Open letter to Jonathan Margolis

Dear Mr Margolis

I have always appreciated your low-tech approach to the internet in the Financial Times "How to Spend It" magazine. However one of your recent columns left me quite seriously
annoyed.

First of all you complained about web sites without a credible contact address. I could sympathize with you, until I tried to send you an email with my comments. You come up frequently in articles, but no contact details. Even the FT site only has a "Letters to the Editor" option. In the newspaper the columnists publish their email address, but not in the magazine.

I have to admit that this was only a problem once I had reacted to your other comments.

You went on to state that spam is dead. I can assure you it's not. As system administrator for a small company, I estimate that over 90% of all incoming mail is spam, and at least 75% of outgoing mail despite a "business use only" written IT policy. Perhaps my definition of spam differs from yours.

The last straw though was your complaint about the country list on registration pages. "How many visitors do they get from Afghanistan?" "The major countries should be at the top of the list" Let's see. Major countries.... That would certainly make life easier for the Chinese, Filipinos and Indians. We could use population, land
area, birth rate etc. If we search hard enough, we might find some where Britain is still in the top 10.

That obsession with British superiority doesn't get you very far once you cross the channel or the pond.

Then it occurred to me, you don't know how to use that list box! Click on the box and you get the usual 'Afghanistan...' list. Press 'U' 4 times. Hey presto "United Kingdom". That's not too hard is it? Or press 'P' and use the down arrow like we do in Portugal. As far as I am aware, that list is a standard feature provided by Microsoft, so it is natural that everybody should use the same list.

Yours sincerely


Harry

PS. I'm not posting my email here, so you'll have to leave me a comment, which doesn't require you to register, for now.