[sf-lug] Major laptop issue with linux

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jason Turner (jturner at nonzerosums.org):

> I read this mail with something akin to "anticipation"... cuz as you 
> went on, I couldn't help but think, "does he consider my disk management 
> settings something I should be explicitly aware of?"  And then you end 
> with that *UN*obvious[to me] suggestion. 

It definitely wasn't at all obvious to me, either, when I started
reading about such things.  As I said, arguably, Ubuntu should not have
been so aggressive for default operation.  

Unfortunately, because the horrible 1996 ACPI spec around which this
problem revolves is such a nightmare[1], and because there are
(consequently) so many buggy implementations, they had no good choices:
If they'd had an "hdparm -B 254" default, they'd have heard perpetual
complaints from laptop users about poor battery life.  Having gone to
the other extreme, now they hear complaints from people whose hard
drives die young as an indirect result of poor hardware engineering.

[1] It was supposed to be a modest, next-generation replacement for the
old "APM" (advanced power management) specification, but fell victim to 
Second System Effect, and ended up as a 600+ page technical spec that
pokes into huge additional areas of hardware control.  See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_system_effect