Sony Pledges More Accurate Laptop Battery Figures 185
Slatterz writes "Ever wondered why you never get the 10 hours of battery life advertised with your new ultraportable? Battery life ratings have been a joke for years, so it's interesting to hear that one big vendor is picking up its game. PC Authority says Sony is abandoning the usual (and wildly misleading) JEITA method for coming up with those 10+ hour battery numbers (they're still using JEITA, but not the usual way). Interestingly, the story has links showing the old and new steps Sony takes to come up with those battery predictions. It's good to see the industry coming clean on this issue."
Prime 95 use (Score:2, Interesting)
I use a text processor... (Score:3, Interesting)
built in the 1980s.
It runs for approx 2 weeks continuously, on 4 AA rechargables, and I just dump my notes as a .txt file to my desktop.
If people made a more sophisticated version, with network capability and OpenOffice formatting, I'd buy it like a shot. Modern batteries would also run it for months.....
Re:How is this for marketing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Battery capacity, not life (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're going to be pedantic, get it right. Batteries are measured in amp-hours, and if you want to use watts, it would be "watt-hours at X volts", whatever the voltage is that the battery is supplying.
The Lenovo X61 extended battery has 4400 mAh, or 4.4Ah, so if it lasts eight hours at a draw of 9 watts, then it's drawing about 16 volts.
9 watts at 16 volts is 0.55 amperes. 0.55 amperes for 8 hours is 4.4 amp-hours.
It's more fun not having to think this much on a Monday morning.
Re:How is this for marketing? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is close, but not quite accurate. Macs enter sleep mode as any other PC does. However, when they enter sleep, they also begin paging everything out so that they can hibernate if the battery gets too low while still sleeping. You can tell whether or not your mac hibernated easily. If it wakes up instantly on a key press it was sleeping. If it needs the power plugged in, and comes back to a greyscale filtered version of what you were working on and a progress bar, then it was hibernating.
Re:How is this for marketing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Joe Average is indeed in a market for lemons. But you find that very often, when buying something like a laptop, he might try and ask for advice from Average Slashdotter.
Most people know at least one geek. Most Slashdotters are probably their friends' and extended families' "go to guy", for tech issues. And lets not forget IT departments and professional buyers, etc. Every geek knows battery lives are 1-1.5 hours for laptops everywhere, and if they see a 10 hour claim, they will call it out. That damages Joe Average's, and indeed Average Slashdotter's, confidence in the product, no matter how many go faster stripes they put on the casing.
This will have an effect, because right now laptop makers are not just exaggerating or stretching the truth. They are outright lying and telling great big obvious whoppers at that. Even Joe Average gets wise eventually.
Re:HD manufacturers next? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now all we need is for HD manufacturers to stop defining "Gigabyte" as "1 billion bytes"
But Giga does mean 1 billion. Why on earth do some people in IT believe they can define a unit prefix differently to the rest of the scientific world?
It was an acceptably lazy hack back when the difference between 1024 (2^10) & 1000 was negligible, but now units of 2^30 are common, we're starting to the consequences of such laziness.
Its not going to be long before units of 2^100 are common. I don't know about you, but I prefer to work with 10^30 than 1267650600228229401496703205376.
Re:Gibibyte is dead. (Score:3, Interesting)
Drive manufacturers do that to make their product sound better than it really is, it's all marketing.
You may not like it, but kilo and giga have always had such values in computing because computers operate using binary, 10 binary bits gives 1024 possible values. It would be quite ridiculous to use 1000 and whatever nasty kludges were necessary to achieve that.
Re:Gibibyte is dead. (Score:1, Interesting)
"If you want to use substantially different multipliers from the standard, don't use SI prefixes for them. Make up your own unit names."
I'm guessing you're in your early to mid 20s.
The "SI system" didn't exist until the 11th CGPM in 1960. Even the earlier system on which it was based wasn't approved until 1946. The 1024 byte kilobyte had already been in use. It's not unusual for a field to have a measuring system like we have in computer science. A kilobyte was always a thousand bytes in base 2, as base 2 has always made sense for computers.
If you are desperate for a base 10 numbering system, use something other than bytes. Why attempt to change the existing industry practice with another method? Unless of course you are a HDD manufacturer who can then make your products sound bigger than they are and hide behind definitions.
Stranger still, the ones with the most to gain (HDD manufacturers) are pretty much the only ones using this definition. This subject is rather heavily tainted by bad faith on their part.