Considering, Ashley's recent interview on backstage podcast, in which he tries to dispel some of the displease aimed at the iPlayer from the Free Software and Open Source Communities, it is quite unfortunate that he has made such a public mistake at their expense, in the past few days.
Considering the Communities are apparently as small as 15,000 users, I am surprised we have been able to be so vocal. (Yes I am suggesting that practically every GNU+Linux user with a user agent string including "linux" visits at least one page on the BBC, once a month.) My question to Kevin Hinde would be, how many users are we unsure of their Operating system? Where are they classed? For example, I have a small blog and I have some visitor statistics (using bbclone) on that. The 3rd most popular operating system is "?" ie unrecognised. for an example see http://bbclone.de/demo/ The BBC must have similar results, whose OS it can't distinguish, if so where are these? This is important because many Free software web browsers, in particular those on GNU+Linux obscure, miss out, or fake the UA String. This is sometimes done for privacy; not wanting an easy way to work out which exploit get which box. more often than not it is done because some silly software designers think that on some websites (obviously not BBC, tends to be Educational Software Vendors in my experience) they can show the user something saying this site is not compatible with you browser, operating system etc. Obviously UA strings can be faked, indeed there is a firefox extension that I currently have installed which lets me change it to show me running what ever browser on what ever platform I want. -Tim -- www.dobo.urandom.co.uk ---- If each of us have one object, and we exchange them, then each of us still has one object. If each of us have one idea, and we exchange them, then each of us now has two ideas. - George Bernard Shaw
