| "The 'Help Desk' articles are always helpful. Thanks."
Koji Yoshina John Tyler made an excellent suggestion about getting computer assistance via the Internet ("Getting Software Support in Japan," June, page 15) [but] in addition to mailing lists, I would recommend using newsgroups. I prefer them to mailing lists because they don't clutter up my mailbox, and I can quickly scan through the list to pick out the ones that look interesting. Whenever I've posted a note asking for help to comp.sys.macintosh, I've usually gotten several helpful responses. Arnold Fisher I was just about to send payment to extend my subscription when I found a Computing Japan envelope in the mail. Imagine my relief when I found out I had won a one-year subscription. I have been saving my precious yen to upgrade the video card of my first Pentium, which I recently assembled with some parts from the remnants of an old 386; spent the whole Sunday evening putting it together. Thank you also for the sleek CJ mousepad. Now I have something to use with the Pentium. This must be my lucky day. Erwin Pantuca Is it something we said? Your June issue (page 17) contains a listing of Internet service providers in Japan, but mysteriously omits one of the biggest Internet providers in the world: IBM. With local access numbers in over 540 cities in 45 countries, and excellent, high-speed nodes across Japan... well, maybe it wasn't fair to include us in a listing with everyone else. Mac Jeffery Please see page 15 in this issue for a correction of this oversight. Also, there was a typo in the June listing of the phone number for Global Sprintlink: the correct number is 03-5561-1912.--Ed. John Boyd's article on LANs in Japan was rather disappointing; it raised several interesting questions without offering any answers. That alone would rate it about equal to the general run of commercial computer journalism. The reason that I am writing is that there were some misleading statements. Mr. Boyd claims that a bus topology LAN is "relatively cheap." This may be true of AppleTalk and 10Base2 Ethernet, but it is surely not true of 10Base5 Ethernet. And whether cheap or expensive, mall bus topology LANs suffer from a "single point of failure" weakness; any break in the cable or misbehaved station brings down the entire network.... The hub and star topology eliminates most of the failure modes that plague bus topology LANs. [Also] it is dead wrong to suggest that in Ethernet there can be more than one packet moving along the network at the same time. Such a situation is called a collision and forces both packets to be retransmitted. Finally, while the number of computers per employee seems to be accelerating in Japan... I suspect that this says more about staffing patterns in Japanese offices than it does about the acceptance of technology. We cannot tell if the number of computers is really going up, or if companies are just cutting back on less-functional ocha kumi-type staff after the bubble burst. A much more interesting measure of the state of Japanese LAN networking would be to look at the product mix being bought in Japan. The ratio of high-end products like routers, Ethernet switches, and 100-Mbit Ethernet products to cheaper and less powerful products like dumb repeater hubs and transceivers might be very instructive. Hank Cohen
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