It is a matter of taste; but the proliferation of 'widescreen' has really made multiple orientation setups more attractive. In particular, the ubiquitous 1920x1080 is cheap as dirt and nice and wide; but actually throws fewer vertical pixels than a nasty old 1280x1024 17' from about 2001. If you read or write a lot of text, or code with reasonably short lines, taking a cheapo 1920x1080 and rotating it gives you a 1080x1920: this is handy because it's still wider than 1024(so even old and horrible programs/layouts generally won't break, since anything that old and horrible probably expects 768 or 1024 pixel wide screens); but provides more vertical resolution than even substantially more expensive monitors in their native orientation.

I prefer my 'primary' monitor to be unrotated; but the amount of vertical resolution you can get for the money, without totally sacrificing width, from a rotated secondary monitor is pretty compelling.

In this case, you might want to go after the vets before the doctors...

It's not an accident that they were looking at agricultural workers (rather than, say, elementary school teachers, who would be seeing the worst of it from antibiotics-for-the-sniffles patients), nor is it an accident that there are 'livestock-associated' drug resistant strains.

I ran 8 for a year and put up with all of the usability crap, but they lost me when my hard drive died and I found out how crappy the built-in backup software is. The damn thing doesn't save a disk image, nor have a similar way to recover from a completely dead disk. If I have to reinstall from scratch, it sure as hell wasn't going to be 8 again. So now I'm back to 7 and its sane backup program.

I know what you do NOT do, you do NOT put a gun to OTHER people's had to steal their money from them to 'help' anybody whatsoever under any circumstances. No amount of misery can be justified to destroy individual freedom.

If a person is irresponsible and has children, too bad for those children, however that's what other family members are for. Beyond that there are private organisations that try to help children. Governments cause massive pain for children by destroying the economy that they and their parents live in.

It's not like the early version of Vista, though. It's more like a late Vista service release.

I think this probably indicates that they bite off too much in each release. It's actually a common problem when companies try to abandon an incremental development cycle and get a little ambitious.

NTFS supports arbitrary metadata "streams", analogous to xattrs on unix. Windows and applications simply don't make use of them very much.

Also, Microsoft did introduce a new filesystem: ReFS. It is sort-of analogous to zfs or btrfs, but not very well supported in Windows 8 at the moment and not as feature-complete. Still, they seem to be ahead of Apple which is still using HFS.

Aside from price, which makes accepting multiple monitors rather compelling(you can get physically big ones for relatively small amounts of money, because of TVs; but if you want resolution the cost goes up fast and things really start to misbehave if you go high enough that DP MST or the like is required to drive the thing), it mostly comes down to how good your windowing system is at tiling and how well applications that expect 'full screen' can handle playing with others.

A good window manager makes carving up a single large monitor into chunks suitably sized for your various programs easy and painless. If you are enduring a less obliging one, it can be a fairly ugly business, actually less pleasant than getting some help from multiple physical displays, which are more widely respected even by poorly behaved programs.

That said, the 'two side by side, giant bezel in the middle' configuration is not my favorite. A larger primary screen, with ancillary screens on one or both sides gives you plenty of room for assorted lesser windows; but also avoids annoying bezels in the center of your field of view.

You don't choose between workspaces and physical screens, you just have multiple physical screens so that each workspace can be even larger and more pleasant to use...

You do eventually run into diminishing returns; but being able to display more than one monitor worth of stuff simultaneously definitely has its uses, and is something that being able to switch between workspaces, be the transition ever so elegant, cannot replace.

Given that 8 was the "Just because it's called 'Windows' doesn't mean it needs a functional windowing system!" release, It's pretty hard to argue with them.

Maybe some of that works on touchscreen laptops; but 'metro' is a tragicomedy on any monitor configuration worth using.

- government has no place in anything that private individuals need and provide for themselves and others absent government.

Energy, clothing, food, shelter, education, transportation, roads, schools, investments, entertainment, mail, anything at all that people need, individuals need, individuals, people create and once they create it, if others like it, they can also buy these solutions from the individuals that created it. That is what businesses are: individuals solving individual problems that become solutions for the entire societies.

Your complete lack of understanding of these simple realities of life and your dogmatic belief in something 'grander' than you are, are blinding you and obviously somebody so blinded cannot see the forest for the trees. "Libertarian" is just a moniker. The point is individual freedom.

Free people create stuff based on their own creativity.

Slaves only work hard enough not to get beat up too much (just enough not to be taxed too much).

Looks to me you prefer a 'society' of scared, ignorant children rather than a society of grown up people actually thinking for themselves and building stuff they need and trading with other grown ups for stuff they built.

That's another good idea, though you wouldn't be able to take advantage of clones and such so that the backup's data would be invalid once the resilver started until it was finished... If I went that route, I'd make sure I had completed a scrub before connecting the backup drives.

In addition, Tesla(whether or not you see this as an improvement is a distinct issue, it simply is so) sells cars much more like an enterprise IT hardware vendor sells hardware: at least within the warranty period, there is very much an ongoing interaction between the hardware and the vendor. System health information gets sent directly back, on site techs with specialized parts and firmware get sent out and so on. More traditional car companies are closer to buying a PC: the dealer will offer (often absurdly priced; but available) maintenance; and the vendor may become involved with certain warranty or recall cases; but they are otherwise largely out of the loop, with third parties handling the ongoing interaction with the hardware.

Something has to provide coordination and theatre-level intelligence for all deployed Highlander batteries, no?

Well, you certainly save money on blinker fluid but you end up paying out the nose for voltage grease.

You have me wondering if using zfs wouldn't be a good option here. You could put the pair of drives in a single enclosure and make them into a pool. Then every quarter or so bring your drives home, update the data, and do a scrub. Thus you get the parity for "free". If your primary backup is also zfs, you can even do a zfs send and get incremental backups for "free" as well.

Of course, now the "all you can eat" online backup services are starting to approach the cost of a safety deposit box :)