Mind the gap
Your report on the use of the internet by political parties missed out on one of the biggest problems for the unwary voter - the number of sites claiming to provide comprehensive links to MPs and candidates but which in fact have many gaps in their records.

Both the Guardian and the Independent have printed in the last few months stories criticising politicians for not having more websites which were in fact predicated on surveys that, at least in the case of the Liberal Democrats, seriously undercounted the number of sites.

Rather ironically, another example of this problem is one of the sites which the article mentions, www.ukpolitics.org.uk. Similarly the Parliament website mentioned has often had problems with gaps in its information.

A far more reliable source is the DMOZ catalogue or the political parties' own web sites.
Mark Pack
markpack@cix.co.uk

Classic note
John King (Feedback May 10) may rest assured that there's plenty of classical music accessible through RealPlayer.

Try Radio 3 at: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 or the more eclectic Dutch station, de Concert-zender at www.concertzender.nl for starters. It seems to me that John is confusing the medium with the content. RealPlayer delivers music: the presets that come with it are just to get you started. After that it's up to you.

Entering "classical radio europe" in Google gives plenty of hits...
Peter Gillings
p.gillings@ic.ac.uk

Mini marvels
I was pleased to read that 8cm CDs are making a comeback, albeit for MP3-encoded material. I bought quite a few of these tiny little marvels in the late 80s, when you could get an 8cm, 4-track, 20min CD single for about £3.50.

Not only are they easy to handle when out and about, but they play without skipping even in a non-buffered portable CD player, because they are smaller and hence stiffer than 12cm disks and so are not as affected by shaking.

They also represent the reason why Sony bought Columbia Pictures and other content providers in the 1990s. The 8cm format CD was intended by Sony to be the definitive format for singles in the future, and Sony also produced a beautiful little portable CD player to play them - it was about the size of today's mini-disc players, years before they were invented.

The idea failed because few companies would release material on to the format. From then on, Sony and other hardware makers bought up content providers so they could ensure there was enough "software" available for their hardware.
Chris Rogers
christopher.rogers@glmca.mcs.gov.uk

OS X-rated
In his review of the new iBook, Neil McIntosh wonders whether the 500MHz G3 processor is sufficient for OS X. I am running an original iBook with a 300MHz processor with OS X installed and have encountered no problems, although it does reduce the amount of disk space I have left. Philip Smith
philip.smith@clara.co.uk