According to the article, MS have an option to match a hypothetical offer from somebody else for Nvidia.

They may not want to match such an offer should it ever arise.

Yes, in the last five years, Samsung have been the drive of choice for the discerning gentleman. Now? I don't know where to turn.

No, the ones who allowed the development or purchase of IE-only apps are incompetent and don't deserve more money. They placed the organization in a very poor strategic position.

The same way America has turned into a 3rd world country? Oooh, scary.

On reading this, was looking forward to snagging a copy if it is open source, as the current Windows open source text editor I use is not entirely to my liking.

No dice. This company has an interesting variation on open source:

"... To discourage piracy, a tiny but essential core (also containing the licensing code), will be kept private (at least until users reach a certain rating)."

Well, they got some free publicity on Slashdot at any rate.

Anyone recommend a good Windows editor? Not into vi/emacs style editors. Wordpad/Notepad do as a last resort, but are not designed for technical uses.

I use an IDE for code, but frequently need a programmers editor for data files or when using PCs other than my development box.

Textpad is shareware and may not have been bought at some companies. I found its Unicode support problematic in the past. Handles massive data files well though.

Notepad++ is free &open source, but a little rough around the edges in usability. Like many IDEs, it adds code folding to XML documents. When XML files are very large this is a problem due to the number of widgets that get created to support minimizing and maximizing each parent node. Notepad++ managed to crash the video drivers on one PC here, which is almost perversely impressive.

Applets, you have heard of them?

When you install / upgrade Java, you get support for the latest Java runtime in your browser to run those applets. It has been thus since the olden times (the mid-nineties when Java was launched).

From the description, this is just a performance optimization so the runtime is loaded and you don't get a delay when there is an applet in the page.

Whether I am right about what the plugin does or not, installing / upgrading the Java Runtime Edition has always affected your browser.

I am not a German or a German-speaker, but most of in the English speaking world have seen "von" in front of a German surname. It seems similar to the suffix "son" in English/Scandinavian surnames or the prefix "Mac" in Irish/Scottish surnames.

However "von und zu" translates as "from and to". Does this refer to some inbreeding problem in the German aristocracy? :-)