This link cannot be shared enough:
http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

For one, it's polling the hardware looking for attacks against its DRM systems:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

So.. your CPU, video hardware, and audio hardware don't idle well.

Found it: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

"In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware every 30ms for digital outputs and every 150 ms for analog ones to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that⦠nothing continues to happen"

So there you go, your video and audio drivers have to poll the hardware repeatedly, which takes all of the CPU, video, and audio hardware out of low-power state when they could otherwise be idle.

As far as I know, this remains the spec for drivers, and does partially explain why Windows would use more power at idle than other operating systems.

I vaguely recall someone from AMD (??) writing a paper back when Vista was introduced that went over the implementation of driver signing in Windows, and how that was going to impact battery life. Basically, as I recall, in order to implement DRM the OS will repeatedly check the drivers and the hardware to make sure that all signatures remain valid, so it doesn't really idle well at all.

If being wrong about electric vehicle pollution makes you an eco-tard, congratulations. You're an eco-tard.

Sierra Club

Popular Science

Or maybe we can all just conduct ourselves with a little more respect. That would be really nice.

No, it didn't. All of the software used for auto-detection and auto-setup of hardware originated and has been largely developed in Fedora. Ubuntu's first releases took place after Red Hat had worked out a lot of the bugs, and the Fedora releases at that time were just as good. Some of the releases before the release of Ubuntu did not have those tools fleshed out.

The only place where you are marginally correct is proprietary drivers. Ubuntu had options to enable repositories for third-party proprietary drivers, where Fedora adheres to Free Software principals.

OK, so there were two things I wanted Red Hat to have that Debian did, back then: more community involvement and apt.

Apt came along eventually, and then was replaced by yum.

At the same time, there were a lot of things that I liked better about RPM. RPM packages were PGP signed long before debs. As far as I could tell from the documentation, debs were either all or mostly built by hand where RPM packages were built using a script included in the src.rpm. Last, Debian used to have mirrors for everything except for updates that fixed security problems. I never could make any sense of that; it seemed completely backward.

Your recollection is off. PAM was in the distribution at least as early as version 4, and has never checked complexity at login. The old cracklib module that was used to check complexity doesn't even offer that service.

My first Linux distro was Slackware, and it was damn educational. I had to do a lot of stuff on my own. A little less than a year later, I tried Red Hat Linux (4.2) and never turned back.

I tried Debian a few times early on, and the system would always break when I applied updates. Break, as in, it would either no longer boot or I could no longer log in.

Debian was what I wanted in a distribution: committed to Free Software. Red Hat angered a lot of users when it split off Fedora, but I never understood that. Fedora was the distribution that I wanted Red Hat to be. Free Software and community driven. Since apt and yum came into the picture, Red Hat's distribution has been the best of the bunch. The company maintains their commitment to Free Software, releasing the code to acquisition after acquisition, and leads all others in developing GNU/Linux.

Thank you Red Hat. There are too many negative comments here. I love Fedora.

Can you provide a reference for the Seagate failure you mentioned? Offhand, it almost sounds like you're thinking of the Samsung laptop UEFI bug:

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/22855.html

Even that's exaggerated. There are an estimated ~2000 people who face an elevated risk of thyroid cancer. Even with that elevated risk, there is never expected to be a statistically measurable increase in the actual development of thyroid cancer.

And thyroid cancer is treatable. It has a 97% survival rate. Those people are going to be screened annually. They're probably going to be just fine.

People keep asking this question without any idea how it possibly could be a back door.

SELinux is a security layer in addition to the existing security controls. It can deny applications the permission to perform various actions, and that's about it.

How do you imagine that it would be a back door?

That's not a fair comparison. Linux's interfaces mostly conform to a documented standard that is already implemented by other kernels. Therefore, it should be a relatively small task to replace one kernel with another kernel that already exists and implements most or all of what is required. (I'd imagine that there would be additional drivers requried)

There is no existent alternative implementation of the Android userland. Replacing it would require a lot of engineering. It would not be easy.

You don't even have to read the article. The summary says that Google will replace AT&T at all US locations.

I've experienced the same from time to time, and typically what I find is that someone in the cafe (or more than one person) is/are streaming hi def video and ruining the entire network for everyone.