Drama keen
Douglas Rushkoff enjoys aiming a few kicks at the soft target of TV drama. Speaking as a TV hack who is routinely tortured by rewrites, I wish it took only a week. Irritatingly enough, most people in the field strive to do high-quality, imaginative work.

Douglas rightly points out that unexpurgated access to people's real lives via web-cam is boring. He yearns for the day that a dedicated band of people select scenes from life to be meaningful, edit them to be entertaining, and put them out there for whoever wants to watch. Ummm... sort of like TV drama?
Gary Parker
gary.parker@ntlworld.com

No time like
Anybody thinking of signing up with Freeserve's new Anytime service should be very, very careful.

I attempted to switch to Freeserve as my internet service provider (ISP) on February 7. I found that my web browser would not work with Freeserve.

Two days later Freeserve's technicians had not solved the problem and had lost me my connection to the other ISPs that I use (Comundo, Libertysurf and Onetel). At that point they decided to blame my computer manufacturer, Dell, and told me to get a Dell technician to sort the problem out.

It was obvious nonsense, since no other ISP has encountered this problem.

Dell's technician sorted the problem out in five minutes on the following Monday, by which time I had been without an internet connection for three days.

A call to Freeserve's customer service department resulted in my being told off for using "abusive language" because I said that Freeserve had "f****d" my computer.

I still have an Outlook Express which displays Freeserve's advertising. I also have an undeletable and unnecessary Networks icon on my desktop and Networks folders in Microsoft Explorer. More seriously I have a bug or virus on Internet Explorer which causes it to open up dozens of new windows if I try to use a "mailto" from a web page. All these appear to have been downloaded from Freeserve.

My credit card has now been debited £12.99, and that does not include the futile calls to Freeserve technicians at 50p a minute (at least £10 over 2 days).
Jane Leaper
jane_leaper@hotmail.com

Ins and outs
I checked my Inbox at 1100 on Tuesday February 20 and was told that "there are no unread mail messages." I then sent out a message and this seems to have triggered a rush of activity. A few minutes later, there were four unread messages waiting.

One of them had been sent on February 11, nine days previously, and the others on the 16th, 17th and 18th. That first one concerned an event that had taken place on the 19th and had been ruined by the tardiness of the email service.

As I use Freeserve, I am wondering if this is their way of dropping a leaden hint that they were growing bitter at their lack of profitability. If so, they are making a poor decision.

They are warning me not to trust email and to use the old-fashioned mail when I want fast, assured service.
David Ross
davidtamara@rossd1.freeserve.co.uk

Pontificating
On February 15, Paul Hartmann asked you "what GSM is". On 22 February, Keith Scott described Mr Hartmann as "stupid" because he didn't search the web for the answer.

Clever Mr Scott demonstrated how it should be done: he asked Yahoo, and got the "answer" that GSM is the Global System for Mobile Communications. QED.

But that wasn't the question. Knowing what the abbreviation stands for doesn't tell you "what GSM is".

What Mr Hartmann needed was a comprehensive, but not over-technical, description of what GSM does and how it works.

I've examined the 263 items thrown up by Mr Scott's Yahoo! search, and only one of them meets this specification. And I had to plough through a vast amount of dross to find it.

The point is that Mr Scott pontificated about a question he simply didn't understand. I wouldn't describe him as "stupid".

But that's because I'm more polite than he is.
Dermod Quirke
dermod@dircon.co.uk

Revealing
Perhaps instead of Keith Scott insulting less technologically minded people it would be more useful to suggest a visit to http://whatis.com , which I find answers any questions I may have about new technology terms, and is more likely to provide revealing information than a simple search on Yahoo! Ben Conrad
benjconrad@yahoo.co.uk

Just too smug
Keith Scott does have a valid point, although he's just a tad too smug about it (and he's assuming that the original inquirer has access to the net, which might not be the case).

It's often seemed to me, over the years, that the most appropriate advice that could be given, not just to inquiries in Online but other PC-related publications as well, is RTFM!
Ron Graves
ron@graves3.fsnet.co.uk

Call icab
Web watch (22 Feb) complains of a site in which "the type is too small, and bad web design means it cannot be made any larger".

The site you complained about (www.Publicradiofan.com) works well with a new browser called iCab (free from www.icab.de ) which has buttons to enlarge or shrink type size.

This is a special boon to lecturers such as me who want to project pages for an audience. But the main benefit of this browser is it operates in about 2MB of memory.
Michael Edwards
m.edwards@ucl.ac.uk

Saintly talk
"Critics point out that... much of the information was both inaccurate and poorly written." (Online, February 22 page 13).

What better recommendation for the patron saint of the internet?
Marc Wilson
marc@cleopatra.co.uk