From: ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld.invalid
On Thu, 25 Apr 2013, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article
, Jim Beard wrote:
>Moe Trin wrote:
>> Most of what I'm seeing here is the smaller 15.5" screens. The
>> weekend ads listed just two of the 17.3s from Lenovo and Sony.
>My eyes and my habits in cluttering the screen with multiple open
>browsers/terminals/etc favor the larger screen, and the
>convenience of smaller/lighter means basically nothing to me. I
>want a transportable desktop, more than anything else.
Understood - my desktop desktops tend to be quite crowded (17 terminals
open on four panes at the moment). I've noticed that on the laptops
(which are secondary systems only), I typically have much less open at
at given time - typically no more than 4 terminals and maybe a browser.
>> The HP dv7-7292nr looks tempting, but may be overpriced. It's
>> likely to be "over qualified" as well (more capabilities than
>> needed). A ton of RAM is always "nice to have", but we're not even
>> buying i7 desktop systems at work. HD size - not going out of our
>> way to buy extra size (500-650 GB seems to be the sweet-spot at the
>> moment), but then we try to avoid storing stuff on a laptop drive.
>> If you need the extra disk space, a 2 TB USB3 external is under a
>> hundred bucks.
>If price were more important, the hp AMD A8 machine would do the job.
I'm sure - as a general statement, we don't use the laptops for CPU
intensive tasks, but I've still got three Pentium desktops that are
adequate for their assigned tasks,
>The hp dv7-7212 32GB or SSD has its attraction, but that has to be
>ordered over the web (at the moment).
For "redundant" storage on a laptop, I'm more inclined to use a SDHC
card or an external USB drive. The SDHCs are dirt cheap, and the
biggest disadvantage is that they tend to get lost easily.
>MicroCenter's no-questions-asked willingness to take the thing back
>within 2 weeks is a nice point, as is having their shop available.
Certainly helps
>> A retired neighbor is a (WW2) history buff, and bought a DVD from
>> the Government Printing Office ("The Army and World War II:
>> Collected Works" GPO Stock 008-029-00550-6 ISBN 978-0-1609-0459-2)
>> for $11. You may be familiar with "the green books" - this is all
>> 90+ of those, and 60+ others - totaling 156 books with 56000 pages,
>> 7500 illustrations and 1700 maps.
>Looks like I will have to google the thing and order it. I'll
>probably never read more than a fraction of it, but a library of
>that nature at that price is too much to pass by.
I first encountered the green books over 30 years ago, when I picked up
a used copy of "Guadalcanal - The First Offensive". It's only about 400
pages, but compared to others on the same subject (I suppose everyone
has read Tregskis' "Guadalcanal Diary", but Frank, Griffith, Leckie and
Merillat have also written authoritative books) it has considerably
more detail - heck, having 20+ fold-out maps (in addition to 15 maps
within the text) allows you to UNDERSTAND what was going on day-to-day.
Consequently, I stopped into the GPO bookstore in San Francisco and
bought 20-30 more of the green books. They were cheap compared to
"normal" hard-covers. They later released at least some of them as a
similar sized (7x10 inch) paperback at lower prices.
]Backordered. When it will arrive is anyone's guess. Thanks for
]the tipper.
Figures - it was featured on their website (bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/
us-military-history/battles-wars/world-war-II). They also have/had it
available on 7 individual CDs, but each CD is about $21. I've got two
dead-tree books back-ordered from them, and they claim 60-90 days.
>> If you like the Red Hat style, one of the clones of RHEL (CentOS,
>> Scientific, or even Oracle) is a good alternative.
>I have had better luck with more recent kernels, and CentOS is a
>little slow in making those available. Scientific is a bit more
>"scientific" than I need, and more tailoring required. I have
>not looked at Oracle's offering.
I suspect the delay is at Red Hat rather than CentOS, but is your
hardware that new, or are you just finding shiny features in the newer
kernels? Remember not to try to chase "version numbers" (lessee,
kernel.org released 3.8.9 today, as well as 3.0.75, 3.2.44 and 3.4.42)
because all distributions tend to cherry-pick features/bug-fixes from
the latest/greatest to include in their "current" update. What would
be more important is the date of that update, rather than the number.
>> Secure boot is a relatively minor issue at the moment. Actually,
>> there was an item on Bugtraq earlier about HP tablets where secure
>> boot could NOT be enabled (a BIOS update fixes that), but even after
>> the update, secure boot is not enabled by default.
>I could be wrong (one of my questions when I go in to buy), but
>my understanding is that if the machine has Win 8 on it, it will
>have secure boot enabled.
"capable", not necessarily "enabled". Now the boxes that are being
sold _may_ be enabled by default, but on non-ARM hardware, MS is not
requiring that. There has been some talk that BIOS manufacturers may
eventually drop the non-secure option (as a cost saving measure), but
I haven't seen that yet. The Bugtraq item above from HP contained the
following:
Note: After the BIOS is updated, additional secure boot
configuration steps are needed
Go to Control Panel
Select HP BIOS Settings
Select "Secure Boot" to enable this feature.
and my understanding it that this is typical.
>If it has Win 8 (or 7) with secure boot disabled by default, that
>would be best, for me.
My understanding is that win7 isn't signed, so secure boot wouldn't
work. But I'm not seeing advertisements offering a win7 downgrade any
more - all of the current crop seems to be win8.
Old guy
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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