[Pm-utils] low power mode

[Peter Jones]

On Mon, 2006-05-01 at 19:17 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:

> (I think several of the powersave "powersave" and "performance" 
> distinctions are bogus - we can do better than that by figuring out 
> what's actually needed

Totally agree with this part.

>  rather than just having static configurations 
> that mostly just serve to give the user more buttons to press, and 
> "powersave" against "performance" just encourages the same sort of 
> binary thinking that led us to the dire speedstep situation on Windows 
> of "Oh look, my CPU goes really slowly now". Providing it doesn't cost 
> us usability, we should *always* be saving power.

Well, that's the tricky bit.  Things like "should I have bluetooth on
right now?" are really hard to do without a button somewhere.

>  And that requires us 
> to learn from the embedded guys that have actually solved this problem 
> properly - can you imagine how pissed off people would get if their PDA 
> only had the same sort of functionality?)

Except they haven't; I've got to use a menu to turn things on and off on
my phone.  Likewise, it has a preferences menu for how long to wait
before setting dimming (and later disabling) the screen.

-- 
  Peter