I wouldn't say it's a complete non-story. I was affected for I guess about an hour trying to figure out WTF was wrong with Steam and/or my new Fallout NV DVD.

After installing Fallout NV from a physical DVD, activating on Steam and even pulling down the latest updates I could not launch the game. Fallout started up to the launch screen, but only gave me an option to Install (which I had just done, wtf?). Other Steam games wouldn't launch either, so I proceed to go down the trouble shooting rabbit-hole - blowing away blob files, re-installing client, rebooting, etc. Everything about Steam worked (websites, client installing/updating, etc) except for actually launching the client to login/play a game. None of the sites that track Steam uptime seemed to indicated any issues. Nothing on Steam Twitter feeds either.

Looked at my kid's PC (which already had the Steam client running) and launched games without issue. Logged out and then could not log back in. Verified it wasn't my Internet (hopped on neighbors wi-fi, different ISP), etc etc. Finally decided it was truly a Steam server side issue instead of something I had done on my PC. Just bad timing with my new game install apparently.

TL;DR

Steam had issues that affected me. Was annoying. I could have gone through the hoops to get offline mode going (there was no revert to offline mode as you suggested), but instead went back downstairs and worked on some x-mas stuff with my kid instead of taking the break I wanted to at the time. Checked back in an hour or so later and all was good again.

Not my custom, but yes, been outside of my country a lot (relatively speaking of course). Whether or not most of Europe practices that custom is irrelevant. The fact that some parts of Europe do eat late dinners prove that "10:30pm is hardly dinnertime for a normal person." is a stupid and incorrect statement. I realize you are most likely not the same AC, but whatever.

Umm. Been to Europe much? A late dinner is very common, especially in the summer.

And now I need to find my copy of Quake and crank it up again. Ahh, the memories....

Dealing with WINE is less of a chore vs dual booting vs running a VM?

A serious question - what is the advantage of running Linux as a host OS (bare metal) vs a guest (virtual machine) OS? Granted you might lose a few CPU cycles and a GB or so of RAM, but with a somewhat current system does that matter? I'd rather run Windows and play the latest/greatest games and run whatever flavor of Linux as a VM for whatever Linux stuff one might do. I would think this would be sufficient in most cases unless there was a specific reason to run Linux bare metal (or someone who didn't care to run Windows games in native mode).

So why are you depriving yourself of these good games?

I'm guessing this is how your particular Win7 x64 is configured as my anecdotal evidence is much different than yours. I run Win7 as my host OS (fairly clean install, only drivers/software geared for gaming) and a VM for work (work junk, office, outlook, cygwin, dropbox, etc). I do this on both my work laptop and home desktop. The only difference between the two is my laptop has an SSD for boot host/guest and mech for data and my desktop is all SSD. I notice no measurable boot time difference among all systems (aside from POST related items); Win 7 is up and running and usable in less than 30 seconds without the pegged HD issues you are seeing. As soon as I log in I can crank up Outlook, Chrome, etc nearly instantly. I cannot understand how this could be minutes in your scenario. Even before SSDs it was never like that, unless (as someone else asked) you had a metric ton of startup software, malware, etc.

Just another opinion....

That's interesting. I've never heard Thanksgiving Day referenced in that manner. I've always known it the be the 4th Thursday in November.

I picked one up this morning at list price without having to wait in line or run all over the county. A 5 minute visit to my local GameStop a few weeks ago to put my name on the waiting list was all I had to do.

Really? I guess I'm hanging out with the wrong nerds...

I won't argue those points as they have a completely different cultural attitude than almost every other country when it comes to technology/gadgets/etc. What are the reasons they are standard issue for first graders? I'm guessing they have reasons that might not apply to other countries. North Korea as a neighbor might be one of them.

http://www.amazon.com/Firefly-kids-phone-card-charger/dp/B0040T9E68

http://www.mobiledia.com/phones/fireflymobile/firefly.html

ATT/Cingular has had one since 2005.

You must work in a small shop. The appliance has many limitations and is not ready for enterprise use.

http://www.thefirstrow.eu/ will take care of your sports needs.

Yup. This is like The Blair Witch Project, but 100x worse. No thanks...