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* Posts by Dead Parrot

45 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2016

Microsoft redfaced after Bing translation cockup enrages Saudis

Dead Parrot
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Re: And?

Indeed. This the closest Bing's got to an accurate translation in years.

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Huawei's pricey new Honor goes upmarket. Bold move when prices are sliding

Dead Parrot

I quite like Huawei...

.. my current mobe is one of them, because I needed one in a hurry, brought one as a stop-gap, and 14 months later I'm still looking for a 'proper' phone that's better... I resell TP-Link routers for the same reason

I wish the buggers could spell "Honour" though. Seriously, guys, if you want to give your phone an English name, at least fire up the fucking dictionary and pick a word we all spell the same. "Trumpwomble" might be worth a go.

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Same job, different place: US salaries top DevOps pay packet poll

Dead Parrot
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Re: Union Time

Do the Technical Workers And Tinkerers have agreed Fellowship Liabilities And Procedures yet? 'Cos I'll come right away.

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Dead Parrot

Poor buggers

I get US$100k for tooling around rural NZ pulling dead rats out of printers and bitchslapping W10 installs. (The nice thing about working on the coalface: You get the pick of the coal)

Look at your cubicle

Now look at my office: http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6127/6035015560_556deb339e_b.jpg

Now look at your cubicle

Now look at my office: https://static2.stuff.co.nz/1396314570/640/9891640.jpg

It's OK to cry.

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'Neural network' spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 silicon brain

Dead Parrot

Flicking through the comments....

...and I see people are as spectacularly misinformed about AI as they were 20 years ago.

This is progress, is it?

Jesus H Christ: give me my floppy disks back, I've got assembly to code.

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Irritable Cisco kicks Nutanix out of partner program

Dead Parrot
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Re: A Question...

So, Microsoft, but with cables...

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Dead Parrot

A Question...

Is Cisco still Switchzilla? Or is Huawei the new Chipzilla?

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False Northern Lights alert issued to entire UK because of a lawnmower

Dead Parrot
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Re: "what had caused the huge anomaly"

Also 1989. Too old for you? #greybeard #Z80assembly

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Dead Parrot

Sometimes, the cutting edge...

...is the cutting edge on a lawnmower blade. Eh, science isn't an exact science: If you don't like it, go see what Kim Kardashian is doing today.

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Google broke its own cloud by doing two updates at once

Dead Parrot

Cloud Computing...

...All the downtime of a datacentre, but none of the ability to control it.

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Angler hooks German's todger at nudist lake

Dead Parrot

"cycled home before he drove to the hospital"...?

Sir,

It has come to my attention that you have at least three testicles.

Please excuse me while I worship you.

Kind Regards,

Dead Parrot

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Stop lights, sunsets, junctions are tough work for Google's robo-cars

Dead Parrot

Your processors are fine

But your algorithms are wank, and you can't write assembly. Just saying....

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Nuclear fallout shelter becomes cloud storage bunker

Dead Parrot

So, these are the tunnels...

...That the French shut down because they were worried the entire city of Paris would collapse into them because of geological instability? Yeah, I want my data stored there.

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Google Fuchsia OS eyes non-Linux things

Dead Parrot

Horses for courses

Linux is - or was, at least - a philosophy as much at was an OS: "Here's a problem, how do we fix it?" It shouldn't matter if the OS base is Linux, OSX, Windows 10 (LOL), or the ghost of Symbian.

Computers work for *us*, don't they?

I have no idea if Fuchsia will make the grade. But kudos to Google for having a go, we have nothing to fear from originality (unless you work for MS) .

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Microsoft buys Genee's lamp, tips it into Office 365, smashes lamp

Dead Parrot
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Re: Hmmm

Soon they'll be a new intelligent assistant to do just that for you - sending the meeting requests to Genee, the alarm calls to Cortana, the weird maths to Wolfram Alpha, and the murder of your ex's new lover to the blood-soaked ghost of Clippy.

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Microsoft can't tell North from South on Bing Maps

Dead Parrot

I can't figure out if it's been wrong for 5+ years and we've only just noticed (possible, if no bugger uses it) or if it was right and they decided to move it anyway. Seriously, why the fuck would you do that?

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Dead Parrot
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Re: Sod the story.

Probably asked Cortana for a wake-up call on Monday morning. It was bound to fuck up.

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Windows 10 Anniversary Update completely borks USB webcams. Yay.

Dead Parrot
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Re: Optional behaviour

"The OS' job is to help the user utilize the hardware in the most productive way achievable."

No, the OS's job is to do what it's damn well told. If I fire up a program that wants H.264 video, I want the OS to go and get H.264 video, not try to give me a different format or a game of sodding Candy Crush.

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Dead Parrot
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Re: Satisfaction?

I suspect they just asked the die-hard fanbois in the Insider program, which is an echo chamber for MS marketing.

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Dead Parrot
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Re: MS is in decline, but Linux will never replace it

May I gently suggest you are in the wrong line of work? My daughter managed an install of Manjaro when she was eight years old.

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Dead Parrot
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Pint

Re: Totally unrelated. (almost)

I hereby nominate "Dungball Tuesday" as the official name for the monthly patch release date (depending on the day, naturally).

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Dead Parrot
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Linux

Re: Also my first thought...

Alive and well and living with the penguins, actually... :)

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Apple kills its Stores

Dead Parrot
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Not the one a couple of miles west, though. That would be asking for trouble.

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Nobody wants Lyft

Dead Parrot
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Re: Nobody wants Lyft

Plus, if they've got a billion in the bank, they're presumably asking for a least a billion to buy them out, which is quite a lot for an app nobody uses even if it comes with the cash. The likes of Google or Facebook could slap an equivalent app together in-house with minimal effort.

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New science: Pathetic humans can't bring themselves to fire lovable klutz-bots

Dead Parrot
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Re: Unexpected Item...

The thing that's so annoying about that is the cheery tone of voice it's said in. If it sounded disappointed or confused, I would be less inclined to punch the electronic bint in the screen.

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Microsoft promises free terrible coffee every month you use Edge

Dead Parrot
FAIL

I've seen some desperate stuff over the years...

...but that's so pathetic I almost feel sorry for them. Almost.

"Please be my friend! I'll pay you! Pleeeeese...?"

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If this headline was a security warning, 90% of you would ignore it

Dead Parrot

I blame Vista's UAC

*booboop*

"Windows needs you permission to continue: Move mouse pointer to the left (Continue)(Cancel)"

Just hitting 'Yeah, whatever' becomes the norm.

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Intel teases geeks with 2017 AI hyper-chip: Xeon Phi Knights Mill

Dead Parrot
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Coat

Re: Eh?

Well, I'd agree that a lot has changed. But next time you're killing a few hours waiting for a Windows update, ask yourself if it has all changed for the better, or if there might have been something useful in those old notes.

Mine's the one with a copy of Harel's 'Algorithmics' in the pocket.

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Dead Parrot
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Eh?

I was tinkering with neural networks long enough ago to be coding the bloody things on a VT-100, back when Inmos transputers were still hot stuff (I'm fucking ancient). The tricky part has always been finding viable applications that fit within the processing power you can chuck at it...

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Light at the end of Intel's Silicon Photonics: 100Gbps network tech finally shipping, sorta

Dead Parrot
Terminator

Computers with frickin' lasers!?

Time to buy a dog & a shotgun and head to the desert.

(and the same day that the Knights Mill AI chips are announced, no less. Intel, we need to talk...)

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Microsoft to overhaul Windows 10 UI – with a 3D Holographic Shell

Dead Parrot

Gorilla arm, now with added motion sickness!

yeah, no. Fuck off.

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LinkedIn sues 100 information scrapers after technical safeguard fail

Dead Parrot
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Devil

Well, that *was* the purpose. Now the purpose is to provide profiling data to the advertising department, and they don't want anyone else getting that - or showing up the inevitable security holes.

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Nokia taps former Rovio man Rantala to market relaunch

Dead Parrot
Mushroom

Maybe they're going into the arms business...

A Nokia 3310 fired from a catapult could do some serious damage.

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Microsoft: Why we had to tie Azure Stack to boxen we picked for you

Dead Parrot

Building a walled garden, one brick at a time.

The question is, which side of the wall will people wind up on?

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'Daddy, what's a Blu-ray disc?'

Dead Parrot
Facepalm

Are we sinking into a kB/Kib-like mess?

So when you buy a TV, you have to peer at the specs to find out if they are kilopixels or kibipixels? Stuff that.

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Accountancy software firm Sage breached in apparent insider attack

Dead Parrot

A precient quote from a couple of weeks ago:

"Sage is looking to change 500 years of accounting," exclaimed chief executive Stephen Kelly [...] "There is no company that integrates payroll, time and billing, general ledger, CRM the way we do". (from www.accountingweb.com)

Well, that certainly seems to be true. Everybody else generally hangs on to their customer's accounting data.

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Native Skype for Windows Phone walked behind shed, shot heard

Dead Parrot
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Re: I've been dragging my heels over Skype...

A native Linux client is my main requirement as well. I've pulled down the Portable x64 one for testing (which fires up OK), and Parrot Snr is going to grab the Windows client so I have someone to talk to: Watch this space...

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Dead Parrot
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Re: I've been dragging my heels over Skype...

Eh? Free for personal use and a free trial for the business version seems fair to me, especially since it seems to be cheaper than Skype for Business.

(Edit: Plus, it looks like it works on older platforms. And there's a Linux version that hasn't just been shot in the face)

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Dead Parrot

I've been dragging my heels over Skype...

...but it's time to move on, I think. Has anyone looked at Brosix? It seems to tick all the boxes.

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Adblock Plus blocks Facebook block of Adblock Plus block of Facebook block of Adblock Plus block of Facebook ads

Dead Parrot

I'm grabbing some popcorn

You guys want some?

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Nobody expects... a surprise haemorrhoid operation

Dead Parrot

I want to know...

...about the other guy. Who went in to get his piles sorted, and won a free baby.

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Adblock Plus blocks Facebook's ad-blocker buster: It's a block party!

Dead Parrot
WTF?

Err, what?

"ad blocking companies are punishing people on Facebook"...

OK, I'm going to need a lot of beer before *that* makes sense.

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Your mission, should you accept it, is to use cheap VMs before they self-destruct

Dead Parrot

Sounds perfect...

...for brute-forcing the NTLM hashes Windows boxes are throwing around like confetti. I can see a market here...

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London's Met Police has missed the Windows XP escape deadline

Dead Parrot
Meh

Well, the wheels just fell of my W10AU box so IMHO, there are *worse* things they could be doing with IT...

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Reminder: IE, Edge, Outlook etc still cough up your Windows, VPN credentials to strangers

Dead Parrot
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Re: Ouch

>...the hash can be cracked in a couple of hours now...

Well, that depends how strong the password is. I think most home users use passwords around the 6-7 letter mark (and re-use it for everything): Even with numbers in the mix that's only ever been a few minutes work with a decent NTLM rainbow table, and they've been around for 15+ years. Hell, just knowing that 8846F7EAEE8FB117AD06BDD830B7586C is the NTLM hash for "password" will open a few doors. This is why we have salt (but not at Redmond).

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