Date: Sat Aug 13 05:52:17 2005
From: jasonc at science.org (Jason Coombs)
Subject: Re: Help put a stop to incompetent
	computerforensics

J.A. Terranson wrote:
> SANS is a for profit corp.,
> and was run as such even when
> they were playing possum as a
> non-profit.
> They are *not* a "disinterested
> third party" any more than the
> anti-virus firms are - and not
> many people would use *them*
> as an authoritative reference

To drive this point home, Newton's Telecom 'Dictionary' has some amazingly bad 'definitions' -- for example, the definition of 'multimedia' includes data that is transmitted or viewed by way of a fax machine.

http://www.harrynewton.com/

Newton's 'definition' of 'Internet' starts out with a first-person narrative on how difficult it is to define the Internet. Pure crap.

Anyone who puts effort into writing a book should be encouraged to publish it, but publishers (and readers) should care a little about commercial misuse of labels like 'dictionary' when the definitions have only a single biased author.

There are some very impressive collaborative, community-developed computer dictionaries and encyclopedias. They do a nice job most of the time, because they are constantly peer-reviewed and corrected.

Anyone presumptuous enough to arbitrarily define technical terms without considerable careful thought and then publish the arbitrary text and call it a 'dictionary' should be shot.

Regards,

Jason Coombs
jasonc@...ence.org

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