Brand tones
Downloadable ringtones (Online, January 10) serve a very useful purpose in distinguishing your phone's plaintive cries from everyone else's. You don't need to be one of those twitchy folk who go for their gun every time the pre-set Nokia ringtone sounds in the saloon bar. In marketing terms, ringtones are true communications products: they make a statement about the user's identity or aspirations, just like brands. People are less happy to pay for downloadable music because they don't really regard consumable products as valuable. Now, if only someone could invent the downloadable snap-on phone jacket... Paul May
paul.may@verista.com
Midi tones
My 15-year-old son has found a way to add new ringtones without exhorbitant charges. He downloads midi files on a PC and opens a music program (EVA Audio) to show the musical score. He then copies the musical notes onto his Sagem mobile. He put Mission: Impossible on to his phone last week. Gill Stafford
gill.stafford@talk21.com
Personal tone
Victor Keegan is wrong. It is no mystery why people pay handsomely for mobile ring tones, when they want content on the web to be free. The mobile is an entirely different kind of device to the PC or digital TV. It is more than personal - it is an intimate object that is part of your identity, in both physical, emotional and psychic terms. This is why mobile telephony is one of the most important communication channels both now and in the future. Lucy Kimbell
me@lucykimbell.com
Acid test
Victor Keegan is right: data stored electronically will be ephemeral in the long term unless an electronic version of the Rosetta Stone is invented. I recall that a top US committee, several years ago, thought through possibilities for archiving scientific information. The recommendation was simply that acid-free paper is the best storage medium. Victor, is your new diary acid free? Stanley Brown
brownfarthings@aol.com
Agenda benda
Having worked on the problem of digital preservation I sympathise with Victor Keegan. If he still has the Agenda file then one possible solution would be to download an emulator from Psion (or Symbian?) so that he could at least access the file on his PC. Stewart Granger
stewartg@dial.pipex.com
Off the Linux
Sorry to be a kill-joy. I realise that religious fundamentalism in the IT world is such a fun sport (Free software survives downturn, January 10) whether practised by Linux, Microsoft or other types of religious follower. Mention of IBM's Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF) as proof of GNU/Linux's ability to scale to handle serious enterprise-level tasks is inappropriate to most enterprises. This is a "supercomputer" project where large numbers of small (1 or 2 CPU) processor nodes are interconnected to support high performance, parallel computing. Linux is the operating system on each node but it forms only a small, albeit useful, part of the overall complex infrastructure. This technology has little relevance to typical commercial applications that are most of the enterprise market. Brian King
bking@dial.pipex.com
Jack's the man
I endorse Daniel Lamont's comments about Jack Schofield (Feedback, January 10). The man is an oasis of practical sanity, and should be treasured. Anyone making snide comments about Ask Jack should write the word "stupid" in lipstick on a mirror, and take a long hard look. He often deals with things people might feel daft asking, without any patronising over tones. I keep a file of cuttings. Even where there is no immediate relevance, I know they will save my life one day. Conrad Cork Tadley
ConradCork@TadleyEwing.co.uk
Hear, hear
I am a regular, though amateur, user of a PC and the internet. Ask Jack is unfailingly informative. Let's have even more in the future! Chris Webber
chris@webberc34.fsnet.co.uk
Radio blog
Lovely stuff in the Online blog. Can we have it as an RSS feed soon, to be used with Radio 8.0, for instance?
John Kaye
jpkaye@btinternet.com
Online replies: Good idea... we hope to do that very soon.
