Re: the future of GNOME Applets

[janne <jan moren lucs lu se>]

On ons, 2004-09-22 at 09:04 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > On Maw, 2004-09-21 at 14:12, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> > You want more than monitor - a lot of the systems can set policies so
> > you want policy selector. These tend to include "performance", "maximum
> > battery life" and the like. Sometimes you need to switch at runtime (eg
> > when playing bzflag) to avoid the CPU speed change messing with your
> > game.
> 
> Don't "Longer battery, less performance", and "Higher performance, less
> battery" options make more sense on the battery monitor applet?

Makes  sense.


> And don't these belong also (or only) in the control center?


Does not make as much sense, perhaps. Even allowing for a system that
switches between battery power and performance based on whether the
machine is connected or on battery power, a user will still want to be
able to switch this manually on occasion. 

Two cases: 1) I am connected to power. But as I am sitting in the middle
of the night, just writing some text, I switch to low performance so the
system draws less energy and runs cooler - and, thus, with less fan
noise (and ideally, this would switch down the disk as well). Or I am
just having the system playing some music in the ackground while I am
busy with other things - again, I'd like to conserve energy and reduce
noise.

2) I am at an airport, terminally bored (sic), and I know I won't have
room or inclination to actually use the machine much once I'm in the
air. Battery life be damned, I fire up Neverwinter Nights - but before I
do that, I set the machine to performance mode so I won't have glitches
and sucky framerate as I mow down hordes of Orcs in some mindless
adventure module.



-- 
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
 
Tel. (Japan) 090-3622 8920            Dr. Jan Mor�(mr)
                                      Dept. of Cognitive Science
http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren    Lund, Sweden