He probably got something more like a Staples gift card.

No, PhysX is (and was) only ever hardware accelerated on Nvidia/Ageia hardware. Before you could add a second (Nvidia) card to your system and use it for PhysX. All this announcement is saying is that people using AMD as their primary GPU can no longer do this.

It's been awhile but IIRC the Endor troopers were wearing different armor.

http://www.google.com/search?q=strongly+typed+language

Crashes usually turn into remote exploits.

I don't think it's really that big of a problem. First of all if you have passwords written down in your wallet and someone steals it, they're still going to have to figure out your username (unless you wrote that) and what password is for what service, what bank you use, etc. In the meantime you could just change all of your passwords to be safe.

Of course this wouldn't work if you didn't know your wallet was stolen (if they copied your passwords and returned it before you knew it was missing), but it seems like that would be a pretty targeted attack...

There's nothing wrong with ATMs running Windows, OS/2 or whatever as long as it's set up right. An ATM should NEVER be hooked up directly to the outside network (no matter what OS it is running), and should always be physically secured (in a very visible location, watched by cameras 24/7, etc).

I honestly read the summary title as "Microsoft Hardware Demos Pleasure Sensitive Keyboard".

Needless to say I was very disturbed...

What version of Firefox are you using?

I've experienced memory leaks in the past, but recently I've been using Firefox 3.5 (on Fedora 11) and Firefox doesn't get over a few hundred megabytes. That's with 7-8 tabs running for several weeks straight.

Was just about to recommend this. It's a fun game, it's free, and it runs on just about anything.

Last time I checked you only lose 3d acceleration if you want to use multiple unrelated cards to drive multiple monitors (something Windows doesn't even support AFAIK).

Configuring multiple monitors is just a few clicks (or commands) away in Linux as well.

Read the last page. 500$.

I agree with you that a lot of projects could use better or more descriptive names, but you've gotta realize that 99% of the time these are people's personal projects that they are either working on because it has some utility to them or because they just want to get experience.

Most projects do have some kind of step-by-step guide to get a build environment setup. If you have trouble, post to the project's mailing list or forum.

You're deliberately missing the point with a straw man argument.

Regardless of what external libraries are available, the Mono Project advertises support for WinForms, ADO.NET, etc, also claiming that it is a cross platform, open source .NET development framework, so you and I should as developers should be free to make use of them.

All the OP said was that right now if you want to play it safe with patents you pretty much have to avoid using most of the features that probably drew you to Mono/.NET in the first place.

Definitely agree. Also if you can't come up with your own ideas (it's hard) there are tons of inactive OSS projects that you could pickup; just search around on SourceForge for something that interests you.