At some point, we're going to have to accept that the devices we carry around with us aren't really "phones" anymore. They're powerful computers that happen to be able to make the odd phone call in between accessing the internet, playing games, taking photos and storing data.

That established, I'm pretty happy with my iPhone 4s. The glaring omission is turn-by-turn directions -- I consider it a public safety issue when I see people looking down at their phones trying to figure out what exit they need to get off on.

I work for a large company, large enough that I see people I don't recognize on our campus every single day.

Two years ago this weekend (Presidents Day, which is a holiday at our office) we had an enterprising thief roll a cart around our office around 5 PM on Friday, loading up laptops. Of course, by then most everyone had skipped out for their long weekend, but if someone was in the office he'd tell them it was for the "weekend virus scanner upgrade", promising people that their machines would be back on Tuesday morning.

I don't know this part for a fact -- our security people and management don't talk about this at all -- but I've heard it enough that I believe it: When someone objected to having their laptop taken, he'd act irritated and ask why they "didn't reply to any of the emails about the upgrade" and then make a show of updating his clipboard -- he'd collect the asset tag from the machine, office number and actually get the person to sign on the line.

I have no idea how many machines he made off with, but it was enough that we all had to suffer new BS security procedures for a year afterword. I would imagine that you could do this at pretty much any big office and get away with it.

Sorry. I didn't see this sooner. I've helped on the Groups / Desura / Forum / Application Linux with all sorts of issues involving library compatibility issues. The problem is real. I've told countless people how to use tools like ldd and readelf to figure out what is wrong. What wasn't bundled. What was bundled and should not have been. I've seen several updates to game to rebundle in different versions of libraries so games will run. I've help find out what was missing in $LD_LIBRARY_PATH at different times. And people still report problems.

It has gotten better on the forums as of late, but it's a recurring theme. And I'm not blaming Desura. I appreciate the work you and others there have done. (I'm assuming you're the Protekor we all know and love.) I want Desura on Linux (and in general) to succeed. I'm not blaming the developers either. It's just a lot easier to do a 'Release' build for windows and have it work on all supported versions than it is to do anything similar for Linux. I wish that would change. I'd help! But it will take a commitment on the part of the distributions.

I'm currently running the "State of Mind" demo from 2000 (compiled against glibc2.0) on Ubuntu 10.04. But 10.04 isn't new, and I had to gut pulseaudio to get sound that didn't stutter and ultimately die in less then a minute of game play.

Desura is the perfect place to prove that Linux is a pain to support. Games are failing because of incompatible versions of system libraries. I manifests as sound issues, 3D issues, segfaults and links errors.

It might be possible to compile something that will work on several releases of several distributions, but the means of doing so is not easy, well documented or supported. You want your program to run on a given release of a given distribution. The supported solution is to compile for that release of that distribution.