As a game artist myself, you can never have textures with too much resolution [...] or models with too much detail.

As a player, I stopped caring about improved resolution some time ago. Current PS3 games have enough. It would be a minor nicety to have more resolution, but only if it was free (ie. didn't hurt framerates, load times, effort put into gameplay, etc).

We are using Intel's "Smart Response Technology" which uses a small 20GB mSATA SSD on the motherboard in conjunction with a regular hard drive.
It can cache both reads and [optionally] writes.
In read/write cache mode, it gives about 80% of the performance boost of using the pure SSD, for our Visual Studio 2010 disk thrashing.

However, these are good quality Intel SSDs, not the "cheapest flash chip I could find to bung in my hard disk" that the all-in-one hybrid drives seem to use.

Exactly: the big "problem" with online advertising is that it can be tracked, and so it's obvious that people mostly ignore it. So it exposes advertising as much less valuable than it has been presented as before.

Most places do have a rough form of version control, as simple as zips backed up to a server. These kinds of low-tech unofficial approaches seem ugly, but basically do the job for a single developer or several independents.

I would also add that TFS feels a bit unfinished. The basic design is pretty good, but certain small but very useful things are missing in the UI, e.g.:
the merge/compare tools cannot ignore case or whitespace (!)
there is no rollback in the GUI (until a recent Powertools addon, which is flakey)
In some places you can get to the history of a file, in others not
There is no easy way to search your bugs (work items)!

1112 pages about web technologoy printed on paper? What a curious idea. How does the search engine work?

On Diginotar's site you can barely tell anything happened, except for a small "security incident" press release.
They are still trying to minimise it when it seems likely the whole company will be shut down for complete failure.
Cowards.

Same for me.
So I've gone back to the old comments system (again)... without the javascriptiness it seems fine.

Nope. 50dBm, not 50%. Vastly different things.

Bluetooth is very complicated compared to other options, which content themselves basically with providing a serial port. This complexity and licensing costs add significantly to devices.

Yeah, near as I can see the $50 option only works if you have a low-profile PCI card, which most are not. For external they seem to start around $400.

The chips we've actually built a product on are about US$15 in moderate quantities, from PLX. Possibly might get down to US$5 for large orders (e.g 100k). They are also all BGA chips, which requires higher tech assembly and PCBs.

So going back to the original point; no, it's not really cheap to adapt PCI cards to PCI Express slots. Especially for end-users.

Where are these $50 cards, or these $5 chips?
The ones I know of cost around US$1000 and US$20 respectively.

BUt obviously, out of the thousands of things that could go wrong it was silly to claim the landing gear as the only thing that needed manual control.
They just wanted to fly spacecraft...

This is technically understandable, but creating confusion is not smart when fighting a battle on this scale. What appeals to geeks will just have people wondering why they want to call two different things the same thing.

The answer is simple: the people writing Linux don't care about a "year of Linux on the desktop". They care about doing the stuff that matters to them. Which isn't testing and fixing 10,000 existing drivers.

Nobody is really that serious about putting the hard yards into to making the whole Linux package compete with Windows. Many developers think that making old drivers or apps work is silly and a waste of time. That's their prerogative of course, as free contributors.

For this reason, I see no reason why Linux will get significantly more market share of the desktop than it has now.