If you want the full text of the letters and blogs we only had limited space to print, then click through.
MOBILE BROWSING (VIC KEEGAN) For the past six months I've been using OnSpeed Mobile for browsing on my Nokia N73 phone. The software has transformed a previously unusable experience into one that is perfectly functional given the limitations imposed by screen and keyboard. Recommended. Gerry McSweeney, Taunton
I agree with Victor Keegan's observations (The mobile web is finally getting started, October 25th), and they're borne out by our statistics. We see an average 2,500 page impressions per user per month, with each of these users logging in on average 8.5 times a day. These are astonishing usage rates – higher than on our web counterpart – and while it's taken us by surprise it does suggest an appetite for mobile internet – despite the current limited technology. For the foreseeable future though, the thinking behind made for mobile content will play a crucial role – as Victor suggested, even on the most sophisticated handsets it's difficult to use more than basic functions. Essentially, content providers have to bear in mind the importance of creating content that will fit into a screen a fraction of the size of a PC monitor. Mark Curtis, CEO, Flirtomatic
My father is a Lincolnshire farmer and needs broadband to run a competitive business. The government increasingly requires forms to be filled in online, but fails to provide any subsidies to help farmers utilise broadband in the first place. In the past few years my father has tried a variety of methods to set up broadband at home and none of them works. The latest method was 3G but the signal was insufficient. We have an Orange mast very close to our home so is there any way we could use this to our advantage? Satellite is another alternative, yet this is prohibitively expensive. Any suggestions you have on establishing broadband in remote areas would be most welcome. Robert Wilkinson, Cambridge
>> mobile web browsers need to up their game and allow more easy viewing of "normal" sites (as the mobile Opera browsers claims to do). It takes two to tango of course, and to capture the maximum number of users/customers, website owners need to design their websites to be usable on a range of devices. This brings us, in a slightly stream-of-consciousness manner, on to the subject of website accessibility. Ratger than create mobile specific versions of their websites, my view is that website owners should be putting their efforts into making their website accessible to all. In doing this, they will open their doors not only to the mobile phone audience; they will also go a long way to making themselves generally accessible. This alone should offer a good commercial incentive for websites improving their accessibility. http://impact.freethcartwright.com/
TECHNOBILE: BANKING Dear Hazel Davis: There is a breathtakingly simple answer to your problem. Ask the large and popular magazine to join the 21st Century and pay you by direct bank transfer. David Fermer, Seaford
Like Hazel Davis I am self-employed and bank with HSBC because it is next door to my place of work. It used to be that you could place both both cash and cheques in one envelope and drop it into a machine in the banks foyer. They 'upgraded' the machines so that now you have separate machines for cash and cheques. A fair amount of time has to be spent smoothing out the notes or the machine won't accept them and if a cheque hasn't been torn correctly along the perforated line the whole lot gets rejected. However, if you post said cheques plus paying in slip through the letter box the bank staff deal with it the following day. Generally works well. although not suitable for cash and not when the bank is closed due to 'flooding' (even though the neighboring retail shops next door, that rely on people actually buying their goods, stayed open). Mardi Jamieson, London
DEAR LARRY I've just read Seth Finkelstein's article in today's Guardian – twice. I still don't understand a single word of it. Am I alone? Gerry McSweeney, Taunton
GAMING ACADEMICS Aleks Krotoski's article on the relationship between academics and the gaming industry didn't make the obvious point that a lot of academic research is not ecologically valid (Boffins and industry: Will the twain ever meet? October 25). In short, a lot of experimental research takes place in artifical laboratories that bear no relationship with playing in the real world. Firstly, playing games in a gaming lab is not very comfortable either psychologically or physically. Secondly, games have a social context. They are often played with friends or family members present, or are played online with other people. Thirdly, games are played at different times depending upon factors such as when free time is available, and when games are accessible. Fourthly, games are usually played over several sessions and require a period of time in which to become engaged or absorbed. Finally, players have specific preferences for certain types of games. A lot of academic research fails to control for these factors. Professor Mark Griffiths, Director, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University
UP TO A SPEED Chris Smith complains (Letters and blogs, October 25) about getting only 1,2 Mbps from a line advertised as '..up to 8 Mbps'. Sorry, Chris, but you've got nothing to complain about. As Michael Doonesbury read out from the back of the box at the time of the launch of a well-known operating system some years ago, "This system supported by 10 000 lawyers". In offering performance up to 8 Mbps, BT is simply saying that the speed will not exceed 8 Mbps. So, as BT sees it, what's the problem? BT is delivering to you what it said that it would. Neil Muir, Shrewsbury
You'll notice that BT, and everyone else, advertises "up to", because the final line speed you'll get is incredibly dependent on the distance between you and the exchange. However, there is generally an implicit "from 2mbps" and as you are not even getting that, and are in a well-connected location, I'd imagine the issue is a physical problem with your phone socket. Consider trying another phone socket and changing the micro-filters, and if that does nothing talk to your ISP who should be able to run tests on the line and if required send out a BT engineer. When I first switched to ADSL my "2mbps" line was barely reaching 100kbps, so a BT engineer replaced my aging master socket and I promptly connected at 2mbps exactly. Ross Burton, Bishops Stortford
Chris Smith with an office in Clerkenwell (letters, October 25) thinks that BT broadband speeds are rubbish. Well I live in a poor part of Manchester, and the BT speeds here are lovely. Because hardly anyone else round here is on broadband yet! Is it a bit different in Clerkenwell? You shock me! If you're paying £200 a month then yes, you deserve a refund. If you're trying to get away - in central London - with paying a business tariff which is really designed for a low-use plumber in Preston, then you're just a cheeky whinger. I could have paid less to Crazy Betty's Nearly-Free Broadband than I'm paying to BT. But then there'd be 2m people using that cheap service, and I'd get low speeds, wouldn't I? Sorry, mate. But when you locate your office in central London, you pay more for a sandwich than you would in Asda. And when you want to be very near 25,000 other businesses... IC Rogers, Manchester
I read Chris Smith's letter complaining about BT's poor broadband speeds and share his frustration. I used to be a Pipex customer but was told by them that due to Local Loop Unbundling issues with my exchange in Bath, they were unable to upgrade me from what was then a 1Mbps service. So I called BT assuming that if they own the exchange, surely they must be able to offer something better and in fact, their sales team proudly said I could get 4.5Mbps through them so I switched. Within two weeks, it had "settled down" to 3.1Mbps so I went through an elaborate complaints procedure because, like Chris Smith, I felt it was a case of mis-selling. The lengthy procedure included an almost unintelligible call from a guy somewhere in the Indian sub-Continent and eventually, absolutely nothing came of it. Nothing that is except that now my broadband has settled down even further to a constant 2.6Mbps. With narrow bandwidth versus contention ratio steadily reducing what's being cynically sold as "up to 8meg", our crappy creaking old copper wires really do make the UK look like the rip off everyone says it is. And BT can bask in the glory of knowing it is right up there in the vanguard. Peter Allerhand, Bath
I'm as baffled as Chris Smith about BT's ability to get away with their totally spurious 'up to 8Mb' claims. I test my connections at home and at work on a regular basis and I'd say they average about 1Mb. Right now, my work connection is running at 1401.52 Kbps; the other evening at home I was getting just over 500Kbs . Does any other business routinely deliver around 10-15% of what it promises - and charges for? Alan Paterson, London
DATING SPOLSKY Joel Spolsky (Why history will repeat itself with JavaScript and the web, p6, October 25) makes a sound point, but he has his dates a bit off when he writes that Bell Labs developed C in 1978. Work on C actually started nearly a decade earlier and was completed by 1973, Kernighan and Ritchie being the leading lights. (Hence "K&R C") What happened in 1978 was the publication of Kernighan's book The C Programming Language. See Ritchie's paper The Development of the C Language, http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.hmtl. Robert Sproat, London
>> Nice theory, but who owns the browsers? Microsoft and Mozilla. http://jamespo.org.uk/
LEOPARD GROWLS "So that lack of excitement about Leopard? It's because we don't need it." (Why the world says 'meh' to Apple's next product, Sept 20). I have to disagree with your premise. After installing on all of my 7 Macs, which are mostly high end but also including this really old 1.3 MHz 512 MB iBook G4 I am in shock. Now, as well as having tons of fabulous features that make this wee, old thing way more useful and productive ... it is now faster that it was the day I got it. I am, I repeat, in shock! Apple have managed the impossible ... a major upgrade that adds way more AND revitalizes older Macs. An amazing achievement! Michael J Bradley, Sarasota, Florida
As I cast my eyes on the Technology segment of today's Guardian (25th October) I was surprised, no, startled to see no mention of the impeding release of Apple's Mac OS X 'Leopard' . I trawled through the other articles in the section, I even went through through Jack Schofield's typically biased bilge and belittlement of anything not formally approved and sanctioned by Microsoft, sure that i would soon see an article dedicated to the new release, but no. Is it that the Guardian have been misinformed? Are you unaware that the OS is released worldwide tomorrow? The OS that Walt Mossberg has just praised as being "better and faster than Vista." The red carpet was certainly laid out for Microsoft's 6 years in the making release of Vista back in January, why should things be different for a company who only last Monday revealed that they had surpassed giants such as IBM and Intel in many areas with their Q4 2007 financial results. I look forward to devouring and casting judgement upon your reply or subsequent article in next weeks edition of the Guardian Technology section. Phelim Brady, Guildford
MISSING MANUALS Leon Schneidermann's and Roger Marriott's letters struck a chord with me, too! I used to be a technical author in computing and electronics, and so did many of my friends, but the job has become effectively extinct. The decline of technical authoring began with the release of Ventura back in the 'Eighties. Managers would buy a copy, throw it at their engineers and say "Now you can do your own manuals!" thus saving money from hiring tech authors and getting blessed relief from ever having to think about 'documentation plans' ever again. The engineers were happy as they had always hated tech authors, seeing them as annoying people who came to ask difficult questions just when they were at their busiest preparing the product for launch. Engineers, being the wonderfully capable people they are, always believe that they can do anybody else's job, so they had no problem with putting the TAs out of work. These attitudes, unfortunately, failed to take into account that technical authors were not just there to deal with the type-setting and printing but were, in fact, needed to write manuals that could be understood by ordinary mortals, people who might not be fortunate enough to be engineers. As tech authors were put out of work there were less of them as they went into other areas of business, so even if a company wanted one they couldn't get one, so the engineers would get Ventura anyway. The internet set the seal on this by allowing companies to sell software and hardware with only a brochure with a URL for a website and a help-desk phone number. Microsoft delivered the death-blow by hiring evil tech authors who wrote carefully-crafted 'manuals' and in-program 'help' that told the user nothing useful, thus creating a market for MS-certified training courses. Consumers are now conditioned to have low expectations about documentation, so they get what they expect. All the old-time tech authors are now dead, retired or running boarding-houses in Bognor Regis, so there is nobody to train a new generation to this demanding profession, and so there will be no change in the forseeable future. I hope this makes things clear. Dick Bentley, South Ferriby
