In the News Archive

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':

ik e-mail	ik e-mailde
hij/zij e-mailt	hij/zij e-mailde
wij e-mailen	wij e-mailden

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).

ik heb ge-e-maild

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.

Cool.

So how did Blackberry become a bit player in the smartphone market it invented? Canada's Globe and Mail offers an extensive look in their article Inside the Fall of Blackberry.

According to one insider quoted in the article, the problem wasn't that the staff stopped listening to customers. It was that they never listened to them. The company simply believed that they knew better what their customers needed.

Apple has wildly succeeded by being "out front" of expressed customer needs. But few tech companies hit paydirt when following this hubristic concept. Just look at the "innovative" user interfaces customers haven't asked for and have resisted over the past few years.

"Long-awaited"? Wait, people actually waited for this?

Must not have a lot going on in their lives.

Another checkmark in our road towards a totalitarian society: government intimidating the free press, destroying materials, and threatening to take them to court - to shut down a newspaper. No joke. The British government demanded that The Guardian hand over all materials related to Edward Snowden so that they could be destroyed. If the newspaper did not comply, the British government would go to court to shut down The Guardian.

The newspaper told the government that even if they did comply, it would be pointless - all the materials related to Snowden had already been spread throughout the world, the actual editing was done in New York, the journalist in question (Greenwald) lived in Brazil - but the British government stood fast.

Yeah.

"The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications today released its report on IT pricing in Australia, making 10 recommendations and concluding that the long-discussed 'Australia tax' is real." One of the recommendations is to make geo-blocking circumvention legal - and as a last resort, the committee recommends the government to make geo-blocking illegal altogether. Pretty strong language.

"Internet users worried about their personal information being intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies should stop using websites that send data to the United States, Germany's top security official said Wednesday." Cute, but pointless. France does it too, as does the UK. Documents from the Dutch intelligence agencies indicate that they, too, are involved in mass surveillance, the extent of which will supposedly be investigated by parliament.

"Douglas C. Engelbart, a visionary scientist whose singular epiphany in 1950 about technology's potential to expand human intelligence led to a host of inventions - among them the computer mouse - that became the basis for both the Internet and the modern personal computer, died on Tuesday at his home in Atherton, Calif. He was 88." We lost one of the greatest - if not the greatest - visionaries of computing today.

"Do intellectual property rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, this paper estimates the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent scientific research and product development. Genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public effort. Across a range of empirical specifications, I find evidence that Celera's IP led to reductions in subsequent scientific research and product development on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera's short-term IP had persistent negative effects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain." Research by Heidi L. Williams, of the Department of Economics at MIT. Forget what companies and their advocates (i.e., politicians) say, and trust science.

"After facing a congressional battering over security concerns, Huawei's carrier networking group is no longer focused on the U.S. market, and instead expects to find ample business in other parts of the world." Let's all not buy Chinese-made products from Huawei so we can buy Chinese-made products from every other brand ever! That totally makes sense!

Sigh. First it was the Apple TV. Then it became smartwatches. Now we're moving on to Google Glass competitors. People, this is all bullshit. Made-up nonsense to get hits. Headlines like 'X to release Y competitor' score a double whammy; X blogs will get excited about it, Y blogs will complain about X being a copycat. So, with one made-up story you score double the amount of hits. It's a variant on the old but now rarely used 'X to release Y killer', where 'Y' was usually an Apple product.

"Kay says that some gadgets with superficial Dynabook-like qualities, such as the iPad, have not only failed to realize the Dynabook dream, but have in some senses betrayed it. That's one of the points he makes in this interview, conducted by computer historian David Greelish, proprietor of the Classic Computing Blog and organizer of this month's Vintage Computer Festival Southeast in Atlanta (the Festival will feature a pop-up Apple museum featuring Xerox's groundbreaking Alto workstation, which Kay worked on, as well as devices which deeply reflected his influence, including the Lisa, the original Macintosh and the Newton). Kay and Greelish also discuss Kay's experiences at some of the big outfits where he's worked, including Xerox's fabled PARC labs, Apple, Disney and HP. Today, Kay continues his research about children and technology at his own organization, the Viewpoints Research Institute." A great interview with this legendary man.

If you don't live in the US, this is a pretty common source of irritation: US companies charging crazy markups on products sold in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the rest of the world. The Australian government has had enough of this practice, and started an inquiry into the matter. Yesterday (or today? Timezones confuse me) Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe had to answer questions in a public hearing.

"An incident at the annual Python developer conference has led to allegations of sexism, death threats, the firings of two people, and - apparently - multiple DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks." Absolutely bizarre.