Microsoft Language Portal

Microsoft Language Portal: a bi-lingual search portal for finding translations of key Microsoft terms and general IT terminology. It is aimed at international users and partners that need to know our terminology for globalization, localization, authoring and general discovery. 

It contains approx. 25,000 defined terms, including English definitions, translated in up to 100 languages as well as the software translations for products like Windows, Office, SQL Server and many more.

Stay ..simply!

Skeuomorphism

Skeuomorphism: derived from the Greek words "Skeuos", meaning vessel or tool, and "morph", meaning shape. A skeuomorph is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, a “derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.” 

The term can apply to either a physical or digital creation. In other words, it means to replicate the form and material qualities of something that are no longer inherently necessary, all with the objective of making new designs “look comfortably old and familiar,” Nicholas Gessler writes in “Skeuomorphs and Cultural Algorithms.” When applied to UI, the logic here is that it will make the interface more intuitive and usable, as the user will understand how it functions based on their knowledge of the analog object it is replicating.

Source: Can We Please Move Past Apple’s Silly, Faux-Real UIs?

SoMoClo

The term illustrates the convergence of social media, mobile and cloud. 

What used to be three siloed technologies have now begun merging, thanks to an infrastructure that allows them to “collapse” into each other and form a new IT construct.

Source: SoMoClo ... huh?

Language evolves: from "e-mail" to "email"

The AP Stylebook, the de facto style and usage guide for much of the news media, announced on Friday that the abbreviated term for “electronic mail” is losing a hyphen, and with it, a relic of a simpler time when Internet technology needed to be explained very carefully.

The move follows the AP Stylebook’s decision to change “Web site” to “website” last year, at which time we wrote, “[We] hold our collective breath for other possible updates, such as changing “e-mail” to “email.’”

Since then the recently much more progressive organization also published a set of 42guidelines and definitions for social media, though the future of “e-mail” remained very much in flux.

Today’s news, fittingly enough, was first announced on the AP Stylebook’s Twitter page, where they tweeted: “Language evolves. Today we change AP style from e-mail to email, no hyphen. Our editors will announce it at #ACES2011 today.” Look for the change to be in effect immediately in the online version of the stylebook and in the 2011 print version.

Source:
mashable.com

Internel Kill Switch

Proposal to give President of the United States the authority to turn off Internet access or Web sites in a "cybersecurity emergency".

Source: CNet.com

See also:Facebookistan

Skypeochondria, Fidgetal, Powerpointless

• Fidgetal - blend of finger and digital. Referred to the use of the fingers to provide input above a mobile device.

• MisApp - something going terribly wrong due to over reliance on latest Phone gizmo

• Wikisqueak - sound emitted by diplomat who realises she's sent confidential telegram without proper encryption

• Dreadsheet - spreadsheet containing very bad financial news

• Disgracebook - social networking site advertising user's embarrassing past

• Mobile drone - lover of interminable tedious and public phone conversations

• Sin card - alternative device to fit in mobile for immoral communication

• Powerpointless - universal feeling in room at end of hi-tech executive presentation of negligible value

• Skypeochondria - queasy feeling brought on by obsessive fear of being offline

• Scroogele - search engine for people trying to find cheapest online gifts

Source: BBC, "The future is fidgetal"

Infowar

Blend of "Information" and "Warfare"

Infowar is the use of information and information systems as weapons in a conflict in which the information and information systems themselves are the targets.

Infowar has been divided into three classes:

1. Individual Privacy

2. Industrial and Economic Espionage

3. Global information warfare, i.e. Nation State versus Nation State.

Most organizations will not need to be concerned over classes I and III, but clearly Class II is relevant to any organization wishing to protect its confidential information.

Also Cyberwar and Netwar.

Source: Seatlle.gov

iZombie

iPod zombies, a digital undead army lurching through the streets. We may call it the iPod zombie trance, but it's a device-agnostic state, since this living dead horde also consists of iPhone zombies, BlackBerry zombies, and the generic MP3 zombies and cellphone zombies.
The iPod zombie pedestrian isn't alone in needing earbuds and a tiny screen these days. Others in a state of iPod oblivion include iPod zombie joggers, iPod zombie dog walkers, iPod zombie cyclists, and iPod zombie rollerbladers.

iPod pedestrians (or, iPodes­trians) people regularly—you might even say compulsively—read and compose e-mail while walking down the street. But that's not all people do while power walking to their next appointments. They also text, read Facebook and Twitter status updates, scan RSS feeds, and more than anything else, they bliss out to their favorite tunes at unhealthily loud volume levels.

Similarly, in your local Starbucks, you've probably seen your share of laptop zombies who are oblivious to everyone and everything except the screen in front of them.
If walking while texting and other forms of pedestrian inattention were merely comical, no one would worry about them too much. But attention is a zero-sum game, so concentrating on your iPod results in a technological autism or unintentional blindness that can lead to near collisions with fellow pedestrians and actual collisions with street lamps. One study found digital music players to blame for up to 17 accidents every day in the UK.

The preferred term for this among cognitive scientists is inattentional blindness, which they define as "the failure to detect the appearance of an unexpected, task-irrelevant object in the visual field." So if you're zoned out listening to Arcade Fire at top volume (the task) and you fail to see an oncoming vehicle (the unexpected, task-irrelevant object), that's IB, and that's probably trouble, perhaps even death by iPod.

The risks increase if the driver of the car bearing down on you is preoccupied reading or sending text messages, a form of digital drunkenness known as being intexticated. An incredibly dangerous habit, intextication is also called DWT, or driving while texting. If the driver is preoccupied with a cellphone call instead, call it DWY, or driving while yakking—abbreviations that play on the legal term DWI, or driving while intoxicated.

Published on: spectrum.ieee.org

Read also:

Distracted driving buzzwords

Don't be 404, know the tech slang!

A study of new slang terms entering English finds that technology is driving and perpetuating them.

For instance, "404" - the error message given when a browser cannot find a webpage - has come to mean "clueless".

Slang lexicographer Jonathon Green says that some such terms and abbreviations come about because of the limited speed and space afforded by text messaging.

Story from BBC NEWS

Leet

Da Wikipedia

Il leet (o anche l33t, 31337 o 1337) è una forma codificata di inglese caratterizzata dall'uso di caratteri non alfabetici al posto delle normali lettere (scelte per la semplice somiglianza nel tratto) o piccoli cambi fonetici.

Il termine ha origine dalla parola "élite", in inglese di pronuncia simile a "leet", e si riferisce al fatto che chi usa questa forma di scrittura si distingue da chi non ne è capace.

Il leet nasce anche dall'esigenza di memorizzare password di senso compiuto (quindi facili da ricordare) ma difficilmente riconoscibili. Il l33t era un modo valido per rendere il file riconoscibile a chi lo cercasse, mentre sfuggiva alle ricerche dei SysOp.

How the internet is changing language

By Zoe Kleinman Technology reporter,

BBC News

'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed?


Technology and culture
The internet prank was just one of several terms including "lurker", "troll" and "caps".

According to David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, who says that new colloquialisms spread like wildfire amongst groups on the net.

"The internet is an amazing medium for languages," he told BBC News.

"Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."

People using word play to form groups and impress their peers is a fairly traditional activity, he added.
"It's like any badge of ability, if you go to a local skatepark you see kids whose expertise is making a skateboard do wonderful things.
"Online you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the internet."

Word play
For English speakers there are cult websites devoted to cult dialects - "LOLcat" - a phonetic and deliberately grammatically incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, and
"Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.
"There are about a dozen of these games cooked up by a crowd of geeks who, like anybody, play language games," said Professor Crystal.
"They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. They are fashionable at the moment but will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."
For him, the efforts of those fluent in online tongues is admirable.
"They might not be reading Shakespeare and Dickens but they are reading and cooking up these amazing little games - and showing that they are very creative. I'm quite impressed with these movements."
Txt spk
One language change that has definitely been overhyped is so-called text speak, a mixture of often vowel-free abbreviations and acronyms, says Prof Crystal.

"People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it you find they're not," he said.
In fact only 10% of the words in an average text are not written in full, he added.
Wireless in the 1950s meant a radio. It's very rare to talk about a radio now as a wireless, unless you're of a particular generation or trying to be ironic”
They may be in the minority but acronyms seem to anger as many people as they delight.
Stephen Fry once blasted the acronym CCTV (closed circuit television) for being "such a bland, clumsy, rythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word".
But his inelegant group of letters is one of many acronyms to earn a place in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
The secret of their success is their longevity.
"We need evidence that people are using a word over a period of time," said Fiona McPherson, senior editor in the new words group at the OED.
She says the group looks for evidence that a word has been in use for at least five years before it can earn its place in the dictionary.
Such evidence comes in the form of correspondence from the public and trawling through dated material to find out when a term first started appearing.
Hence TMI (Too Much Information) and WTF (you may wish to look that one up for yourself) are in, while OMG (Oh My God) has yet to be included in the quarterly dictionary updates.
"Some people get quite exercised and say, 'do these things belong in our language?'," said Ms McPherson.
"But maybe this has always happened. TTFN [ta ta for now] is from the ITMA (It's That Man Again) radio series in the 1940s."

Word thief
There is no doubt that technology has had a "significant impact" on language in the last 10 years, says Ms McPherson.
Some entirely new words like the verb 'to google', or look something up on a search engine, and the noun 'app', used to describe programmes for smartphones (not yet in the OED), have either been recently invented or come into popular use.
But the hijacking of existing words and phrases is more common.
Ms McPherson points out that the phrase "social networking" debuted in the OED in 1973. Its definition - "the use or establishment of social networks or connections" - has only comparatively recently been linked to internet-based activities.
"These are words that have arisen out of the phenomenon rather than being technology words themselves," she added.
"Wireless in the 1950s meant a radio. It's very rare to talk about a radio now as a wireless, unless you're of a particular generation or trying to be ironic. The word has taken on a whole new significance."
For Prof Crystal it is still too early to fully evaluate the impact of technology on language.
"The whole phenomenon is very recent - the entire technology we're talking about is only 20 years old as far as the popular mind is concerned."
Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a word is that it becomes too mainstream, he argues.
"Remember a few years ago, West Indians started talking about 'bling'. Then the white middle classes started talking about it and they stopped using it.
"That's typical of slang - it happens with internet slang as well

iPad terminology

Sunset, verb. To be in the process of becoming obsolete; a "sunsetting device". (Cf. the already well established and uncommonly ugly legacy, adjective: already obsolete; a "legacy computer")

Readcast, verb. To read something while similarly transmitting on several social media the fact that you are reading it and what you think of it.

Vook, noun. A book composed of both video and text; also, the name of the company that invented the vook for the iPad.

Swype, verb. Allows users to glide a finger across the virtual keyboard to spell words, rather than tapping out each letter.


published on: Johnson

Read also:

Sunsetting and Readcasting

Getting a handle on the language

Thanks to the economy, technology and fashion, there are so many new words being created you'd have to be a "didiot" not to notice them. As a didiot myself, I assumed didiot means someone who's an idiot with digital technology (that would be moi), but no: It is a hybrid of "damn" and "idiot." A "yoot" sounds like either a Dr. Seuss character or the way your cousin Vinny would pronounce "youth," but instead it is a person young enough not to remember life before youtube.
Men were already suffering in the "mancession" -- meaning disproportionately more men are unemployed due to the languishing of traditionally male trades like construction. Now they have to cope with the "Tiger effect," too. That's newly alert wives checking up on them through cellphone, GPS, and e-mail records. And by the way, a GPS is not just a gizmo but also a driver that gives too many directions. I have just bought a GPS myself and love it, but wish that instead of the bossy female voice directing me this way and that, I could have mine programmed with Colin Firth telling me in his posh British accent, "Oops! This is a one-way, ducky!" or "Wait 'til the light goes green, love."
Anyway, the Tiger effect must be the downside of "funemployment" for some, that is, enforced time off work that might as well be used to do long-postponed enjoyable things. With today's technology, can cheaters of either gender really be dumb enough to think they won't get caught, or on some level do they want to be? Nah, that's giving them too much credit for psychological complexity. Sex addicts, my Aunt Mabel! They ain't nothin' but hounddogs.
Other new words for males include "hegans," men who are vegetarians but not necessarily sissies, and "heavage," for the male cleavage that Simon Cowell shows off so proudly. Back, too, is the "pornstache," the full luxuriant moustache of the 70s that was especially popular with newsmen and porn actors. Maybe someday the five o' clock shadow that lost Tricky Dick the presidential debate -- but that many women now inexplicably find sexy -- will also seem quaint.
We have the recession to thank for the lack of a "speeding cushion," that is the five miles above the speed limit that a nice ossifer used to let you get by with; now more tickets are being written as cities and states try to rev up their revenues. That "incentifies" drivers to follow the limits. I've been seeing "incentify" a lot in the business world; it's one of those conversions of a noun to a verb that drives traditionalists and grammarians crazy. Sure enough it sounds dopey, but I have come around to the belief that in language, change is inevitable and correctness rests mostly upon usage; it's like a river because it is never the same twice.
From my kids I've picked up "meh," which signifies profound indifference. An exchange might go like this. Question: "Do you want to rent Al Gore's documentary about climate change?" Answer: "Meh."
A neologism that strikes my fancy is "Nocialism," that is, the denial that a policy or law being proposed is an example of Socialism. In politics closer to home, I keep hearing Gov. Culver referred to regularly, but not affectionately, as "the big lug," a signal that his jig is up come November.
From the travel industry comes the word "yotel," very small but sometimes very fancy accommodations that originated in Japan, allowing people to experience luxury for less. From fashion this spring comes "the shoe boot," a warm weather version of the boot. For me, it conjures up a surprisingly tender "All in the Family" episode in which Archie recalls how other kids called him "shoe bootie" because he was so poor he had to wear one shoe and one boot to school. If you remember that episode, too, kid, you're no "yoot."

This post appeared originally in the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, Iowa.