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Admin
Seems to me you do have to pay the parking meter. In Bitcoins.
Admin
Man, these parkings are expensive as heck!
Admin
What Dutch-speaking (or near-Dutch-speaking) nation uses the US system of writing dates?
I submit that the language shown there could be Afrikaans (I can't distinguish it at a glance from Dutch), but surely South Africa uses YMD or DMY format, not MDY?
Admin
As an Afrikaans speaking person from South Africa I can tell you that:
Admin
Definitely not Afrikaans, seeing I am Afrikaans :-) That is definitely Dutch. And over here we do YYMMDD (too lazy for centuries!)
Admin
Our Dutch parkingmeters only show this behaviour in the 15th month.
Admin
No. "OK" is "OK, do the reboot" and "Cancel" is "Cancel the reboot and let me try to continue"
Admin
Reminds me of a small program I had. "Do you wish to exit the program? Yes - No". Both options closed the program. Maybe the developer just knew that it's stupid to bug anyone with a "do you really want to"-question.
Admin
It is the ransomware that uses the US format...
Admin
Do you really want to exit? No? Tough. You started it, and I'm finishing it. Adios.
Admin
The Netherlands usually use DD/MM/YY or DD/MM/YYYY date format, as does most of Europe as far as I know. Looks like that malware might be ignoring the system date format.
Admin
Dear mr. ransomware builder,
I regret to inform you that I will not be able to pay the requested fee, because you message uses an incorrect an confusing date format. Could you be so kind as to rephrase the ransom demand? Only well worded ransom demands will be taken into consideration.
P.S. You should also use the correct screen resolution
Admin
That's appalling! What terrible lack of attention to detail. Was there no official QA done on this? I for one will not be paying the ransom until they fix their software.
Admin
I know I'm going to sound like a fun-hating sourpuss, but I don't think machine translations are WTF-worthy unless they're totally out of left field. This one is honestly not that unusual when it comes to Japanese->English. It's funny, but...meh.
Admin
What Utopia is this where you get to park for free because the meter is down? You think the parking enforcement cares? There would be a ticket on every windshield. They'd probably leave the meter down on purpose for days just to boost revenue.
Admin
They probably never configured to regional settings on the embedded OS, default would be US.
Admin
I had cause to spend considerable time visiting a certain hospital in the Midlands of England a few months ago. The parking ticket machines were regularly broken so it was impossible to pay for your ticket to be processed (it was one of those systems where your ticket had an electronic stripe in it to trigger the gate-opening machine). In such circumstances, the barriers were left up permanently, thereby allowing for unlimited free parking.
Given that you tended not to want to park there unless you had good (or bad, come to that) reason to be there, it was rare to find there were no spare spaces, so there were no downsides to this arrangement from the point of view of the users.
Admin
apart from links to xkcd and other dwtf articles do we NEED to allow links in comments?
might cut down on the constant stream of spam
Admin
They would just continue spamming with un-hyperlinked URLs, unfortunately. Assuming whomever is managing these spam bots actually pays enough attention to change that.
Admin
Drat. That feel when you realize you used "whom" incorrectly in the subject of a sentence and you can't edit your comment. My Pedantic Thought Cortex (PTC) is firing on all neurons.
Admin
Google Translate has made a lot of progress, but then it reminds me that it's still not so great at East Asian languages.
The actual translation would be something closer to "we recognize this may cause you inconvenience, and thank you [for your time/trouble]".
Admin
Possibly Suriname, but I doubt it. Still, they based their nexwcurrency on the American dollar, so who knows? Anyway, my guess is that whoever wrote that ransomware didn’t bother to localise times and dates, or any other parts of the program except the extortion message.
It’s Dutch: the word “wij” (“we”) gives it away for certain — the Afrikaans for that being “ons” (as it is in all sensible Dutch dialects).
Admin
That's better than one error message I got on Windows one time. I was installing a piece of software, and it failed in the middle of the install. A dialog popped up, didn't have an icon that indicated "error" or "warning" or "info". Didn't have a title. The only message it had read "?0" and it had a single button without any label (completely blank).
Needless to say, I went into the process manager and killed the install process, because I had no idea what would happen if I clicked that button, and it was a production system.
Admin
What is with that Japanese? Is it a mistranslation (par for the course for Google translate, but I don't know Japanese, so I can't tell) or it it actually stupid? In the former case, we need to know what it actually means, in the later where it comes from.
Admin
There is no corresponding phrase in English in common use, because of cultural differences. A word to word translation could be: "I am causing you trouble, but please be kind to me". It is usually used as a signing-off phrase of an email about, well, the trouble that you will be causing.
The second part, "please be kind to me", is used at other times as well, even when one is not causing any trouble. For example when meeting someone for the first time, or in place of "Regards" near the end of an email.
But it certainly has neither "appreciation of inconvenience" nor "thanks".
Admin
Summary: Bad translation is bad. But also: machine translation is hard.
Admin
That's actually really sweet.
Admin
Yes, it is! Continuously keeping in mind the emotional impact of your actions or words (or even nonverbal cues) on the person in front is an inseparable part of the Japanese culture. The rest of us could learn a lot from it! :)
Admin
On the last one: it's not that the laptop is going to charge quickly, it just knows it's not going to charge very much. "Fully charged" is probably about 8% - time to get a new battery.
Admin
It look like the spammers are back at it. Can some one clean out this crap? My comment can also go when the weird junk is gone.
Admin
"Pedantic Thought Cortex (PTC)"
LOVE it! I am totally stealing that.
Admin
the title of this page reminded me of a VERY old "Super-Friends" cartoon, called "the day the world turned upside down". the episode involved a super-computer called "The Geek" that could run EVERYTHING in the world, "so nobody would have to work again." so what went wrong? a MOUSE got inside it and flipped switches and pressed buttons at random!