Houston we have a problem!

Okay, let me start this post with a confession: I'm a gamer. Here we go, now it's out.

I think many people don't like it Steam, but I've learned to hate it. Why is that, you may ask? You shall have your answer.

I've decided that I want to try out "Empire: Total War", and the demo was available through Steam. Having played some games that require Steam, I didn't think it'd be a problem, but I was about to be proved wrong. I started downloading, it wasn't fast, but okay. Then, the first time at 40%, the download began to stall. Pause - Resume, nope, didn't fix it. That's why I closed Steam. When I tried reopening it told me it was already open - so I killed the process and the download happily continued. The same thing happened again at 80%, I did my closing and reopening. Then, what I saw was horrible. The download got back to 0%. I gave up for this day.

Today, fresh and full with energy I tried again. In the beginning it went pretty slow, but after trying through many mirrors, I eventually found one that was acceptable (~300KB/s). For those who may be interested, it was the one in the UK. Today I downloaded the demo - there were some problems, but I eventually succeeded. The game's pretty okay, but with my system I have to play it on very low graphics settings.

I guess they have a lot of work to do stabilizing Steam and the servers, as I think there's no excuse for a commercial service that earns money by distributing software to be slower than university servers for open-source Linux distributions.

But another thing happened today. While I was downloading, my mouse began to break. Windows made that "device attached" and "device detached" sounds really often. In classic Windows manner, I disconnected both the mouse and the keyboard and reconnected them. This was a mistake, as Windows demanded me to accept to install the mouse driver because it doesn't comply with some tests. The bad thing was that it did that before installing the keyboard driver, and apparently this question blocked the whole device installation process for all the devices. I had to reboot.

Now comes the weird part. When I tried rebooting, my BIOS hang. I thought resetting it might help (through the jumper on the mainboard), but it did not. When I disconnected my mouse it went fine. So I booted my Arch, connected it. It did not work. This is what dmesg says about it:

usb 3-2.2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 8
usb 3-2.2: device descriptor read/64, error 8
usb 3-2.2: device descriptor read/64, error 8
usb 3-2.2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 9
usb 3-2.2: device descriptor read/64, error 8
usb 3-2.2: device descriptor read/64, error 8
usb 3-2.2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 10
usb 3-2.2: device descriptor read/8, error -71
usb 3-2.2: device descriptor read/8, error -71
usb 3-2.2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 11
usb 3-2.2: device descriptor read/8, error -71
usb 3-2.2: device descriptor read/8, error -71
hub 3-2:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 2

Any suggestions of what might be wrong with it are very appreciated. Another mouse works just fine, so I guess my mouse is just broken.

In other news, I had to delete some Java programs in my Archlinux in order to update all packages as there is some confusion that some appear to want openjdk and some jdk and jre.

To sum this post up in one sentence: Everything out there is broken!