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Ughgggh. Am I gonna need to get a device I can put propriety garbage on for school?
I should be fine right? A software dev program couldn’t possible force you to use windows right?
They can force you to use Windows.
What you can do is ask if using a virtual machine is fine. or don’t ask at all and have a virtual machine image of windows ready.
Unless the school that has the software dev program forces all their teachers to use this stuff…
aaaaand uninstalled…
They forgot to put the worrd ‘upgrade’ in air quotes.
Can you run it in a vm?
Some websites do this.
Change the user agent to windows and it works.
Fuxk you piece of shit!
Amazon does this too. After you bought a movie you can’t watch it in full hd on Linux. User agent doesn’t help.
However if you tell their api that you are an smart tv running Linux it works…
The amazon might be due to drm, not OS racism, not that that’s a valid excuse
Same goes if you’re running Firefox.
I once had Hotmail take forever to get past the loading screen, then actually navigating my mail was hellishly slow. Switched my user agent to Edge and “magically” it loaded instantly and everything was snappy…
Had a few other sites do similar slowdowns but that and Youtube were the most unashamedly blatant.
“Upgrade?”
Also I remember these Pearson pricks downgraded everyone’s BTEC results for an assignment on “the future of the media industry” as they got some boomer to mark it who didn’t do any research himself
This is like “upgrading” from a Ferrari to a Ford.
Hey Ford beat Ferrari in Le Mans
And Ford beat the entire world into a 48h workweek
Harrison ford shummed on my dog
Seems to be that learning sites in general are assholes. I once attended a language course, and while their “solution” was web based, it was focused on IE. I had serious issues attending the course under Firefox.
I logged a lot of errors on their site, but their tech support could only manage accounts, the web site had been built by an external company ages ago, and they had no fingers into that.
At my uni they go to the extreme where not only one gets around 20-30 mails DAILY but now to go check your email, which is gmail-based, it hops first into a Cloudflare human verification page that you can never pass in Falkon because it keeps looping after you check the human verification
A key difference is that for learning sites, those who hold the purse strings are usually not those who actually use the website. They only need to convince the school administry or corporate procurement, but care little about the actual users.
Ha ha, that’s cute, you think there is are admins and procurement teams involved. The book publishers sell this shit directly to the professors, and usually the university can’t get involved because of the way the profs contracts are setup. Pearson builds their platform for making the profs job easier, not for any benefit to the students.
Useragent string parsing, for <whatever excuse that you don’t do feature detection>?
Pearson is the worse
Not surprising
It’s a real bummer how the “education” system is infested with crappy, exploitative grifters. See also textbooks, standardized tests, administrators, etc…
“Upgrade”
“Operating”
“System”
"Win"dows
Just like they asked you to upgrade to ie in the 90s a d early 00s.
Seriously, fuck Pearson. Garbage company.
It’s kinda wild that an IT Certification company can’t handle Linux, but I’m sadly not surprised.
Yeah I’m not going to buy ebooks that expire so quickly.
Its kinda fucked, especially since McGH, the other big textbook company, offers theirs online with tuition as built in course materials. Like, on the one hand I understand them only offering access during the course but if they’re also charging you for access that’s horseshit. Idk, I just open my books in reader mode and then print them 😅
I hate this move to only having ebooks. I have to have actual books to read through. I can’t stare at a screen and concentrate to comprehend the topic.
I’ve got my stuff customized to be as close to real paper as I can manage regarding contrast and readability but sometimes I just can’t and have to look at my printed copies instead.
Screens aren’t meant for reading, they’re meant for watching.
Note to self: Find color E-Ink monitor for textbooks
Books… doing what? Expire?
Yeah wtf. That’s kinda books whole thing. They just sorts exist until they naturally end up in a charity shop.
I have this exact problem when I have to manage Apple devices for work. Nothing that user agent switcher can’t fix.
Pearson is a testing company. They use all sorts of sketchy shit under the guise of anti-cheating. Much of that requires specific plug-ins and stuff that only work in Windows.
Even if you could get it working, but they’ll likely just say you were cheating, and take the $300+ you paid to take that required test.
Pearson using all sorts of extremely invasive and questionable kernel-level access plugins to make sure people don’t open notes to cheat on their test on their computer. People just open their notes on another device. Or, you know, paper.
Or, you know, paper.
- That’s what desk/workspace scanning in the most extreme cases is meant to detect. This is why I really don’t like online schooling, because in the absolute worst case, your school will literally scan your place.
You know what would be a really good way to show if your students learned your course material? Let them show it with a practical test of some kind…
Thats not necessary for online teaching. I just got my degree and there were some online courses too, never had to deal with any of this anti cheating crap.
We just have open book exams, problem solved
My daughter had to write a university paper once. They required two cameras to be running. One atop the screen like you use for meetings, and one showing the whole desk and the tested person.
Redhat would randomly interrupt your test and ask you to stand up, pick up the camera and show the room
Privacy invasion. I doubt that would hold water in the EU.
Also, do we really want to normalize mandatory cameras broadcasting from people’s homes? Where’s the outrage?That was in the EU
It’s really useless too. If I wanted to cheat on a test so fucking bad, I’d learn to read braille and just stick reference material under my desk.
I’d clone my monitor to a second monitor in another room and then use an AirPod or something similar to communicate with someone searching for the answers using the second screen and a second device.
All it takes is one class action suit. Wait for it
The only solution for that is to proctor exams in person on their equipment. Miss me with all that nonsense. Makes me glad I’m done with schoolin’ for now…
Oh Pearson definitely does thst as well. But not everyone lives near or has reliable transit to a testing facility. Online testing is essentially a requirement for those people.
Linux will never become relevant on the desktop until its has better spyware support.
