footnote in computer history itself, but it looks like Amiga OS is still around.

For the record: I became a Mac User with the Mac Classic, I still prefer it, I actually think that without learning in a Mac I couldn't have learned to use Windows, I'll be damned if I don't always find Windows harder to configure,I really think that without finding Mac OS more intuitive to setup I'd never have tried to learn how to do those things in Windows.
I don't really swing between OS's, most of my swinging now is going back to Classic Mac OS briefly, Mac OS X is just a pleasure to use and view. But believe it or not I still use a program running over Windows 3.1 sometimes, for the computer control of some scientific instrumentation. I had to use Windows 3.1 and 95 in previous jobs, I even used Amiga OS in college (for some computer animation and graphics projects), I don't really know Unix, except a few very basic functions and enough to respect and fear the power of the command line. Actually if you ever had to use DOS (which I also did) using Unix shouldn't feel so different, other than the fact that almost all the commands used have a different name, and a different and more powerful syntax.
Man, after writing that do I feel like a computer dinosaur... I've been from DOS to here...

P.S. the X-Window system is not really an OS, AFAIK, it's just a windowed GUI work environment for Unix, capable of running in several versions of Unix.



Another filter for ads (including banners) is Web Washer.

www.webwasher.com/en/prod.../index.htm
It's free for home and educational use. I tried it briefly some time ago, but found it lacking somewhat in that I had to specify several image sizes for banner blocking. That, and its effectiveness against pop-ups may have been updated, it also seems to work for URL blocking. It has Windows, Linux and Classic Mac OS versions.