battery plasmoid and remaining time..

[Zack Rusin]

On Thursday 14 May 2009 23:22:46 Chani wrote:
> > > It's not made up, as far as I can see it's remaining capacity / current
> > > discharge rate. So it does tell you when your battery runs out if you
> > > keep doing what you're doing right now.
> > >
> > > Maybe a good point is to think about how we can make this more clear to
> > > the user.
> >
> > I'd suggest prefixing that number with an icon of a dude going "3
> > hours... no, 2 hours! no! 1:30! no 6 hours! oh, for gods sake, i give up"
> > and then an animation of him throwin his hands up in the air. that'd
> > pretty much express exactly what it's doin.
>
> "four hours and ten minutes! four hours and eight minutes! four hours and
> fifteen minutes! four hours and five minutes!"
> who cares, at least I know I've got around four hours left.
> I don't know what sort of hardware you've got, but my battery doesn't vary
> that wildly. I managed to make it go down from 4:20ish to 3:50 by starting
> a compile, but that's as much as it's jumping.

nope, that's crap. if *you* don't see a huge difference between idle processor 
and a movie playing/compile/gamin then it's your hardware that's shite. or do 
you actually think that all those patching of all the apps to not run extra 
timers was to save a minute or two?

> > of course that's also what "2 hours left" can mean.
>
> if that's true then your hardware *sucks*

nope, as noted above it's your hardware that sucks if that's not the case. an 
idle 13" laptop with no usb pollin devices should be takin about 10Watts. 
lowerin the screen brightness to maximum will win you a few watts as well.  
playin a full screen movie, compilin, playin a game, etc it will likely jump 
to 20Watts+. if you don't see that then your acpi setup is busted. so we're 
talkin about hours of difference (especially for people with larger batteries).

as to the rest, it's about feelings, which honestly is a shite discussion to 
have in a context of a development list. my point is "it's wrong to have a 
computer guess/lie", yours is "but it's nice!", which is a discussion no one 
can win. as i said in my last email "if we only had like, i don't know, a 
'usability team' to look at those issues!".

z