language

PHP and Perl crashing the enterprise party

The enterprise has long favored Java and .Net, but PHP and other dynamic programming languages have left their infancies and are rapidly closing the gap on their more stodgy competitors.

That's the message I got from Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, the "dynamic languages company," in a conversation this past week. I wanted to find out how the Vancouver-based "old school" open-source company is faring in building business solutions and developer tools around Perl, Python and Tcl.

Quite well, as it turns out (and as described by Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond). But the story is … Read more

Oh goody!!!!!! A punctuation mark for sarcasm

There were many people, quite a few in America, who were excited, delighted, even positively beaming when some clever cove created that smiley colon/parenthesis thing that is now the universal sign of a written smile.

:) That's the one. The one that is sometimes written as ":0" or ":-)" or, for a smiling wink, ";)." Or even, and this is far beyond my intellectual galaxy, "J". Does that signify "JOKINGYOUMORON!!!!!!!!"? I think that it does.

All these symbols have been such great successes in bringing people together and making them … Read more

Office flashback

It took a while to get used to the new Office 2007 interface. Nothing was where it was supposed to be, and the now-ubiquitous ribbon was a foreign concept. Hours sifting through menus and the Help file sometimes failed to locate familiar features from previous versions of Office. If you're having problems adapting to Office 2007, you may find that Classic Style Menus and Toolbars for Microsoft Office 2007 is exactly what you need to bring back that old familiar feel.

The program is deceptively simple. Once it's installed, users will find that their Word, Excel, and PowerPoint … Read more

IBM taps into group language translation

Global company IBM seems to have found a way for its employees to get past language barriers and communicate.

IBM employees are currently using text translation software that can instantly convert documents, Web pages, and even instant messages between English and 11 other languages. The software, christened "n.Fluent," is being "crowdsourced" or tested among IBM's 400,000 employees across 170 countries.

As IBMers use n.Fluent, the software learns from its mistakes and improves itself. As the entire company potentially taps into n.Fluent, volunteers within IBM refine each translated word for greater accuracy. … Read more

The dad who only talked to his son in Klingon

Just like everyone who grew up on something of a "Star Trek" diet, I want to believe.

I want to believe that Spock will rise from the dead, get married, and have pointy-eared offspring, who, regressing to the mean, will become sports-loving couch potatoes. I want to believe that Captain Kirk will shack up with Uhura on Pluto and lead a fight to have the planet recognized as one of the greats.

And I want to believe that d'Armond Speers really did only speak to his son in Klingon for the first three years of the little boy's life.

You don't remember d'Armond? Well, he first entered the Trekkie firmament in a 1999 Wired article, in which he told of how difficult it had been to communicate solely in the limited language of Klingon with his then 30-month-old son, Alec.

He even presented a recording of little Alec singing the opening bars of the Klingon Imperial Anthem.

The story has this week been updated with some extraordinary news.… Read more

Help, my iPod touch (or iPhone) is in a different language!

Occasionally users may find that their iPod touch or iPhone has been set to a language they do not understand. Here is a visual guide to reset the language to English.… Read more

Oxford's word of the year? 'Unfriend'

Perhaps in a sign of how the plague of social media has numbed us all to the value of legitimate human connections, the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked the verb "unfriend," or "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook," as its 2009 Word of the Year.

At the very least, it's a testament to the ubiquity of Facebook, which now has well over 300 million members around the world.

Facebook itself takes the process of "friending" and "unfriending" very seriously. It once sent warning notes to players of a third-party game called PackRat … Read more

The 404 Podcast 466: Where we dissect a live fanboy

With so many new blogs and Web sites that review video games and offer buying guides, it's hard to know who to trust; if you've ever vehemently disagreed with an online review and felt a boiling need to hunt down the writer, listen to today's episode of The 404--it's all about fanboys, online reviews, and our credibility as unbiased journalists.

We start off the show with a quick verbal fanboy bashing, and Jeff is probably the most engaging participant as a result of an article that instructs video game fans on how to respond to a bad review. After grilling Jeff for a while on what exactly makes him qualified to review video games, we run down the list of excuses as to what outside sources might influence a writer to give a game an unfairly low rating. For example, it could be that the reviewer might just suck at the game, or maybe the writer is just trolling for hits to further their career. In any case, The 404 fully endorses MetaCritic as the definitive source for unbiased, aggregated user reviews. (Disclosure: MetaCritic is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET.)

Jeff is jokingly ticked off after we challenge his legitimacy as a professional video game reviewer, so we help him let off some steam with a study out of Keele University in North Staffordshire that claims swearing relieves pain. Although we don't normally use foul language on the air, everyone agrees that a well-placed cuss word can certainly alleviate frustration and even mild physical pain. Without getting ourselves into trouble, we run down a list of curse word dos and don'ts and even offer a few choice expressions in our native tongues.

We also want to give a big thanks to everyone that e-mailed and called about the derogatory comments sometimes heard on Microsoft Xbox Live. We received a lot of excellent comments about censorship and age limits in video games as well, so thanks to everyone for their input. If you have something to say about today's episode, give us a call at 1-866-404-CNET or email us at the404[at]cnet[dot]com and tell us what's on your mind.

Have a great day everyone!

EPISODE 466 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Google hopes Go will give a browser boost

Google, ever eager to renovate the computing industry for the benefit of the Web and its own business, is working to link two nascent but potentially significant projects, its experimental Go programming language and its Chrome Web browser.

Specifically, the company is building a foundation to let programs written in Go run directly within a Web browser endowed with Google's Native Client software. Native Client is designed to let browser-based programs run faster than is possible with today's widely used JavaScript; though it's still in its early stages, it's built into Chrome and available as a … Read more