Re: Three questions

["SN_Diamond" <Norman.Diamond@example.com>]

Stephen Carter wrote:

> I've heard some complaints about the "Western" Toshibas--several people
> bought them last year after a presentation at Tokyo PC, and it seems they
> were less than satisfied, and the price for things like the CDROM drives
> really annoyed people.

If the CD-ROM is an external drive connected by a PCMCIA card, there are
various models on the market for prices a lot cheaper than those that are
branded by major computer makers.  But some of them aren't supported in
Linux.  Some SCSI cards are supported, some IDE/ATAPI cards are supported,
and I think one schizophrenic card is supported.  But one common
schizophrenic card, which reports itself as SCSI but operates as ATAPI,
isn't supported, and that card is also OEM'ed to at least two other brands.
So from the same manufacturer, some PCMCIA card / CD-ROM drive combinations
will work, and some won't (under Linux).

There's one other thing about Toshiba machines.  Toshiba has recently
started putting a glidepoint pad on some models, but very few, and I didn't
notice if any versions with US keyboards had it.  The "accupoint" push-stick
is so popular [irony] internally to Toshiba that Toshiba employees attach
ordinary external mice to their machines instead.  Maybe their market is
different, maybe they don't sell to themselves, or who knows why they're so
slow to adapt...

> I admire those people who can easily use different keyboards;

It's called "looking at the keys".  Anyone who had to deal with 64 different
keyboard layouts on various IBM machines as a child learned very early not
to touch-type.

> I suppose if
> that's all I had, I'd get used to it and forget it was ever a problem.

Nah.  You'd get used to it but you'd remember that it's a problem.

Yours sincerely,
Norman Diamond