Most likely incompetence, yes. I use grub as my bootloader, and had no real issues installing or upgrading Win7. I assume I have SP1, given that I tend to apply most updates immediately.

PuTTY is a better SSH client, at least on Windows, than Cygwin's SSH.

YTMND launched in 2001. LZW expired in 2003.

Fair, though I think the same applies to most options here. I mean, HTML5 at all is a non-starter if they insist on running IE on XP, for example. Somehow, I think a codec provided by Google is one of the safer things you could possibly ask an admin to install -- certainly safer than, say, Flash.

Citation? Wikipedia lists Symbian and WP7, but not Android, iOS, or any game consoles. The only reference I could find for Silverlight on Android was something about the Moonlight team doing it, and if it's just Moonlight, then there's exactly as much Silverlight support for Android as there is for Linux -- which means none of the DRM.

Are you sure that's not just a native Netflix client for these platforms?

A "fileserver" needs Internet about as much as your refrigerator does? Really? I'd think you'd at least have it on a network, or are you suggesting it's only serving other non-Internet-connected machines? Or do you only deliver stuff via sneakernet?

Does it have software?

FWIW, I think Chrome on Linux is still an option for the moment.

Wait, what?

Ok, first off, PNG isn't a replacement for GIF in that it doesn't support animation -- there are several competing standards for PNG animation, none universally supported. There's a lot of places where PNG beats GIF, but GIF is still around, and for good reason.

Second, WebM is already supported in IE, just not out of the box. This isn't even a legal grey area -- you can just download it. There's a framework already in place for this, too -- not like the kind of kludges you'd need to get PNG working on IE6, they actually have pluggable codecs. The only issue would be getting them to ship it by default, and it's possible they'll fight that, but it's also possible PC manufacturers will preload it anyway.

I hope they're not online...

...looks like they are.

Um. No kernel upgrades? Not even vulnerability patches?

Do you have any idea how bad an idea this is?

True enough, but I didn't buy Ubuntu, and I did buy Windows, directly or otherwise.

My current laptop came with Ubuntu with the Fluendo codec pack. I don't think I got a free upgrade for that, either.

I'm not seeing any Rails-specific flaws there. If it's the '..' stuff, that really looks like the webserver that's the issue here.

Oh, and it does scale, it just scales horizontally. But maybe you missed the part where this particular site was never intended to scale, and doesn't need to. Or the part where it was done in 15 hours -- that's certainly a reasonable amount of time even if this is only a prototype, so that the entire thing needs to be rewritten from scratch later.

I'm also a bit curious as to why that AC would use this vulnerability to antagonize Rails, rather than submit it to the relevant projects.

That's cool, and also practical, but also frightens me a bit. While I don't know of a better way of doing it, that is effectively training people that the way to code something is to find something similar and copy/paste.

About the only way I can think of also teaching DRY in a game is by giving the player a severely restricted environment either in terms of amount of source code or memory usage.

I suppose, but then, there's also more error using mouse-aiming and WASD rather than auto-aim on a rail. Which one is more fun? I'm not even sure that I'm slower when I play without any sort of auto-aiming than when I have the game effectively cheat for me.

It's JavaScript. You might need to learn a library, but presumably it'd teach you.

Here's one. Here's another.

Even so...

I've definitely run into bots like this in IRC who were somewhat spam-focused, and identified them within a few minutes. Reading some of the transcripts, it looks like there are people who never figured it out.

I suppose it's possible that these guys had no idea that bots exist?

I don't think that's the case.

First, it's not English specifically. It's being able to communicate your ideas well. There are plenty of native English speakers who have a harder time being understood than countries where they don't speak English. (Though for what it's worth, English is one of the two official languages of India.)

Also, even the work that's going to India, a lot of it is stuff like call centers, and the better ones do require English. Not just English, but heavily americanized English.

It's also worth mentioning, there are still plenty of jobs which are here specifically because communication is valued. Maybe you hire a consultant in India, but your core team is still here. And even when you hire that consultant, you probably want someone here to act as a go-between, or at least to talk to management about it.

The last job I had was working for a startup. I started out doing HD-DVD development with them, and I realized we were one of very few companies actually doing this, and one of exactly two who did anywhere near a decent job. But we were in the US, and our headquarters were officially in California (along with our CEO), while the other company was in Germany. Guess which one the studios wanted to talk to?

Sorry, did you just compare doing actual schoolwork with collecting welfare? Maybe I missed the part where collecting a welfare check requires writing papers or understanding advanced mathematics.