Reality check
Chris Moss (War on the web, December 6) dismisses the G8 digital opportunity task force as "utopian fantasies". OneWorld, an online partnership of more than 1000 non-governmental organisations using the internet to promote human rights and sustainable development, is the UK civil society representative on this G8 "dotforce".
We want a better world. And we want to harness the democratic potential of the net to help get us there. OneWorld has just launched the first non-profit world news syndication to a major corporate portal, Yahoo! News. Stories from partner organisations such as the World Development Movement, Amnesty International and aid agencies in Afghanistan appear next to those of media giants such as CNN and ABC. OneWorld contributes to the very diversity of news on the web that your article champions.
Glen Tarman
OneWorld.net
media@oneworld.net
Burn CD, burn
Schofield's comment: "The best option is to buy a CD... copying vinyl to CD is tedious at best and quite difficult", (Ask Jack, December 6) suggests he has never spent hours compiling compilations from vinyl to cassette which is also "difficult and tedious" to people who would rather buy "the greatest album in the world!" for £16.99 than craft 90 minutes of pop perfection in real time. I recently bought Musicmatch jukebox software off the net for $20 which includes a user-friendly interface and will rip vinyl or CDs to any audio file format (MP3, Wav etc.) Once you have hooked up your turntable and amp and set your recording input correctly, you simply "tape" and save to your hard drive, create a playlist of tracks and then choose the ones you want to burn. You can go back to this list and burn a new selection as the mood takes you. Difficult? - not really. Tedious? - to some, maybe. The best party CD? - you betcha.
Richard Bond
bondage001@hotmail.com
All change
I take it that all this stuff about high speed connections is satirical? I gave up when my connection dropped to 470 bytes per second. The ISP? BT Internet. Or Openworld. Or Surftime. Or something. Changing it every fortnight is their idea of customer service. Or progress. Or something. David Cawley
dcawley@btinternet.com
GPRS failure
I agree with What's New: Mobiles of the Year (Dec 6) that the Ericsson T39 is "a marvel of miniaturisation". Unfortunately, after four weeks' subscribing to BT's GPRS service, I have failed to connect every time I try. James Richards
JNRichards@bigfoot.com
Memory lane
At the risk of fuelling an ongoing debate on the "mainframe with the smallest amount of memory" (Feedback, Dr Harper, November 29, Dr Vines, December 6), I too remember the old ICL 1900 Series. I wrote my first program in April 1969 in Plan, a neat programming language just one step removed from machine code. It ran on a room-sized ICL 1901 with 16K words of memory, 4K words of which were taken up by the operating system (one word = 24 bits = four characters). We had just 12K words in which to write and run whole suites of programs, Sales Ledger, Payroll etc.
For speed, all peripheral input and output was "double buffered". Any programs exceeding the 12K limit had to be written with segmented overlays which, at run time, were loaded into memory from magnetic tape as required. If the software development on modern PCs had been as memory efficient as the programs on those old mainframes then Windows and its associated Microsoft applications would probably run 10 times faster and in less than 1MB - though how long it would take to write the applications is anybody's guess.
John Percy
jasper@jasp.demon.co.uk
Moot point
What we are we going to call mmO2? How about "mote"? Ken Lee
kenlee@netcentral.co.uk
Past revisited
One of the spookier effects of this week's Goner virus seems to be that it flushed out lost emails sent on February 21. Two from that date suddenly appeared in my inbox - including a press release from a now-bankrupt company. Alan Burkitt-Gray
alan@burkitt-gray.com
