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On Mon, 16 May 2011 10:12:37 +0000 Adam Latham wrote: > Some of you may remember that I work in a Secondary school - not in > ICT thankfully. > > Today I received our BTEC subject Assessment materials on CD-ROM and > the requirements read like a who's-who of computer fascism: > > OS: this disc will only work on a PC running Windows XP SP3 or > better. It WILL not run on MAC OSX. > > Required: MS Office 2003 or better, Adobe Reader 8 or better, IE7 or > better, Firefox 3 > > Without these requirements, the disc is a Â200 coaster. > > Edexcel produce the BTEC resources as part of the Pearson group. > > So although it'll install through WINE, you can't actually read any > of the documents without installing the items previously mentioned. > Nice. > > World domination, just another (depressing) step closer for M$ and > adooby-dooby-do. > > Adam > Message sent using BlackBerry Adooby-dooby-do... I like that. :D If they are mandating IE7+ or Firefox 3, then chances are that aspect of it will work in any browser. I doubt they'd've gone to the extend of writing their own custom add-ons for those two specific browsers. If they'd mentioned 1 browser, then I could believe it... but writing add-ons for 2 browsers? I'm not so sure. They are saying "MS Office 2003 or better", so it would suggest the files in question are Microsoft .doc, .xls, .ppt, etc. These should open with little or any noticeable changes in Libre/OpenOffice. Also, it is unlikely any of the PDF documents are going to include any weird and wonderful Adobe-only features if they're specifying Adobe Reader 8+, so they should open OK with Evince or XPDF, or others. It is annoying, especially if they interface they've created is essentially just a bunch of HTML files with hyperlinks to the included documents - why not make the whole thing into HTML? Why mess around with MSOffice & PDF? Grant (also in the education sector and having to deal with BTEC stuff). -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq