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.

Very nice.

I follow a similar pattern. I went from an S to the S3.

This was in part due to cost. If I am going to spend $600 on a phone, I treat it like any other computer purchase and I expect to get a minimum of 3 years out of the device.

Now that there are phones available that are of almost the same quality, at a much lower price I'll probably make a move - but not for at least a year. While I waited to repair this one I was using a Moto G and I loved it. The screen isn't as big, and it was a relief to get back to my Galaxy in that regard. But I'd say otherwise the Moto G was just as good but it cost less than $200.

People talk about the race to the bottom - and there are some awful Android devices out there but there are also some really nice devices that don't cost such a huge premium and I like to think of them as being part of the race to the middle. The point where I get maximum value.

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

Out of curiosity, what model of Opel? I always wanted an Opel GT...

I've gone through three of those plastic box fans over the last ten years, and whenever one dies I drag out the big heavy steel box fan my parents had in the 1950's. Man does that thing move air, all day long, fairly quietly. It's just terrifying because if it fell out of the window it could kill someone, but whereas the plastic ones jump to their doom every couple of months I think it would take a volcanic eruption to shift the old fan.

Pushbutton hard-wired phones, world war two vintage drillpress, metal lathe, wood lathe, tablesaw, 1970 Triumph as my not-snowing car, 1990 bicycle for my non-race bike, MOO/MUD's that I've been hanging out on since 1992, Commordore Amiga 2000 (okay, I only fire that up about once every two months.) A lot of my wood chisels are from the 1890's. They all work just fine. My race bike is a brand-new marvel of carbon fiber and magnesium, but I bet it won't last another two seasons, whereas the old bike has over 150,000 kilometers on it. I do now design using switching power supplies, rather than LDO's, and I've moved from PIC to AVR, (and I've always programmed in C rather than assembly) but generally, there has to be a really clear advantage for me to change piles of experience and knowledge for something new.

...on a computer what it took fifty years of uninterrupted Democratic rule to do in real life!

I'm in no rush to update. I wait on that stuff and let the early adopters find the problems.

I really don't get why everyone gushes over mac as being so superior to Windows when it comes to the stability of updates. Mac fans are just willing to endure more.

Don't know.

Mine has 16GB - and the instance still gets cranky sometimes even after I've thrown a lot of resources at it. And I don't think it is Fedora - it's something to do with the virtualization. But it is good enough.

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?