"Citation needed. I can't remember the last 'apt-get upgrade' that broke something on my system."

Recently I thought I would try the latest Qt IDE on Ubuntu 12.04. Did the apt installs and tried to use the IDE, got strange error messages and a crashing app just from trying to access some of the tools. After going thru all the obvious steps and finally ending up on the forums with the appropriate authorities on Qt, I get advised that I should uninstall the Ubuntu packages and download and build it all myself, cos the Ubuntu packages are usually borked.

And this after I had just spent several months trying to convince myself that Linux had come a long way towards being a reliable click-and-go desktop solution.
Not a hater, I have been used Linux for fun and a little programming for well over 10 years, I just feel disappointed every time I have to sift thru the crap and read the discussions across several eras of a library or app's evolution to find the solution to a problem, cos I relied on the packaging system of the distro I am using at the time. Its fun and all, at first, but eventually gets tedious. Perhaps I should ditch Ubuntu, but its not like this is the ONLY distro I ever encountered this with.

Too true. The only real statistical proof would come from getting a dowser to flag an equal number of places that DO have water and DO NOT have water below them. If the statistical anomaly is larger than random for both sets of identified locations, then maybe we would have to start believing in something.

Because God knows you will only mod up atheist-oriented posts?

I loved the old-school hard core action in sauerbraten but got put off badly when people started using every hack imaginable, including running around 10 times faster than everybody else while their aim bot shot everybody in range.
This was when I realized that open source multiplayer games are only any fun in closed environments or when there was some effort put into validating that each client was running the same unmodified code.

Yes, I would also like to see some more developers and support people get behind Desura for Linux and get it working properly across multiple Linux distros.
Sadly, last time I looked, Desura had Linux game installers that fail, mainly due to library dependencies, while the Ubuntu software center can install the same game properly. There was no clear indication of which specific distro it was expected to be compliant with.

It would be way cool to have the one app responsible for finding, installing, launching, and also for browsing and adding mods to all those games which can run on Linux, plus hooking in community and support forums. I believe it has a valuable niche for all those games and mods which fall outside of the Steam-for-Linux catalog.

Thanx, that sounds like a likely contender. Last time I was at MOTAT they only had a scale model of a capsule.
Still, nice to know what it was.

Hard to remember exactly what I saw back then, but pics I have found rule out an Apollo, it could have been a Gemini or Mercury module.
Its only curiosity, but I won't be getting close to a space museum in the near future to see anything like it.

Thanx man, but I'm pretty sure I have tried searching on all the terms I could think of.
There does not seem to be a lot of history recorded on what space capsules they hauled over here to New Zealand to show us.

When I was very young a capsule was brought here on tour (New Zealand, sometime around 1970-ish), but I cannot find out which one it was. I assume it was an Apollo re-entry capsule. Would somebody have a history of such things?

If I was registering a new company, the last thing I would want to give my company or servers etc is a name that already pulls up millions of pages in a simple web search.
It just sounds like somebody was clueless and doesn't even know how people find services on the internet these days.

Realistically a large IO bound task is something you hand off to low-end process to get it done as fast as ppssible. Would you over-ride the O/S to transfer that 10gigs in 100 meg blocks and report each bit back to your high level UI so that th progress bar is accurate?

"...I found that JS became much more predictable once I learned a little more about what was going on..."

I am sure many of us have inherited code written more on a superstition than an understanding of JavaScript. When badly written it can be hard as all hell to trace the errors. However when it is understood and used correctly it can be very powerful while providing an elegant and often very short-and-simple solution to what you are trying to achieve. I read a book recently, JavaScript The Good Parts [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596517748.do] which, while it was a little dry to read, did a damned good job of pointing out the misconceptions and wrong ways to use types and classes, and pointed out the correct patterns for using the power of JavaScript correctly.

That book, combined with the introduction of jQuery, gave JavaScript a whole new level of fun, at least for me. Of course on the down side it made me want to rip thru years of old code (which I have not been allowed to replace/delete yet) and rewrite it in a fraction of the amount of JavaScript code that is currently used to badly achieve its purpose.

I have to wonder if those who decry JavaScript the most have the least understanding of how to use it properly - altho I have to admit, it was never intuitively apparent exactly what were the right and wrong ways of using types, functions, classes and closures.

I had a dead drive with a relatives photos on it once, and came across an identical drive a while later. The PCB connections and crimp-ons looked far too fiddly for my level of tool experience, but on close examination I found one surface-mount capacitor appeared to have lost its magic black smoke.
With a fine soldering tip and some patience I managed to remove the matching capacitor from the working drive and stick it to the dead one. This worked long enough to retrieve the personal files off the drive. I was not prepared to use the drive for any longer than that tho.

Appreciate your right to an anonymous moan about Steam, but have you really had a lot of experience of how things used to be?

In the past I remember many horrible experiences while attempting to install games from a handful of CDs or from 2 or 3 DVDs released by a publisher who had their own idea of how complicated and needlessly annoying the process should be, and then the hassle of finding and inserting the DVD to be allowed to start up a game, every time I wanted to play it.

All I know is a lot of problems went away once I started using Steam, and it has never been easier from the point of deciding to buy a game to the point of kicking of a game session.

I have not noticed any of the mentioned crashy and buggy stuff, altho I have not purchased EVERY game they publish. My guess is bad graphics hardware or drivers. Invasive? what? the steam client that you can configure to start up automatically or not? What is invasive?

Yes, use SourceForge. I put my open source project up on there and my users have BOTH posted a bug report on the project. Easy to find whenever I need to think about maybe checking it out to fix it.