Banking online
Where has Roger Willcocks been (People need banking not banks, October 19)?

I'm aware that building societies are deeply unfashionable but at least he ought to check before making such a blanket condemnation.

I have used a direct PC link to the Nationwide for years to manage my current account. I can check balances and pay regular bills up to month ahead to organisations for which I had made prior arrangement (eg services and credit cards). A transfer made one day will in general be executed the following morning. I also use Nationwide's ISP (internet service provider) which is reliable, fast, free and free from bull. What more does he want?
Alec Williams
alec.williams@nationwideisp.net

Roger Willcocks rightly draws attention to the state of the art of the banking world.

I'm still waiting for an idea to be used that's so old, the patent has just expired: RSA encryption to digitally sign electronic cheques. Many people do not buy over the internet because they are dissatisfied with levels of security.

Come on, banks, you only have another two months to get into the 20th century.
Dave Neale
dave.neale@btinternet.com

Wrong track?
F1 is the most misunderstood genre. That was proved on October 19 when you reviewed two F1 games.

I own both and I think you must have mixed them up. To say F1 Championship Season 2000 is realistic is a joke. Twitchy handling? Difficult overtaking? Didn't find that.

Formula One 2000 (where, you can also lose your gears) is genius. It is the one with the twichy handling. Carbon chassis does fly all over the place. Also, the track map isn't unrealistic, considering many drivers have one on their steering wheel.
Duncan Stephen
doctorvee@yahoo.co.uk

Viral first
Victor Keegan reckons viral marketing was invented by Netscape half a dozen years ago. Get away. What about Unix?

It was handed out free to academic institutions in the 1970s and infected thousands of CS students then, who advocated it in their earlier jobs and chose it when they had the opportunity.

Unfortunately, too few had achieved adequate status before Windows came along.
Sam Nelson
Sam.Nelson@cs.stir.ac.uk

Page power
All the talk about e-books appears to miss the fact that fluent readers scan chunks of text of up to a page at a time, often in paragraphs, and usually at least two or three lines.

Boggling at a monitor is not comparable. Until a screen is adaptable enough to make available the equivalent of the double-pages of an ordinary book, with the comfortable seating at choice of the average reader, paper books will not only survive, but win.
John Roberts
JRmundialist@compuserve.com

Licence fee
"No one collects online licence fees" (Online, October 5). Well, they do. Online licences are and have been available for two years from the writers and publishers of music via their collection societies, MCPS & PRS.

Anyone using copyright music online should ensure they have both a performing and a mechanical licence. See www.mcps-prs-alliance.co.uk
Terri Anderson
The MCPS-PRS Alliance, London

To e- or not to e
To hyphen or not to hyphen: that is the question. E-books, e-commerce, e-literature... so why does the hyphen disappear when we refer to email? Geoffrey Woodcock
glw@liverpool.ac.uk

Bugs bashed
Guy Clapperton (Time to give the bugs a bashing, October 19) describes a recent bug in a program called rhnsd which is part of Red Hat Linux 7.0. This leaks file descriptors.

But why doesn't Guy tell us the rest of the story? It isn't a security flaw at all, but simply a program that forgets to close files it has opened. This would cause a Linux machine to start behaving strangely after about three weeks, but to most users of Microsoft operating systems, three weeks of continuous crash-free running is close to an eternity.

The bug was reported by a user on October 4 via Red Hat's bug-reporting website, http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18345 Within four hours, another user had pinpointed the problem in the source code and posted it to the same site.

Red Hat released a fixed version of rhnsd within a week and made it available for free: www.redhat.com/support/errata/RHBA-2000-081-06.html.

Can anyone imagine a bug in a Microsoft product being fixed with such alacrity, and discussed so publicly on the company website?
Dr David Harper
Cambridge

Happy surfer
Since signing up for Freeserve's service, which complements BT's SurfTime, I have had no problems worth moaning about.

Yes, there have been times where the line has been engaged, but redialling has got me on track pretty quick.

Unlike Bernard Harper (Feedback, October 19), my online speeds have matched my modem's capabilities, and if he read the conditions of Freeserve's service, he would realise that being kicked off after two hours is exactly what they state will happen.

Before whingeing, my advice would be to check the small print before clicking on that Agree button. Some of us acutually do, you know.
Paul Graham
Email address withheld

Idiot overload
Victor Keegan's "information overload" (Second sight, October 19) is nothing to do with information. The inability to keep your fingers off the keys, like the inability to keep your gob shut, signifies nothing so much as the tiny brain of a corporate nobody devoured by a terrible sense of insecurity.

Perhaps calling all those "managers" and "executives" by titles more descriptive of their real functions - clerks, secretaries, and bean-counters - might puncture their self-importance to the extent that they spend less time reminding the rest of the world of their existence and more doing some work.
Root Cartwright
Radlett Herts