[SLUG] Re: ECDL

[Al Girling]

Pete Redwood wrote:
>  I understand that Microsoft has now ceased co-operation with Apple
>  and stopped all further development of Office software for Mac It is
>  not what I would describe as "fully compatible"anyway. Things written
>  in MacOffice Word do sometimes hiccup when read back in MS Office
>  Word - any form of graphics incorporated in a word document for
>  example, which refuses to print correctly; page settings wander etc
>  etc.. However, we live with that. It is Access which causes the
>  problems. Access has never been availble for Mac but much of the
>  "official" data we recieve is only supplied in Access database
>  format, and all officially approved software is Microsoft Windows
>  only. DfES/LSC will not approve it otherwise. One of my monthly tasks
>  is to re-compile an Access database to run on the College's
>  FileMakerPro system. Many of the pages we have to acces on the LSC
>  website can only be read by a PC running MS Explorer. They don't even
>  work on the Mac version of Explorer.

My knowledge of Mac use is limited to about 3 hours.  I was going on
info from a couple of (Mac user) friends extolling the virtues of OSX.
So I'm happy to be corrected by an unbiased opinion. ;)

The whole 'Microsoft being the only secure system on the planet' crap
drives me nuts.  I can only assume there is something well dodgy going
on here.

> As a side issue from that, the Royal Mail website used to display
> exactly the same message - " You are not running MS Explorer. Please
> download Explorer to access this site." They have now changed it. The
> Co-Op Bank, on their internet banking site was the same when they
> first opened it. They soon corrected it though after a barrage of
> complaints. Their excuse was that MS Explorer was the only browser
> with sufficient security!!!!!

If I can find an address these sites get a mail from me saying how
there's an estimated 18 million Linux users globally.  So add all the
Mac, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris users etc etc to this.  Do
they really think it makes sound financial sense to exclude such large
numbers of potential customers who have already chosen to move away from
Microsoft products or would never touch them on account of how hopelessly
insecure they have proven to be.

These are generally ignored, but I've had a couple of responses on the
lines of working to business guidelines.

> I gues it comes down to web page designers who use Microsoft software
> to do the job but the number of supposedly professional web sites that
> are not fully W3C compliant never fails to amaze me.

I'm not a web-designer but I do tinker with it a little and I know I'm
not the only one who gets annoyed at building a page, validating it.
OK, but wait!  It doesn't work on Internet Exploder!!!  So you have to
break your code to make it work for what is undeniably the most popular
browser.  Aaarggh!

I posted a link on the Catux-Slug list last week to the BBCs statistics
page, which makes interesting reading.  Contrary to the MS claim to have
something like 95% of the browser market.  This site shows IE6 at 65%.
Add the other versions of IE and it comes up to 75%.  Firefox having 12%
and most surprising to me that text based browsers are actually
increasing in popularity, only 0.2% but hey! ;)

Toodle pip,

Al

-- 

Al Girling

GPG: key ID 0xD826BCE9
Home page:                  <http://al.sdf-eu.org>
Linux User: #290080         <http://counter.li.org>
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