In addition to whatever student advisory board we have, we should  
maybe ask students (and faculty) to sign up and identify themselves as  
primarily Mac or Windows or Linux users.   Then, we have an audience  
we can periodically (like once a year) ask about trends/preferences,  
etc, rather than a) guessing, or b) playing catch-up.   We could offer  
prizes (techcash, tosci's cards) for participating in the survey.

I think this might be a slightly better way to engage the community,  
rather than the periodic surveys we send out to a small subset of  
mailing lists.  The hard part would still be encouraging people to  
sign up.  But maybe we could do something clever like offer an opt-in  
checkbox when users automatically download Windows, or OS X, or  
Debathena.  Or possibly even major pieces of software, like Kerberos  
or SecureCRT.  If we phrase it as something like "Click here to opt-in  
to receive an annual survey on {Windows|Mac|Linux} at MIT and how we  
can improve our offerings to you", it might get a better response.  Or  
it might turn out to be useless...

But I think something like this would be better than relying on User- 
Agent and similar data to determine what people are using.

-Jon
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