Napster lives
I read your file-sharing alternatives with interest and was disappointed to find that you missed out two of the best clients available.
First up is WinMX - www.winmx.com - a Napster-like clone that allows you to connect to both the Napster and independent Opennap servers.
It also has its own P2P [Peer to Peer) function built in, allowing you to connect with other WinMX users online, which apparently number over one million. As well as this, it is very easy to use and has many extras that Napster doesn't.
Second up is Gnucleus. This is a true P2P client along the veins of Gnotella and Bearshare. It's not as easy to use as WinMX but does generally get the results I need.
Neither of these clients use advertising or contain any known "spyware", as do more than one of the clients you listed.
Another source of help is www.naptalk.com, which is a Napster oriented bulletin-board designed to help people with file-sharing queries.
Laurian Dalley
laurian@btinternet.com
MP3 sharing is very much alive and kicking and I can still get whatever music I want. I haven't used Napster since they started hiding certain files, except for chat.
There are many, many new clients out there, and many, many new servers to connect to. Most of these are personal servers which will never be stopped.
They get shut down, get another server name, link to a new network and they are back up and running again. As time passes by, more and more people are getting servers and we can all link up and share for free.
So a big :o* to all those who tried to stop Napster. They have killed a client but many people have got off their own backsides to keep the internet music sharing community alive.
Name and address supplied
Regarding Napster, two points spring to mind:
• Napster was the best resource in the world for out-of-print titles and obscurities. While a hit parade of transfers might put familiar names at the top, the most useful aspect of Napster will never be reproduced in a paid-for system - the chance of finding someone with that ultra-hard-to-find track or vintage out-of-copyright recording. These are the tracks the record companies already deem uneconomical to re-release, or belong to long defunct labels.
• Given the slow speed of downloading and the varying quality of ripping and compression, it was never really feasible to use Napster as a means of acquiring CDs for free. I am one of many who used Napster as a stepping stone to trying out unfamiliar artists before shelling out on a proper CD.
Yes, I have the equipment to burn audio CDs from MP3s, but even so a free Napster did more to encourage me to buy more CDs than anything now proposed.I strongly suspect that the Napster alternatives will do less well what Napster did so successfully.
Andrew Rose
andrew@moeran.com
Designer label
David Earls (Feedback, July 5) illustrates perfectly how designers do not find out what their site looks like to real users.
To maximise a site's readability you need to fit as many words as possible, at the size the reader finds best, onto the line length (s)he is looking at on their screen.
To put 10-13 words per line so that you have to scroll from side to side to read the whole line (as is often the case) defeats the whole point of a clever design. If 10-13 words are optimum, why do newspapers print in columns with 4-7 words per line?
Alan Joyce claims that "the vast majority ... use IE 5.x on an 800 x 600 or VGA screen" but, for a start, how many use the window full screen? The point is that browsers and HTML were designed to adapt the text to the user's requirements, including screen size and character size.
But most designers seem to be frightened by this and instead design as if it were on paper, where every copy looks exactly the same!
Both try and blame their clients for the narrowness of their designs, but the client is not the expert on good design - the designer is, and should be advising the client.
They both also ignore the fact that getting the design perfect on one screen size should not mean it is rubbish on any other, although this is often the case.
The client should also be advised that it is what he is selling and how well he can deliver that counts, not simply a pretty site, and an annoying site will drive customers away.
Geoff Tomlinson
geoff@the-tomlinsons.org.uk
David Earls (July 5) incorrectly states that the inability to alter font size on a web page is "due to the inclusion of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)". Absolute nonsense! This problem predates the existence of CSS, which is a little used technology, sadly.
The problem is caused by "pixel-perfect" web merchants using the "Size=" attribute of the Font element with absolute values, such as points or pixels, instead of relative values.
Setting text in points or pixels prevents users resizing the text, unless they override this in their browser Preferences. IE5 on a Mac, incidentally, makes ALL text resizable - I don't know about Windows versions.
One of the principal aims of CSS, in fact, is to stop this nonsense. Using CSS, the user can override any type of "DTP/layout" instructions that the web page designer has included.
CSS instructions merely have the status of "suggestions" for layout, which the user is free to ignore (via a personal stylesheet).
Final control resides with the user, which is exactly the way it should be - whatever precious web "designers" may think to the contrary.
Brendan Rowland
brendan@browland.karoo.co.uk
Lunacy
Matthew Genge's "irrefutable evidence" (On the rocks, Science, July 5) for the Apollo missions, namely the samples they supposedly brought back, won't satisfy the die-hard conspiracy theorist.
If, as Genge says, the USSR managed to retrieve moon rocks without using astronauts, could not the USA have done the same?
Nick Simons
nicholsi@cogs.susx.ac.uk
