Hi All,

I just finished using a website of a tax supported agency. I went through several iterations trying to get it to work on a particular page. By the time I got it working I was using Firefox (on Linux) with the user agent reporting IE6.0 on WinXP, and Java Script enabled. It turned out JS was essential and was probably the only thing initially stopping me. The page in question was called browserCheck which would eventually redirect me to the page I really wanted. What I found interesting was that 1) it required JS (but didn't tell me that -- it silently failed) and 2) it popped up a window telling me I would have a better experience if I used IE6. After clicking OK, it redirected me to the page I wanted (which seemed to work fine).

I am not particularly literate with either HTML or Java Script so I didn't bother trying to look at the code on the page. But I was wondering if anybody else has had a similar experience or has a clue to why it assumed I was not running IE6 even though the user agent said I was. I am guessing it has something to do with Java Script. (I had previously tried to use that page with the default user agent but I wouldn't expect it to remember that. I had reloaded the previous page after changing the user agent and enabling JS.)

And, oh yes. I did send the webmaster a polite email saying that I found it "highly distasteful and problematic" that an agency partially funded with tax dollars promoted and "preferred" a particular company and its products over others.

Please note that I posted this in "General" as I am just seeking opinion and comment. I am not trying to solve a particular problem.

That's an interesting twist in how to get people to fix their sites. Consider that many--if not most--bureaucrats know nothing about computers and sometimes assume that everyone uses Windows. Even so, what if we **could** sell the notion that our government should promote open standards for information exchange? What if we were to have a government even able to understand the issue?

Exercise for student: Are OP and I from the same country??

That is exactly what Peter Quinn did in Massachusetts. Of course, what he started has since been derailed. And his reputation was dragged through the mud with an unsubstantiated story (which turned out to be false) published. (Golly, I wonder who could have been responsible for that.)

I assuming you report your location accurately and it means what I think it means, I obviously know the answer to that. Should I post or let the "students" work on it?

I have tried to explain to various people the evil nature of a particular US company. Each incident taken by itself tends to produce yawns, but if you look at the whole picture.........

More for those students: Which US presidential candidate visited Google and said something about being a supporter of OpenSource SW?

And even more: Will the emergence of Linux-powered "netbooks" be the straw that breaks the camel's back?

I am insufficiently interested to research the "country" question, but without looking I would guess Algore was the candidate who supports open source.

I'm referring to the current election cycle.....

Al Gore invented the Internet, so he might not feel he needs to understand Open Source.....

I know Obama visited google and when asked what is the best way to sort a collection, he said something along the lines of, "Not bubble sort." Which I thought was pretty decent for a politician; certainly made me laugh.

McCain doesn't even really like technology, so I've heard. There was an interview with his campaign manager, and I seem to recall him saying how McCain didn't even know how to turn on a computer and just learnt what google was. I also seem to remember, don't quote me on this, but if McCain had his way, he would do without all this technology stuff since all it does is get in the way. I think that's what he said, but I'm not sure.

My guess is yes. The US leans so much towards Microsoft its not even funny. Filling out FAFSA, they suggest using Windows. That's completely ridiculous! The OS I'm using shouldn't affect my experience if we're all sticking to the same standards.

But it's nice to see the Universities pushing for open source standards and software. Freshman year before we got to college, they mailed us a CD containing suggested software to install and almost all of it was open source. From what I remember the only software not open source was the firewall and AV. We even have our own distribution based on RHEL 5 and free to download and install, which I have yet to try. According to CIT's site, they're hoping to even have their own LUG. I'm wondering how much that will change the next generation of businesses.

Another University I was checking out already has their own LUG, sells RH to students, and has their own Ubuntu mirror (used to support Fedora, but was discontinued a few years ago).

So conversely it's also nice to see Universities targetting the younger population, and they still do that despite their ties with Microsoft, which I suppose is only there to offer students MS products at the correct price ($0-$15; $0 for MS Office, $15 for MS Vista).

I was just back on the website I mentioned in post #1. Intellectual honesty (OMG! ) now requires me to put "offending" in quotes in the title of this post. This time I discovered something that in its own right *might* be disturbing, but it also indicates that *perhaps* I fired off that email to the webmaster in too much haste.

What I just discovered is that if I enable Java Script (apparently required to get through the browserCheck page) but let the Firefox browser correctly identify itself in the user agent, I do not see the popup saying I will have a better experience with IE6. However, if I set the user agent to Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) (IE 6.0 on winXP, or so prefbar tells me) then I get the popup.

Curiouser and curiouser ...

(And ... while spell checking this post I found out the spell checker considers "curiouser" a word! Cool!)