a headline, posted today on
Slashdot. The content of the article is not what interests me at the moment, though. What is most impressive is that most of the words in the headline are used in a highly technical sense, very few people would have been able to understand this sentence five years ago, probably nobody would have understood it ten years ago, and I suspect that nobody will understand it ten years from now.
So, Valve unveils Steam Cloud. Or, if you prefer,
the Valve Corporation software company, famous among other things for developing Half-Life, unveils (metaphorically speaking, since we are talking about software and servers hidden somewhere in a datacenter) an extension to its existing Steam game content distribution technology, while making an oblique reference to cloud computing, something that is not really well defined but is currently the target of much investment and speculation.
This sentence is to contemporary life what a joke about placing antimacassars in bathing machines in a hill station would be to Victorian times. Ready on its way to becoming a piece of arcana. The sweet smell of obsolescence.
What is this, ten lines of footnotes to make a sentence marginally understandable to a technically minded person? Sometimes it is a wonder we can communicate at all.