John Dvorak is hit-or-miss in his articles. This one's a hit, and articulates my bewilderment at the idea of online office apps like Google Office. Even if consumers used them, I can't imagine any business doing so.*

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2176192,00.asp

Excerpts:

I only use Google docs," a friend of mine told me. "It's as good as Word and easier to share files."

Easier to share files? So how hard is it to attach a doc file to an e-mail anyway? Cripes.

To analyze the illogic of certain trends, I like to employ a trick I call the "reverse timeline." . . . You can image the advertising push. "Now control your own data!" "Faster processing power now." "Cheaper!" "Everything at your fingertips." "No need to worry about network outages."

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* Except, possibly, that they'd purchase a version from Google hosted on their own business servers, and be able to store all corporate documents. Of course, this can be done today, through thin clients, using Microsoft or Linux technologies.

Is any of these sentences more grammatically correct than the others? Will you provide references to support your claim?

Is any of these better suited to a particular use? For instance, which would be best on a flyer?

1. "All services are not available in all areas."
2. "Not all services are available in all areas."
3. "Services are not all available in all areas."

Here are links to a couple of articles about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. The machine is quite impressive, as is the software. There are several features I wish were available on "grown up" computers. I think this represents the first real update to the graphical user interface in a long time. There seem to be many ideas taken from Jef Raskin's Humane Interface.

For an example of the OLPC's innovation, read about The Journal, a wonderfully thoughtful approach to working with files.

Links:
eTech article
Wikipedia article
OLPC Page

I also reprint from Wikipedia, below, Negroponte's response to the issue of theft/black market. He believes (and I agree) that one way to limit this problem is through social pressure. "Um, what are you doing with that? It's supposed to be in the hands of a child."

The grey market is a very serious issue. I don't want to be dismissive of it for a moment, and there are three ways of addressing it. Way number one is to have no market at all for it. I mean you can't sell it, who could buy it, and that isn't bullet proof. That's a little bit dreaming, but it's part of the equation. The second is to put the technologies into the device that help stop that. [The laptops distributed to middle schoolers in Maine are Apple iBooks] so they are not only great stuff to steal and we don't necessarily have corruption of that kind, but it's pretty transferable technology. They've put little things so the machine disables itself after a while if it hasn't connected to the school. You can put GPS in it, you can put all sorts of stuff. But then the third one, which I'm doing and I like is to make this machine so distinctive that it is socially a stigma to be carrying one if you are not a child or a teacher. Now you can obviously take it down to your basement, but I hope your spouse will even say: “Oh God! Honey! What did you do?” [...] So those three combined will I hope at least limit this to one percent or two percent.

I've complained for years about people in my profession (computers) treating English with startling abandon. My favorite example is still the redefining of the word "deprecated", as in "this html tag has been deprecated." Ask most computer people what deprecated means and they'll say "deleted" or "rendered obsolete". (Or even "obsoleted"!)

No. To deprecate is to strongly disapprove of, as in "I deprecate her outlandish behavior", or (ahem) "I deprecate the computer industry's misuse of the word 'deprecate'".

Deprecate could be used properly to indicate something that can still be used, but whose usage isn't approved. In that case, the correct sentence is "this html tag is deprecated." I applaud Dave Thomas of the Pragmatic Programmers for getting this right most of the time in his books.

Here's another one I read today, from a Microsoft article:
Shadow Copy

The Volume Shadow Copy Service tells the writers to quiesce their data and temporarily freeze requestor (application) I/O write requests....

To quiesce, when used as a verb, means to become quiet. "I wish my neighbors would quiesce at night."

But in the Computer English, quiesce means to render inactive (quiescent). Now, this isn't so bad, I'll admit. I can make the argument that it's reasonably correct, even a somewhat impressive use of the word. However, I think a better word could have been chosen that wouldn't make readers head toward their dictionaries, or, more commonly, infer the meaning from context and thus create a whole new denotation. "Before entering the car wash, please quiesce your car."

Couldn't the Shadow Copy Service just tell writers to finalize their data?

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Someone's going to tell me that language changes¹, and that this usage of quiesce is perfectly fine. Fine. My beef isn't with change. It's with the arrogance and ignorance in my field. The ignorance of their misuse of words, and the arrogance of saying "well, that's what it means now, because we say so."

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¹ In fact, the definition of deprecate has changed over time to become synonymous with "depreciate" (to reduce in stature, to belittle). One article I read pointed out that in most cases, when people say "self deprecate" they really mean "self depreciate".

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Comments? Have I really gone to far this time, and truly splitting hairs? (Or, for dinner, splitting hares.)

Here's a wonderful little article about the death of the comma, by Robert J. Samuelson. The only thing I'll emphasize is that removing commas removes clarity. Commas are not, as many suppose, merely used to indicate a pause. They are used to indicate sentence structure, to help the reader understand the meaning of sentences, especially complex ones. As a software developer, I respect the need for clear syntax.

Alas, representing complex sentences--and complex thoughts?--seems doomed.

The Sad Fate of the Comma