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Why Is Linux Notebook Battery Life Still Poor?
Ganty writes "I recently purchased a Lenovo W500 notebook, and after 'downgrading' to XP and creating a dual partition, I found that I had a battery life of nearly three hours using the long-life battery, at this point I was a happy camper because it means that I can watch a DVD during a flight. I then tried various Linux distributions and found the battery life under FOS to be very disappointing, with an average of 45 minutes before a warning message. After settling on Ubuntu I then spent three days trying various hardware tweaks but I only managed to increase the battery life to one and a half hours. Unwanted services have been disabled, laptop mode has been enabled, the dual core CPU reduces speed when idle and the hard drive spins down when not needed. Obviously Apple with their X86 hardware and BSD based OS have got it right because the MacBooks last for hours, and a stock install of MS Windows XP gives me three hours of life. Why is battery life on notebooks so poor when using Linux? Some have suggested disabling various hardware items such as bluetooth and running the screen at half brightness but XP doesn't require me to do this and still gives a reasonable battery life."
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The failing public schools are mostly plagued by kids that don't give a damn and parents that don't give a damn, and they ruin things for everyone else. Private schools do far better because they can very easily eject problematic kids - and most parents that don't care about school won't even bother to send their kids to a private school anyway.
There are plenty of things the US government does more poorly than private industry that are clearly the government's own fault. This isn't one of them, this is a case where the biggest problem facing the public schools does not exist for the private schools because the private schools are not legally required to accept all students in the area. And if we don't try to educate the kids that cause problems, we're adding to the population of people who turn to welfare or crime because they're not educated enough to qualify for a real job. (e.g. 30% of the people in US prisons are illiterate.) I don't know what the solution is, but please pick some other government failure to harpoon.
but please pick some other government failure to harpoon
Why? It's exactly the same problem as health care. Kids (and parents) who eat their way into a diabetes-induced amputation, costing more in health care than it would cost to provide basic services to a dozen other families, aren't a bit different than kids (and parents) who slack their way through school and become parasites on every other system. What on earth makes you think that more of a Nanny State is going to produce kids who are more responsible for their own lives? It's all part of the same wider cultural problem. And government policies that amount to nothing more than just raising taxes (more!) on the productive people to increase the number of Nannies aimed at the non-productive people are all of a kind.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.