September-October 1987

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Table of contents

• Localizing Software by Peter E. Tik. Americans are past masters at coining short, to-the-point words. But just try translating “marketing” into any other language with just one word.
• The Japanese have a word for it: “suriyawase.” It means “rubbing the bottoms of two teacups together.” For, as every dutiful Japanese housewife knows, putting an unrubbed porcelain teacup onto a bare tabletop can cause one highly dishonorable scratch–since the rim at the bottom is unglazed. …
• A Poetics of Interactivity by Ronald Martínez and Jim Gasperini.
  Someday, a definitive critical work will appear which recognizes the structures that appear and reappear in the work of interactive narrative writing. At the moment, the evolution of technique is, in all things computer, rapid; so rapid that any description of them may be obsolete by the time it hits the street. My advice is, read this fast.
• An Engineeer and his Word by Peter Rutten
  The engineer is Andy Heermans. His word is “Insomniac.” A few months ago he yelled it into a mike at Steve Friedman’s Digital Music Center, a New York recording studio. Wanna hear it? It’s on Carlos Alomar’s (David Bowie’s guitar player) debut album “Dream Generator.”
• The Filofax of Life
  Quick, if your house was on fire, what’s the first thing you’d save? For an increasing number of young professionals, the answer is their filofax.
• Get Smart! Industrial Strength Language Processing from Smart Communications. by Jeffrey S. Mann
  Every year multinational corporations around the world put out hundreds of millions of words designed to instruct, inform, warn and convince. The ability to achieve each of these goals effectively can mean the difference between chapter eleven and Easy Street.
• How to Talk to a Plane. Crouzet’s Speechtech by Andrew Joscelyne
  A peek into the cockpit of the Rafale, the first fighter being designed around a voice interactive system.
• Does Steak Love Lettuce? by Susan J. Shephard
  If a computer could tell us what it dreams, what would it tell us? The question is less theoretical than it used to be. INRAC’s progeny is the most highly developed artificial writer in the field of prose synthesis today.
• How a modern newspaper is really put together – The Independent by Louis Rossetto
  Neither “Front Page” nor “Lou Grant”. The Independent is the first national quality newspaper launched in Britain this century. By all measures The Independent is a success. Critics like it, its target yups are buying it, and nine months after its launch, it’s just 30,000 copies short of breakeven circulation of 360,000.

Reviews

• Bookshelf–First Shot in the Desktop Information Revolution by Eric Alderman
  Microsoft Bookshelf, scheduled for fall release, is nothing less than amazing.
• PC-MOS 386 –What DOS should have been. by Susan J. Shephard
  PC-MOS/386 (MOS) is a fast, multi-tasking/multi-user operating system, designed top to bottom for microcomputers running the Intel 80386 32-bit processor.
• Handwriting Recognition – Anatex’s Personal Writer by Emmanuel Rabier
  More than a gimmick, but less than what it will be when it can read the way you really write.
• Amnesia. The first computerised novel. reviewed by Peter Stenhuijs
  Amnesia, by Thomas M. Disch, published by Electronic Arts, for IBMs and clones. US$44.95
• Machine Translation. A Technology Assessment. by Richard W. Balfour reviewed by Tony Whitecomb
  Publishers BMT Consultants claim this report can help current and potential MT users make their cost-effective utmost of a technology through which “hundreds of companies are already doubling the productivity of their translation departments.”

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