[Liverpool] proprietary formats @ liverpool uni

[Vladimir]

yes, i know i could look on google, but that's not an excuse
to using such a formats that only Windows users can read, isn't it?
in fact, i was offline, when i ran across this file (i downloaded it on my
linux
laptop and when i was doing my reading, i found out that i can't open it),
and as i thought - i raised this issue, because when i only got to uni i was

always expecting something like that to happen. and it happened.
alan, would you believe, that before i came to study in liverpool
i was quite happy with one of my laptops running on redhat without
any proprietary codecs or drivers - i simply never needed them
as i am not a youtube addict and tend to keep my music in ogg vorbis
format. but in a uni you just don't have time to convert all the files
to open formats. i sincerely think (what i never mentioned in my letter,
as it is down to my personal beliefs), that this kind of attitude is a
disregard to me as a linux user. it's an attitude like:
 - i can't read this proprietary format
 - oh, don't try to find a problem that doesn't exist - use windows.
i don't want to use windows and i don't want to spend money on it!
they spend big money to make all the places in uni accessible to
disabled people and don't bother to make electronic documents
"accessible" to other other Operational Systems' users. literally making
them (well, that's us) "disabled". but even worse - treating us like misfits
after all of that. in the end of the day - i am paying my money for
education
(and all other taxes), and it's £3K a year. i am not expecting to be sent to

google to find the stuff on my own. yes, it was the first result in google
search,
but not the second example.
what makes the situation ridiculous - is that it's not that the file was
just stored
on computer in this kind of format (some people due to lack of computer
knowledge have all of their music in wma format - what wmedia player
gives them), it was converted  to it, before uploading. and it is not that
i (as a linux user) don't want to open, let's say mp3 and write back -
could you please send it to me in other format. no, i really can't open this
file.
yes i could search for the first article on google - it's not hard. but
wouldn't
it be easier in the first place not to convert it to some weird archives,
but just leave it as is. we are talking less than 1 mb. i don't think that
we have that many people on dial-up nowadays (the .mht was eventually
bigger than the original twice the size). or to simply post a link :)

On 06/03/2008, Alan Pope <alan at popey.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2008 at 02:49:00PM +0000, Vladimir wrote:
> >    Week 4 reading, the article: Copying music legally in the digital age
> >    Technology The Guardian.mht was posted on VITAL in a proprietary web
> page
> >    archive format that can't be opened by
> >    either Mozilla Firefox Web Browser nor by KHTML [open source] engine
> >    driven ones, like Safari on Mac OS X platform. Indeed to read this
> article
> >    I had to go down to a place with Windows machine that had Microsoft
> >    Internet Explorer 7 (that was struggling to open it indeed and
> crashed 2
> >    times before opening the article).
>
>
> Alternatively you could have just looked at the name of the file and
> figured
> out that it's an article saved from The Guardian website:-
>
>
> http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Copying+music+legally+in+the+digital+age%22
>
> The first hit:-
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/09/copyrightlaws
>
> Whilst I agree that using non-free formats is bad, I think you could
> possibly have approached this in a somewhat less confrontational manner.
>
> Cheers,
> Al.
>
>
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> Liverpool at mailman.lug.org.uk
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>



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