| FACEBOOK FOR DUMMIES (6th edition) Carolyn Abram New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2016 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-119-17903-0 | ||||
| ISBN 1-119-17903-3 | 368pp. | SC/GSI | $21.99 | |
I established a Facebook account a few years ago, but only started using it in 2015 — a relative latecomer. Since then I've come to appreciate it a good deal. Many things about it are intuitive for me; but others are not. So I decided some instruction was in order. After looking at five or six books, I chose the newest edition of Facebook for Dummies.
I think it was a good choice. Carolyn Abram writes well, and the instructions are clear for the most part. Grammar errors are few. However, there are some confusing passages, and the book failed to answer some questions I have. (The errors, and statements I deemed confusing, are detailed on my Errata page.)
One question I have is why Facebook does not allow HTML tags. I assume this is because, with millions of users online simultaneously, the extra processing needed would bog things down. Still it would be nice to know for sure. And I really miss the option to bold something, or to put a book title in italics.
The chapter on photos tells how to superimpose text over photos you add to Facebook. But it says nothing about whether Facebook preserves the JPEG comment block in those photos.
Early on, the author states that Facebook users will have entered an email address. I never did this, and I'm fairly sure I was not asked to enter one. I have not seen any prompts about this recently, for sure.
The proper way of highlighting text in a comment for deletion still eludes me. Twice I have highlighted the complete comment and hit backspace, only to find the text untouched. Once I was bounced out of the thread completely. It took me half an hour to get back to the thing I wanted to comment on.
A related problem is the inability to bookmark your position in a thread if, for example, you want to respond to a notification. When I do this, I am always returned to the most recent entry in my timeline.
An alternative would be a way to search the timeline. This would be less convenient than a bookmark, but still workable.
Chapters 5 and 6 are an extensive discussion of the theory and practice of cryptography, including the details of the factorization program. (It's due to Peter Shor of AT&T Bell Labs.)
Chapter 7 describes the progress in actual hardware to date. Researchers have found four approaches so far: laser-exciting electrons in polymers; laser-exciting phonons (vibrational states) within chains of atoms in ion traps; photons in resonant cavities ("cavity QED"); and hydrogen atoms of organic molecules excited using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Each approach has its advantages and its defects; but all suffer from the critical problem of decoherence. Simply put, the conditions needed for QC are all too evanescent. There is also the "quantum dot transistor". It is stable; but the problem here is how to get the essential coupling (entanglement) between individual quanta (or "qubits"). Yet, if a quantum computer can be built at all, it may be possible to accomplish a lot of computing in a short time. Brown presents on page 266 a chart suggesting how this could be:
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