"She was like, 'You're not your normal, cheery, bubbly self,' " Mr. Witkowski said. " 'You're not using exclamation points.' " She told him she felt his emails came off as more demanding than usual. "I didn't really know how to react," he said. Exclamation points are stressing people out. Years of rampant use have both diluted the punctuation mark's meaning and inflated its significance.

We've all heard about startups like Netflix and Airbnb that came of age on AWS (Amazon Web Services), and became major forces reinventing their industries. As Vice President of EC2 Windows (Elastic Compute Cloud service that offers users flexible, scalable compute capacity for Microsoft applications), Sandy Carter is helping drive adoption of AWS technologies among enterprises. In this interview, Sandy answers a Proust Questionnaire (a parlor game popularized by Marcel Proust, who believed that an individual will reveal their true nature in answering these questions), speaks about her grandmother, her team at AWS, and why she loves the beach. Which person do you most admire? She'll tell you that she's five feet tall, but she's only four foot eleven.

Apple said the phone's battery will last two hours longer than that of the iPhone 7. But rival phones -- many of them from Samsung -- already offer similar displays, facial recognition, augmented reality and wireless charging, if often in cruder forms that mostly haven't won over large numbers of phone users. None of which is to say that Apple won't break new ground. In particular, the iPhone X gives Apple the opportunity to bring augmented reality -- essentially the projection of computer-generated images into real-world surroundings, a la the monster hunts in "Pokemon Go" -- into mainstream use. No one can say with certainty what sort of "killer app" will make augmented reality a hit.

Wildcards are used in computer programs, languages, search engines, and operating systems to simplify search criteria. It's similar to how wildcards are used in Scrabble or Poker. For example, in Poker, when aces are wild, that means an ace can represent any card in the deck. The same is true for wildcards in programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Windows, and even Google. In a nutshell, wildcards search for everything * or specific things?; define ranges [ ]; create groups (); repeat @, { }; anchor; and make exceptions!