I wouldn't touch WD.

WD basically invented the hard drive and used to be awesome. Then they started selling garbage. After having a number of their drives fail and seeing online reports of the same, i no longer consider them an option. Same story with Epson for printers. It make me wonder why these great companies decided to destroy the one thing they had: A brand that stood for quality.

What a pane glass can be.
Luckily, you had she.
Broke the phone unknowingly,
Now you're happy as can be.

host OS (Mavericks)

Have you looked at 10.10 (beta) yet? Looks like the community is split over whether it's ugly or beautiful.

Does the adapter being passive or active have anything to do with it?

For the most part. Crapware isn't really like Malware you get from the red-light districts of the web. Most of it is just junk installed by the OEM that goes away when uninstalled.

That's not to say it might to leave a config file or registry entry lying around afterwards, but as far as visible, executing processes, most of them respond well to just uninstalling.

Yeah - $30 or 40 may be a bit more reasonable. Still though, computers have gotten pretty cheap these days. I paid $199 for my Windows 8.1 laptop on sale. $30-40 is still a decent chunk of the purchase price to upgrade the OS (which I'm sure when the computer was assembled the OEM was charged next to nothing for the original copy).

Because "web only" is what Google is about. It works pretty well for them honestly. Android phones and Chromebooks are selling pretty darned well.

For the most part that's what people seem to want these days. Even for the "keyboard, mouse and screen" form factor you'll likely see a shift to those type of devices. As said Chromebooks are already selling very well, but they're also introducing Chrome "desktops" - basically a chromebook that connects to external peripherals (ie, the Acer Chromebox CXI).

In less than 10 years a full computer running local apps won't be commonplace for "regular people" anymore. You'll likely see them relegated to use by content creators, programmers, and hobbyists like us.

It's kind of odd that Linux might finally succeed as the dominate desktop OS eventually - because eventually a desktop OS might not really be a viable retail product anymore.

I'm still wondering if the upgrade will be free for Windows 8 users or if they'll expect us to dish out another $100 to upgrade.

Don't get me wrong - WIndows 8.x has some nice features. I'm primarily a Linux user at home and only keep Windows 8 on my laptop (I use it for doing Visual Studio projects). The integration with Microsoft's cloud services is done pretty good.

HOWEVER, the UI is just insane (and I'm judging mostly from the "semi-fixed" 8.1 version - I never bothered with the original Windows 8). Metro is just not intuitive or useful. To make matters worse, system configuration seems to be split about 50/50 between Control Panel and the metro-based "PC Settings" screen (plus the registry in the background for other stuff you can't access from either of them).

It honestly feels like two dissimilar systems that they tried to rubber-band together, with the NEWER of those two systems being the aggravating one. Here's hoping that they ditch most of the bad ideas and clean it up some.

True, though one good thing Windows 8 has done is include a disk imaging program utility. Boot your computer, uninstall all the crapware, update drivers, and then image your disk to a $15 USB key. If you ever need to restore use that to put it back to your own clean slate.

but should NEVER be part of a logical primary key.

I wouldn't say never. The odd case would be in the table held data by the minute or second or the like.

But, i share your adamant stand against it it nearly all cases.

I had to add the time field in to achieve a unique logical key.

:(

Admittedly I don't like Microsoft's "cloud" as much as Google, but with Windows 8 they're pretty much there too. Web versions of Office are available with an Outlook.com account (which is actually what gets tied to your computer login). All the save dialogs (Microsoft's at least) are linked to your OneDrive (cloud) account.

Don't get me wrong Metro and the Start Screen are steaming piles of shit, but they're actually coming around ok on the cloud storage and integration front.

Tiny Chromebook-sized Windows laptops are already about there. Acer's E3 series has basically Chromebook specs (Celeron Dual-core and 2GB RAM) and a 320GB hard drive and can be had quite easily for $250. I just recently picked one up from Best Buy for $199 (may have been a sale - not sure).

I may eventually put Linux on it (I run Mint on my desktop), but for my needs something like this works great. I use my laptop maybe 10 times per year while traveling. I just need something functional with a keyboard, screen, and internet connection.