Technophile Monkey

Ich bin zwar Schweizerdeutsch- und Alemannisch-Verteidiger, aber es gibt da schon Grenzen. Helvetismen im Schriftdeutsch einzubauen, das ist herzig. Aber manche Auswüchse aus der Mundart sind nur falsch.

Kürzlich in einem Forum gelesen: “[...] ich war überhaupt nicht überzogen [...]“. Das scheint aus der Zürcher (?) Mundart zu kommen, wo viele Leute “ich bin nöd überzoge gsi” sagen würden. Vielleicht liege ich falsch, aber im Khûrertütsch sind wir näher am Hochdeutschen: “i bin nit überzügt gsi”. “Überzoga”, das gibts dort nur im Konditorei-Jargon, obwohl man da wohl auch eher “mit XYZ-überzug” sagen würde statt den Passiv zu bilden.

Deshalb zum Merken: Überzogen ist man höchstens mit Schokolade, und wenn das bei einer geneigten Leserin einmal der Fall sein sollte, bitte unbedingt anrufen, ich kann da helfen. Ansonsten ist man überzeugt von etwas.

Here’s a very insightful comment on a recent Slashdot article asking for the best eBook reader:

dpbsmith writes: I’ve been taught a lesson. I am now the proud owner of over $300 worth of useless bits. They are encrypted and keyed to a serial-numbered hardware device which bit the dust last year. In theory, this is no problem, as the books and Gemstar’s record of my ownership remains on the servers. All I need to do is buy a new device, call Gemstar customer service, have them reencode my books with the new device serial number, and download them again. Except that Gemstar doesn’t exist, Gemstar customer service doesn’t exist, and the servers were shut down long ago.

Because of another limitation of DRM–I couldn’t share my books with my wife even if she had her own Rocket eBook reader, which she didn’t, she didn’t know that I had purchased an e-copy for $15, and bought her own paper copy for $15. She can still read her copy. She will still be able to read it twenty years from now. She can lend it to a friend. She can sell it on eBay. Scarcely five years after purchase, I cannot read mine and will never be able to read it again.

The same is true today with the Kindle. The Kindle only supports a handful of formats, and none of them are open. Perversely, the Sony readers mostly support open formats like ePub today. Sony used to be the king of crippled, proprietary products and formats, but with their eBook readers (Sony PRS-505, etc.) they seem to have opened up. Who knows why, but it’s a good thing to have happened. A good thing for Mr. and Mrs. Customer, at least.

So before you buy a Kindle, ask yourself the question: Do I want my reader to natively support non-DRM-crippled books? Do I want my reader to still be able to display the books I’ve bought five years down the line? Then maybe the Kindle is not the right choice. Right now, there are ways to get the Kindle to do this as well, but Amazon can issue an update at any time that removes your ability to do so. Other manufacturers are instead adding more and more open formats to their readers. You may think the ~ $100-$200 lower price on the Kindle may justify the loss of freedom, but I think you won’t be happy with that decision.

If you want to find out what DRM is all about, check out Defective By Design.

If you squint and look at the MMO market sideways, you see where the territory lines are:

• Europe: Hardcore PvP games (Darkfall, Mortal Online), “mature” games (Age of Conan), creepily adapted Asian F2P’s (Runes of Magic), niche nerd magnets nobody else is risking (EVE Online, Anarchy Online).
• North America: Theme park games (World of Warcraft, EverQuest II), sandbox games (Fallen Earth, Ultima Online), group tactics and realm vs. realm games (Guild Wars, Warhammer Online, Dark Age of Camelot).
• Russia: Endgame naval battles in space while trying to innovate, but careful, not too much (Allods Online).
• Asia: Grindfests (Aion, Lineage II, Final Fantasy XI), F2P’s with item shop (Dragonica, Perfect World, 12Sky 2, etc.)

Yes, the genres could be split any way you like, so this list is a little arbitrary. But with MMO(RP)Gs now having roughly ten years of history in the market, I think we slowly see differences between the MMO subgenres each area likes and thus produces. There are bastard children, designed in one area and developed in another, like Runes of Magic. But all in all I think the observation works.

One oddity is that all the sci-fi games came from Europe (EVE Online, Anarchy Online) until Fallen Earth and now Star Trek Online were released. Odd. On the other hand, you could say that all the theme park games came from the US for quite some time.

I wonder if this is all just random and future diversity in the genre all over the world will remove any regional trends, or whether it continues like this.

I’m such an anal-retentive freak that I enjoy finding errors in people’s pronunciation of English words. It’s no wild enthusiastic enjoyment or anything, it’s just something in my head that goes “click” and thinks “hey, that didn’t sound right”. Don’t worry, I’m not such a big cock that I go and correct people. And I don’t make any exceptions for myself, either. I’m not a native speaker, so I’m sure I make enough mistakes as well.

But I notice this especially well when two people try to find out how to pronounce one English word based on other words that are written similarly. That just won’t work. English is a cesspool, a wild, tangled mess of loan words from all over the world. You can’t guess the pronunciation of one word from another, you have to learn how to say each word when you learn the word itself. Just like in some of the darker and more unappealing areas of German.

Examples? No prob:

1. Item vs. iteration. Both start with “ite-” and a following consonant. Yet the first is ai-tem (ˈaɪtəm), the second is iteray-shun (ˌɪtəˈreɪʃən).
2. Forfeit vs. feign vs. feisty. All three have a “fei” element, but the first is for-fitt (ˈfɔrfɪt), the second fei-n (feɪn) and the third fai-sti (ˈfaɪsti).
3. Miserable vs. miserly. Mis-, twice the same? Forget it. The first is mis-er-äbl (ˈmɪzərəbəl), the second is maiserli (ˈmaɪzərli).
4. Hood vs. boot. Now those should really be pronounced the same — but they aren’t! It’s hud (hʊd) and buut (but). Add to this the problem of room, which in some dialects is shortened to rum and in others is ruum (rum vs. rʊm).

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That’s just the start. That doesn’t even lead you into grammar. Instead, I’ll let this rather cute and bookish dictionary editor explain what utter chaos English grammar can be:

So if you think there are any regularities in English, you’ll be so disappointed. Yes, there are some regular elements. But the more you learn about the language, the more irregularities you see, and the more German the whole thing might seem to you.

Thanks Tycho from Penny Arcade for the link.

In the world of software, we sometimes find geeky wordplay such as recurive acronyms. The best-known recursive acronym is surely found in the GNU project, because GNU stands for “GNU’s not UNIX”.

leihs, one of the projects I lead, used to be a pure equipment booking system without any inventory-related functions. There are numerous linguistic problems in translating German booking-related terms to English, because English distinguishes between borrowing and lending whereas German only knows the concept of “Ausleihe”, which is used both for borrowing and for lending. So in German, it made sense to call leihs leihs — it was an Ausleihsystem.

Now you English-speaking people can’t really follow the beauty (ahem) of that, and thus when leihs became international, we had to think up a better definition of the name. The result is perhaps the world’s first ever bilingual recursive acronym:

• leihs is an easy inventory handling system
• leihs ist ein einfaches Inventarhandhabungssystem

Amazing, huh?