This will be one of the defining changes in Android over the coming years. Android 5.0, perhaps?

Microsoft has not written a single line of Android code, yet rakes in the profits through scummy software patents. Crime does pay.

Several publications got to play with Valve's upcoming Steam Machine and the awesome new controller, and as The Verge reports, it's essentially nothing but good news.

That's a tall order, but they've managed it: despite the massive amount of CPU and GPU power crammed into that tiny box, it's quiet and cool. According to Valve, they're still working on this, and the device will get even cooler and quieter as it nears release. Considering Valve is aiming for the living room, this was a major concern.

The big question: how does the controller perform?

This is all in a long line of first-hand reports that all say more or less the same: it takes some getting used to, but it's far more accurate than analog sticks. It seems like Valve's whacky idea phase (the pictures in The Verge's article make clear just how whacky it was) is already paying off. I'm also very excited about how you will be able to download new controller configurations and adjust all the settings in case you're into that sort of thing. Steam Controller users will be able to vote on these, too.

The final question: SteamOS. How does the Linux-based platform perform compared to Windows?

Coming January, at CES, Valve will share more about the partners it has signed up with. Valve has been working with game makers on this Linux project for three years now, and thanks to many underlying engines already supporting Linux anyway, getting games to run on Linux isn't as hard as it seems.

Valve seems to be on the right track. I can't wait to hear just which partners will be supporting SteamOS.

That track record remains impressive - no matter how often I see it.

Apple, Microsoft, and others, a little over a month ago in a letter to the EU, warning that the EU's new proposed unified patent law could lead to more patent trolling:

Yesterday:

They're not just scumbags - they are lying scumbags.

I told you Apple and Microsoft were patent trolls. They specifically set up a satellite company that owns nothing but patents, with the sole goal of attacking the competition in the courtroom instead of the market. What a bunch of low-life scum.

I'm surprised by Sony there, though. They use Android themselves.

Google has unveiled Android 4.4 KitKat. The main focus is to reduce Android's memory footprint across the board, allowing KitKat to run comfortably on devices with 512 MB of RAM.

In addition, Google unveiled the Nexus 5 - quite possibly the most leaked device in human history. It's only $349 off-contract. Insanity.

Remember the whole H.264 thing? Cisco just solved it for us - more or less.

Cisco will release the code of its H.264 codec under the BSD license, and will also make binaries available for just about every possible platform. Cisco will pay all the licensing costs - over the coming decade, this will cost them a whopping $65 million, illustrating just how expensive H.264 is, and how unrealistic it was to expect it to become a standard without a free implementation being available for everyone to use. It has to be noted that both end users and developers can make use of this.

Mozilla has already announced it will implement this codec into Firefox. All this is great, but it doesn't really address the issue in the long term - the next generation of codecs is coming, and once they arrive, this whole process starts all over again. Will another sugar daddy step up by that time?

So, Microsoft is buying the part of Nokia that is losing money, while the parts that make money remain in Finland. Seems like a good deal for Nokia-proper. In the meantime, Microsoft will be saddled with a devices division that is still losing money, and whose increase in sales consists largely of low-end, low-margin devices (like the 520). Interesting - especially since Windows Phone was supposed to prevent Nokia participating in a race to the bottom. I'm sure Microsoft's super-successful Surface division welcomes Nokia's devices division.

The cold truth: even more than 2.5 years after announcing the switch to Windows Phone, Nokia's Lumia range still cannot make up for drop in sales of Symbian devices and feature phones. This is roughly the same timeframe in which Samsung rose to the top. With Android.

Read into that what you will.

Remarkable documentary - several planning meetings and discussions during NeXT's early days, with Steve Jobs and his team, many of which also worked on the Macintosh. You have to see this.

Via Typographica.

Google back in 2005:

Google today:

And people wonder why I have zero trust in companies.

So, The New York Times has updated its style guide, and the most intriguing change - for me - is that NYT editors are now allowed to spell e-mail as 'email'.

E-mail is actually a very problematic word in Dutch as well. Technically speaking, 'e-mail' is an abbreviation of 'electronic mail'. In Dutch, compound nouns consisting of a loose letter or acronym combined with a regular noun are always hyphenated (for instance, we write 'tv-zender', which means 'TV channel'). This means that the the noun 'e-mail' is always hyphenated in Dutch. This is where it gets interesting.

Many Dutch people, especially in casual writing, spell 'e-mail' without a hyphen. Personally, I would never do this, since correct spelling and grammar is a huge part of my job (I'm a translator with my own little translation business), but it's still quite common. This is quite problematic because 'email' without a hyphen means something completely different. 'Email', in Dutch, means 'enamel', as in tooth enamel. For language geeks such as myself, reading "Ik stuur je wel even een email" ("I'll send you an enamel") is weirdly hilarious.

The hyphenation rule regarding compound nouns with single letters or acronyms is a very solid rule in Dutch, and it's unlikely an exception will be made for e-mail.

We can go even deeper into the intricacies of the Dutch language. Obviously, 'e-mail' can function both as a noun and as a verb - which, obviously, can be conjugated. This is where the idiosyncrasies of the Dutch language really start adding up, leading to what can only be regarded as one of the biggest abominations recently added to Dutch. Here's a summarised present tense/paste tense conjugation of the Dutch verb 'e-mailen':

So far, so good - this doesn't look very weird to native Dutch speakers. Now let's take a look at the past participle, used in a present perfect (as a sidenote: I'm not sure I'm using the correct English grammatical terms for all the tenses - I purposefully unlearned those years ago because I found they interfered with my instinctive ability to form proper English tenses).

Double hyphen! Even though this is correct, proper Dutch verb conjugation and spelling, many language experts will actually advise against using this, urging people to come up with workarounds ("Ik heb een e-mail gestuurd"; "I have sent an e-mail") instead. The weird thing is that in speech, 'ge-e-maild' sounds perfectly fine; in writing, however, it looks like you're stuttering while choking on a chili pepper. It's just... Wrong. Even though it's correct.

There are more instances like this, where the rise of computer technology and the dominance of English has spawned some seriously disturbing Dutch verb conjugations (my personal favourite: 'ge-ftp'd'). These clearly look alien and foreign to us Dutch today, and only time will tell if they ever get assimilated into Dutch spelling in such a way that they will lose their alien nature.

Early this year, I decided to take a risk.

As a geek, I like to reward those in the industry that try to be bold. That try to be different. That try to leave the beaten path. That look at the norm in the market, and decide to ignore it. Despite all its flaws, Microsoft did just that with its Metro user interface, incarnations of which are used on both Windows Phone and Windows 8.

I was a Windows Phone user since day one. I bought an HTC HD7 somewhere around release day, and imported it into The Netherlands, a year before the platform became available in The Netherlands. I wanted to reward Microsoft's mobile team for trying to be different, for being original, for not copying iOS and Android and instead coming up with something fresh and unique. Despite all the limitations and early adopter issues, I loved it.

I'd love to see a BB10 device out in the wild.