JM (Jason Meridth)

JM (Jason Meridth)

Learn, Converse, Share

03 Sep 2007

I didn't think websites still required a certain platform...

Precursor:  I’m not as much anti-Microsoft as I used to be, but this re-ignited the flame.  Not against Microsoft, but websites that don’t want to hit all demographics.

I personally use Ubuntu at home on 2 of my computers (I also have 2 Windows XP Pro and 1 Windows 2003 Server SP2 boxes).  I switched my wife over to Ubuntu about 2 months ago.  She only uses her laptop for email, Internet and the occasional document/spreadsheet.  She uses gmail for email, so no application change there.  She used Firefox on Windows, again no change.  I introduced her to OpenOffice on Windows before the migration so she could used to it and therefore be able to continue writing documents and spreadsheets.

She loves to play games online and usually it’s just java applets or flash/shockwave games.

She told me today that she had a site where she couldn’t get the games to come up and I looked at the error screen and cringed. I thought the “this site requires Internet Explorer to run” was bad.  This one takes the cake.  “King.com requires Microsoft Windows”.  The same site thinks that Shockwave is on its 99999 version.

I know, I know.  Run a virtual machine with windows and let her play the games for that site that way.  (HOWTO) She’s pretty computer savvy, so we’ll be good.

Side note:  BERYL, is freaking awesome.  She only has 64 MB of video memory on her Dell Inspiron 1150 and it runs great.  (Yeah, I know I need to upgrade her soon.)  Beat that Vista. It was actually this subject and video, that made my wife want to switch. :)

Ignore the “java Firefox plug-in” Google search in the browser.  I was too lazy to look harder than that @ 650am.

KingDotComWindowsRequirement

Back to finishing my monorail posts.  They have been delayed a bit because I’m switching hosting companies.  Goodbye WebHost4Life and hello ServerBeach.