How can you waste your cash on something that will never be released?  Surely no one is going to accept any "three year pre order" lark?  
 Oh and I definitely agree we should all get rid of this compiler malarky.  Including the developers, especially the developers!  We should just stick to perl / bash / python scripting and pray to god no one loses the interpreters.  

  (Hmmm, Doom 3 written as a python script, drool over the processor size I'll need to run it...)  Oh wait.  We should just go back to assembly!
(Maybe you need to qualify / quantify your statements a bit...)
I've never had any problems with compiling.  And I've certainly never had any problems with apt-get .  (altough this is with Debian not Red Hat so your mileage has varied as you say...)
On a more personal note, does anyone else get thoughts about how much cooler CS would be if someone ported perl to the half life console?  
