LookIt

Labels for Windows 7

Having seen this article whose author humorously compares Windows Vista to "New Coke" (but then spoils it by admitting that she didn't hate New Coke as much as most people), I started to think about how we could market Windows 7. The best I could come up with was "Now twice as good as Windows NT 3.5!"

NIST on firewalls

Another of the NIST documents I have co-authored was just published: Guidelines on Firewalls and Firewall Policy. It is a revision of an old document that was really, really out of date and out of step with current practice. Our revision is not perfect (they never are), but we dragged the content kicking and screaming into present. Big thanks go to Joel Snyder at Opus One and David Newman at Network Test for doing thorough reviews of our first draft; they found dozens of places that needed more work, and the doc came out much better because of their reviews.

How much text is needed to translate?

Google says that its Translate service now works in 51 languages. Great, but now many of them does it translate well? I have become Facebook "friends" (gag) with about a dozen Danes (relatives) and Swedes (IETF folks). The latter usually slip in one or two Facebook status messages in their native tongue a week; the former do so almost exclusively. In both cases, Google Translate usually comes up with something barely understandable. I assume that it is because there are only a few words to work with, and they are probably written informally, but it is not confidence-inspiring.

For example, my Danish cousinish person says "KuskSynes godt at det der ondt i ryggen snart må holde op!", which comes out as "Coachman Seems good that it is a pain in his back soon must stop!" That doesn't seem right.