Readers' Comments

Reader Comments on Aardvark Daily 15 Feb 2001
Note: the comments below are the unedited submissions of readers and do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher.
From: bede
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: ird

I have little trust in the irds response,
its just too fishy to believe,

call me a conspirist but really how would the story the ird
present be possibly true?

unless the ird hosts internal homepages for its users how
could a link to an auction site be in the ird's system?

goverment departments are renowed for spending a million or
so dollars on "Pens and Pencils" in there annual budgets

is the ird really attemping to save money?

gosh how come we never herd the pr man put out the release
"ird to use local auction sites for procurment"
like any other department would spin out on a regular basis


I personally would have to go down to ird check over there
system and database to see what was going on before I could
believe the story presented




From: The Hobbit
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: How many people use Netscape?

Bruce, you appear to be falling into the same trap as you
acuse others of doing and misleading your readers - on the
very page you link to from todays rant reads the following..

"Before you read these stats, its very important that you
know where these numbers came from. First things first,
this is a representation of browser usage for people who
visit BrowserWatch, nothing more, nothing less."

Which kind of flies in the face of your statement that
"21 percent of Net users still rely on good old Netscape as
their preferred browser"

The "good **old** netscape" (my ** ) is not in fact
differentiated in the figures given and instead appears to
lump any browser identifying itself as of the Netscape
flavour all together (as it does for IE which, at 64
percent is still over 3x the above usage of your beloved
browser.  The fact that only 2 percent of the NEtscapes
recorded may be of a 3.x vintage in unclear - they may all
be 4.xx and slightly less picky about code than their
predecessor.  (Personally I like picky browsers - but then
I'll occasionally do some coding).

Many websites will identify the people they expect to use
their site, and if they expect most to visit with IE, then
it's their call as to if they bother regression testing
against older browsers or NS/Opera types.  It doesn't make
the site any worse than others, just not as accessible to
people browsing with IE (in much the same way that me
running a fruit and vege shop with the signs printed only
in Samoan, or japanese or whatever would restrict my
customer base - sure you may not understand the language
but you may or may not be able to make out how much the
banannas are so it doesn't necessarly exclude you from
shopping there.
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