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Saxonia Issue 02 Part 035
Mysteries
By Rumrunner/VOID
[l
As everybody who has read some of my previous articles know, I
occasinally do something I consider to be work even when I'm in school.
That mostly involves downloading demos and other scenewares to bring home
to my Amiga. However there are also times when I load up Netscape or
Internet Explorer to have a look at some webpages.
This was exactly what I had done this particular day. I had just used
Internet Explorer to check my mail from a computer at school, and since
the program was running, I continued to use it instead of loading
Netscape. Except from the crap scrolling in IE, there's not that much
that irritates me when I'm only going to use it for a short time.
Anyway, I used Altavista to search for a page which I had found earlier,
but couldn't remember the adress for. It didn't show up in the listing
this time. Reload. It still didn't show up. I then loaded Netscape and
performed exactly the same search. There it was. I then tried IE again.
Still nothing in there. What was this? I have still no idea, but it seems
to me that this certain Microsoft product is getting more and more
useless every day. Today, I again tried the search again, and the entry
I was looking for showed up, but now all Norwegian letters are missing.
Let's take a look at possible reasons for this. It's at first easy to say
that a computer placed at a school will have many users every day and
some of them are bound to do something stupid, either by accident or
because they consider it to be fun. This solution is quickly shot to
pieces considering the fact that the administrators ghost the computers
every once in a while. This means that they have a computer somewhere in
the network and copy everything from this onto the user-computers. This
means easier updates, as they can be done on one computer alone, then
copied, and it also stops user-invoked trouble before it get's too
annoying.
What else can it be? Some years ago, when things went wrong, you could
say that it could be a virus. I don't think that this explanation stand
up very long today. There seems to be no [2 real[0 viruses anymore, just
scripts and basic-programs the maker sends via mail. You also have macro-
viruses and the likes for instance for Word. But this was not a Word-
document.
Let's consider the Norwegian letter problem alone for a while. This
should be able to explain by the fact that you can use different fonts,
and perhaps some of them doesn't support these letters. No, again this
is not the case. The font displayed these letters on the same pages
earlier.
One possible solution could have been that some pages are made for a
specific browser. A friend's homepage for instance, looks the way it
should when you use IE, but trying to use Netscape will result in
disapoointment, as it will only load one of the frames used all over,
not cosidering what should really be there. Yes, this must be the
solution. [1 No, it worked with both IE and Netscape today, remember.[0 It
was a phenomena happening every time one day, but not other days. It also
seems a little odd that AltaVista should make a page that only supports
Netscape fully, considering that most people (unfortunately) use IE.
I'm out of ideas as to what caused all of this. I don't care much either.
I just wanted you to think about this :[2
Today all programs are made to be as userfriendly as possible, everything
should be done automatic, and you should not see the preferences much.
Is userfriendlyness the same as loosing control. Because there must have
been some controls somewhere that at least could have helped the font
problem.[0
In the end, I will give you the adress to the webpage where I first
discovered the font problem. It's a very good page if you know the
Norwegian language, and have some sense of humour :[1
www.tragisk.com[0
Then go ahead and judge the page for yourself.
