BKDCMMIA.RVW 990415 "Dictionary of Multimedia and Internet Applications", Francis Botto, 1999, 0-471-98624-0 %A Francis Botto %C 5353 Dundas Street West, 4th Floor, Etobicoke, ON M9B 6H8 %D 1999 %G 0-471-98624-0 %I John Wiley & Sons, Inc. %O 416-236-4433 fax: 416-236-4448 rlangloi@wiley.com %P 362 p. %T "Dictionary of Multimedia and Internet Applications" It might be thought that the title is just an attempt to jump on the latest bandwagon. However, the material does seem to concentrate on terms related to network based multimedia applications and standards. On the other hand, I had a full page of error notes before I got out of the "A"s. Frankly, the cover's insistence on "total accuracy" is a bit misplaced, since the best you can say about some of the material in the book is that it isn't verifiably wrong, mostly because of the difficulty in determining just exactly what the passage is supposed to mean. Your humble reviewer, world's worst copy editor that he is, even found some typos. Caxton invented the printing press? Vannevar Bush helped found the Internet? Many entries have bits and pieces of relevant information, but are not really complete. "Absolute addressing" speaks only of CD-ROM blocking, there is no entry for the associated concept of relative addressing, and the definition for "address" itself is rather confusing in its jumps from topic to topic. Under 2B+D, the D (data) channel seems to be identified as the ISDN link, while "ISDN" itself starts with a BRI (Basic Rate Interface) of two 64 kbps B channels (ignoring the North American standard and the D channel) and then, without transition, talking about the full T-1 PRI (Primary Rate Interface) bandwidth. "BRI" is defined (somewhat, but not entirely, better) but there is no listing for PRI. There is an entry for "Java Unicode" (which talks about it being "used exclusively by Windows NT at the system level"), but not Unicode itself. Some inclusions are bizarre and rather pointless. There is an entry for "15 in," citing it as a "standard display size." "1000" tells us that it is "The number of bits transferred in one second, using the unit Kbps." Another listing reads, in its entirety, "AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Sciences) An American organization dedicated to the sciences." The material is extremely biased in favour of Microsoft. "Cabbing" gets a listing (compression into .CAB files), but not archiving or compressing. There is, for crying out loud, an entry for "ActiveX security!" (Of course, it isn't very long.) For those in the know it is fairly obvious, but the definition of "Active Desktop" never mentions Microsoft at all, making it seem to be an accepted standard. "ActiveX" is defined as a reincarnation of OCX, while "OCX" is stated to be a forerunner of ActiveX. There is more detail on ActiveX, mostly a list of pedestrian guidelines for developing ActiveX controls. Some definitions, while not exactly wrong, seem to miss the essential point. For example, the entry for "Architecture" seems to imply that two of the most important considerations are whether multimedia functionality is built in and how big the internal cache is. Others use terms in ways that simply do not make sense in the context of the technology under discussion. "Bookmark" ignores its use as a personal directory of Web pages in Netscape. In talking about cryptography, we are told, of the mathematical underpinnings of public key encryption, that it is "achieved through a one-way function which describes the difficulty of determining input values when given a result." Certainly all of those concepts belong in cryptology, but the sentence itself does not use them properly. The standard mistakes are all there, such as crediting Grace Hopper with the invention of the term "bug." (Hopper herself only said it was the first *recorded* case of an *actual* bug being found as a cause.) The listing for viruses starts out well by mentioning propagation, but then degenerates. "Known viruses are said to be `in the wild'." (Many known viruses have never been `in the wild'.) "Michelangelo [...] alters the size of the DOS COMMAND.COM file." (Michelangelo is a boot sector infector.) "[V]iruses may be removed from a system or DSM ..." (DSM apparently means disk: digital storage media.) Email attachments are apparently "removable media." It is refreshing to see, for once, a work that is not specifically US-centric. It is disappointing to note that authors outside of the States can be every bit as provincial as the worst of their American colleagues. References to outside sources are few: so few that the author can't seem to keep to a consistent format. URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are included in such a manner as to be confused with internal links to other terms in the dictionary. Book citations are in a wide variety of formats, and even different typefaces. (Of those few texts that are mentioned, an astonishing number seem to be written by one "Botto, F.") While quite up to date, in some areas, the material in this text is neither complete enough, nor reliable enough, to recommend as a sole source. Despite its age, Stevens' "Quick Reference to Computer Graphics Terms" (cf. BKQRFGRP.RVW) remains a much more useful guide if you want to know about multimedia. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999 BKDCMMIA.RVW 990415 Addendum: Since he wrote this book, Botto has been a busy boy. As usual, I sent off the first draft for him to make comments if he wished. Predictably, he didn't like it. Unusually, he didn't stop there. First he threatened legal action. Then he sent me an email threatening phsical violence. I forwarded it to AOL. That seemed to work. For a little over a year. Then, last week, he reappeared. My review of Rand finally got Godwin's Law applied to me: somebody called me a Nazi. But Botto seems to have applied a kind of inverted Godwin on me. Last week he argued, in a rather succinct (five words) email, that I was "a stupid JEW." I sent that to AOL. I would assume that they contacted him, since it would explain part of the email I received today. ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- From: FrncsBtt@aol.com Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 09:17:28 EDT Subject: We will respond To: rslade@vcn.bc.ca Jewish Ass, We will do the same to your work, and undermine you in the same way. Francis Botto ========= A reader contacted the good Mr. Botto, asking him to explain the logic underlying his statement. His response was: ========= From: FrncsBtt@aol.com Subject: Jewish minority of radical Anti-gentiles It's Rob Slade and a minority of other Jews that are radical anti gentiles, and are running a highly coordinated campaign to undermine gentile computer book writers. There's the explanation for the e-mail. Francis Botto ========= (Just parenthetically, I should note that I am not the only object of Mr. Botto's wrath. The Computer Underground Digest has been threatened with legal action for including the review in one issue, and Northern Illinois University, home of CuD, has been inundated with email to random professors, taking them to task for hosting the CuD with it's egregious taste in book reviewers. More recently, Botto sent a death threat to a Webmaster Down Under for maintaining an archive which contains, among 30 gigabytes of useful stuff, an archive of the CuD and, by extension, my humble review. I have yet had the nerve to ask if any of them are Jewish.) Now, as a good (well, semi-good) Baptist, I suppose I am supposed to be vaguely insulted. However, I keep thinking, that's the best this anti-Semite can come up with? I also wonder: a) should they be increasing his medication? b) do they allow email access for the inmates at the State Home for the Terminally Bewildered, or is someone breaking into the nursing station in the middle of the night? c) is he showing deterioration in moving from physical violence to anti-Semitism, or is he showing some progress in therapy as he moves from violence to mere name calling? d) should I be expecting this about every 1,000 to 1,500 authors, or regularly every ten years? e) was he this crazy when he wrote the book, and does that explain why it is so bad? f) is Mom hiding something from me?