[Discuss] UVic's new portal now available to students, unless they use Firefox

[pzelnip at telus.net]

Mixed replies below....

stephen hawkes wrote:
> On a possitive note there were some rumors of uvic starting a linux repo 
> or mirror (I don't want to say what prof said that since it was second 
> hand to me, but my friend said he was quite excited about the 
> "possibility" or something along those lines).  That would be the right 
> step in UViv (or CSC at least) having an "official" distro that would be 
> supported on campus.

I'd echo the same concerns Paul had about having an official distro (ie - if
there was only 1 supported distro then anyone who uses anything else is just as
screwed), but OTOH if there was an "official" Uvic distro, then it'd give
students who otherwise wouldn't bother even trying Linux a reason to check it out.

George Farris wrote:
> The get leagl blurb is here.  I made it into a poster and started
> putting it up everywhere at Malaspina Cowichan.  I'm going to buy a
> hundred CD's and put them in the Library for next September so students
> can get it easily.

That's a good idea, maybe I'll print off a few of those and see if I can get
them posted up around campus.

Just curious as well, where are you getting the OO CD's and how much is 100 of
them costing you?

David Bronaugh wrote:
> If you read the list, you would notice that Mozilla 1.7 -is- supported, 
> and considering it is essentially identical, there is not a support 
> issue. 

Yeah I see that point, but so long as the "not supported" message appears I have
an issue with it.

Imagine you're a relative computer newbie and you hear about this new browser
called Firefox and want to try it out.  So you download it, install it, and
decide to visit the uSource site as your first site and get greeted with a
"Browser not supported" message.  Do you really think the user will stick with
FF after that point?

What really gets me about this is that it's such a double standard.  I'm the TA
this semester for SENG 265 and part of my duties is to maintain the lab webpage.
 Now imagine I design that page such that it's not IE friendly.  I would have so
much #$@@ thrown at me so fast it wouldn't be funny.  But make a major site
designed for the University as a whole not compliant with one of the major
players in the browser market and that's perfectly fine with UVic.  That's a
policy that is discriminatory in nature, plain and simple.

The more I think about this, the more it pisses me off.
---
Adam Parkin
pzelnip at telus.net
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