Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

"Your "miserable existence of food queues and no prospects" rhetoric suggests to me that you are interested in beating some political drum. Whether a product is unavailable (as tends to be the case for poorer people in socialist societies) or unaffordable (as tends to be the case for poorer people in capitalist societies) is immaterial to the person who needs it."

Whatever. Next time you see 50 metre long food queue at a supermarket that has next to nothing on the shelves in a western country then maybe we can have this debate.

I've been writing Xlib code for 15 years pal. Compared to other APIs its a piece of piss.

"he USSR in particular did not "sink" until Gorbachev,"

Heh, funny. The USSR had been virtually bankrupt since the 70s and spent a huge amount of what GDP it had on defense ti try and keep up with the USA. It still failed plus it plunged a hundred million people into a miserable existence of food queues and no prospects.

But you keep on dreaming the communist dream if you like. Whatever makes you happy.

X might be old but its not particularly arcane and neither is OpenGL.

Its just an eye candy window manager core for X Windows and is totally unnecessary and wastes cycles.

Most people when they're young are rather tribal about their musical tastes as they see it as significantly defining them, no only as who they are but as who they're not.

However once we grow up and become full rounded adults then music simply becomes another form of media entertainment and we no longer limit ourselves to metal/rap/r&b/whatever but listen to anything we like.

And thats a good thing.

So thats why he was so pissed off. His parents wanted him to be a good klingon lawyer but he ended up wearing cheap clothes and being the foil for a bunch of ungrateful mensch!

Quite. Its just the middle class wannabe version of a graffiti tag, with about the same amount of talent required and having the same level of intellectual gravitas.

It really is just an alphabet soup of acronyms with security systems. No wonder the average person just doesn't bother.

Nice try at some conflation there but no cigar. Sports and music are meant to be watched as well as played. Watching someone typing into a text editor has never been and never will be a recreational activity. The musical equivalent would be watching the composer write down the notes or for sport watching Roger Federer do practice shots over the net for 3 hours.

"and I can assure you it has several thousand viewers when it's on, so there's your proof that there is an audience for people writing code."

All that proves is there are thousands of people with absolutely no life, not that watching the activity itself has any merit. You can put any old shit online and some bunch of mugs will watch it.

.... is solving problems yourself and creating a working piece of code at the end along with a sense of achievement and self satisfaction.

The fun of coding is NOT the physical typing in of the code text along with edits, deletions what whatnots. So quite why anyone would want to watch someone *else* do it frankly is beyond me. If you want to learn to code in language XYZ go buy a book or look at some example code online then most importantly try it yourself.

"* manually indents his code"

To be fair, I find manually indenting code a lot less frustrating than auto indent because the number of times when I *don't* want auto indent to work but it does anyway and I have to manually undo it just makes it more hassle than its worth.

Agree with you on everything else though.

... that 4.0 really is a big step up from 3.19 or is it simply the same amount of new stuff that would have gone into a 3.20 release anyway? Not that it really matters, Linux version numbers make about as much sense as Firefox ones these days.

Unless the "winners" are completely stupid - but then this is reality TV so who knows - they'll probably notice the complete lack of G's at "take off" and the persistence of gravity once they're supposedly in space.

Personally I think 99.9% of the contestants know full well the whole thing is dubious but are going along with it simply to get the experience of astronaut training and have a bit of fun knowing the nearest they'll ever get to space is on the 747 on the way to the training centre.

Not really. Web "developers" don't have to understand TCP/IP to do their thing. I imagine this will be similar. There'll be a basic set of functionality that can be used by Mr Below Average coder to produce ok results.