I'm grateful for having access to your website. It provides me with a lot of useful information. In particular, I found the Help Desk from the April 1996 edition very helpful. I hope you continue to provide such service.

Rock Muraoka

If we were to equate the home users you are speaking to on your webpage ["The Query Column," April 1996] with the users at my work, I would say your "do it yourself" advice would cost your readers a lot of money. For example, if someone decided that their internal modem card was faulty and went to replace it in line with your advice, they may find they had misdiagnosed the problem. [If] it was a problem with their software configuration [instead,] it would have cost them a lot of money, and they would still have the problem!

It is not as easy as you are suggesting. I know enough people who can't even use MS-Word properly, let alone figure out hardware interrupt clashes.

Dean Ashton

Before I let our Query Columnist respond: Your e-mail and the previous message, commenting on columns published in our April 1996 issue, highlight one of the merits of the Web. A traditional paper-based magazine has only a brief shelf-life, and copies can be hard to find even one month later. The Internet, though, enables us to warehouse material from back issues for easy retrieval months or even years later. -Ed.

The author replies:
I think you misunderstood the gist of my column, which was the need for people to learn how their PCs work. You've given a very good example, however, of why the resistance people have to learning what makes computers tick, and how to keep them ticking, is causing both companies and their employees so much pain.

The average computer user should understand what an IRQ interrupt is all about. Don't you, as a staff member of a corporate IT department, have better things to do than helping individual employees install a sound card or new software application?

This is 1997; the age of the overpaid, underskilled, self-important employee is long over. Like our parents and grandparents, who once had trouble dealing with photocopiers and bank cash machines, we have no choice but to get used to the tools of our age. We are all victims of the time in which we live.

High technology may be a curse, but we'd better get used to it if we expect to survive in the modern world.-Thomas Caldwell

I just finished reading the February 1997 issue of Computing Japan, a task that did not take more than about half an hour. (Yes, I'm a slow reader). At the risk of mixing metaphors, I have to ask: Where was the beef in your Apple issue?

Apple is in serious danger of doing an Amiga, or, in the American idiom, "going teats up." It has failed to come up with a next-generation operating system and resorted to buying the NeXT system in desperation, a move met with considerable skepticism by both financial and technical analysts.

After coming on strong in the Japanese market - so much so that Japan was for a time the only market where Apple market share was not declining - Apple in Japan has followed the pattern of Apple elsewhere: namely, the slide into smaller and smaller niche markets. Not a word about this in your articles. And, not a word about the education market, one of the niches that Apple has been able to claim for itself in the past.

Another point. I have noted various articles in your magazine that seem to see the world as Wintel (Windows 3.1, Windows 95) versus Mac. This says to me that the people who write for you are out of touch with the real world. For the record, the Intel platform is not restricted to Windoze in its various flavours. Aside from OS/2 (which is even more of a niche player than the Mac), there are a number of other OSes for this platform, including Linux, BSDI, SCO Unix, as well as more esoteric systems like PICK.

If you are going to write about the Mac as a Web server, as you did in the February issue, you might do more than contrast it with Windoze.

Earl H. Kinmonth

I saw the cover of the magazine this month [February] and thought, "Great, finally some decent press about the Mac and its usefulness as a server." I was expecting some discussion about the various server software, security, or simplicity of using a Mac for a server. Instead I got this two-page story that... had nothing really to do with a Mac. At the end you did at least list off the software on the market.

I really wish that Macs would get some better coverage in the media - especially in Japan where the Mac is still a big force in the market. Thanks, though, for continuing to provide a quality magazine about a market that is so foreign to most.

Paul Donovan

I have been enjoying the informative contents of your magazine for about six months now. Thanks! John Tyler's March column ("The Devil in the Box") resonated with me when I read it, since I had just been going through the throes of trying to solve a computer problem and was getting the same error message he cited in that article. In fact, John was kind enough to provide me with additional suggestions after I e-mailed him some specifics.

Please keep up the good work and continue to use people like John to share their enormous expertise with us novices.

Bob Austenfeld

Send your comments, criticisms, and kudos to editors@cjmag.co.jp

Back to the table of contents