Gah?

Laptop battery myths

marco:

TUAW ends this article about laptop batteries with this advice:

Never leave the machine plugged in all the time. Laptops are meant to be portable. Using it as a desktop that never runs on the battery will destroy your battery life.

Cycles are your friend. Never letting the battery complete a cycle will greatly diminish your run-time. Try to avoid charging the battery unless it’s drained past 30%. Any time the battery drains past 50% and charges more than 50% counts as a cycle. The farther you let it drain before the charge - the better its overall health will remain.

30 cycles in a year is not a good thing. ;)

Let the battery drain completely a few times a week.

Never let it sit for long periods of time without use. Batteries need to be loved or else they won’t love you.

Most* of these tips are incorrect for the lithium-ion (and, more recently, lithium-polymer) batteries that are used in nearly every laptop manufactured in the last decade.

The “memory effect”, or the need to “refresh” or “deep-cycle” the battery by completely discharging before recharging, is stale knowledge from the time of NiCad and NiMH batteries. Lithium-ion batteries don’t suffer from the memory effect.

It’s also not bad to leave your laptop plugged in. In fact, it’s a good thing to keep it plugged in whenever you don’t need to be running on battery power.

* Update: Apple recommends that you run it on battery for a while at least once per month. It’s pretty difficult to own a laptop and not do this, but it is an edge case that some people achieve. So I’ll amend this: You shouldn’t technically leave your laptop plugged in all the time, but you certainly don’t need to deep-cycle it “a few times a week” as the TUAW post states. Furthermore, the recommendation for monthly battery usage isn’t just for capacity preservation: it’s mostly so the charge indicator can maintain accuracy as the battery’s capacity decreases naturally over its lifespan.

With that said, here’s how lithium-ion batteries behave.

Due to their chemistry, their capacity slowly diminishes with age. Laptop batteries usually lose most of their useful capacity 2-3 years after manufacture (not initial use). The new lithium-polymer batteries in the MacBook Air and unibody MacBooks (only the non-removable ones) claim to have improved this, but it’s too early to tell if these claims have merit. Assume that most laptop batteries will need to be replaced after a few years.

If you use the laptop on battery power a lot, the battery lifespan will be shortened. This “wearing out” effect is much less severe than with older battery technologies, but is still present. This is why you should plug it in if it’s convenient.

When plugged in, the battery is not in use. The laptop’s power circuitry bypasses the battery unless it’s needed. Depending on how smart the charger is, it may occasionally poll and “top off” the battery if its charge decreases to a certain threshold below 100%, but this is rarely needed in practice.

If the battery is not in use, it will slowly lose its charge due to all rechargeable batteries’ tendency to slowly self-discharge. Lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries have the lowest self-discharge rates of any common battery technology, estimated at less than 1% per month and difficult to distinguish from the loss of capacity with age.

In reality, if your laptop is closed, the battery slowly discharges with time because it’s not really “off”. A small amount of continuous power is needed to preserve the RAM’s state during sleep. It’s not the battery wearing out — it’s being used, but much more slowly than when the computer’s in use.

When Apple decides whether a battery is defective or has been worn out normally, the “special utility” they run is System Profiler. You can run it, too. Check the Power section, and it’ll tell you your battery’s cycle count, the intended capacity at manufacture, and how much capacity per cycle remains. Apple technicians compare the cycle count to the capacity loss. If your battery has lost a lot of capacity in its first year but hasn’t performed enough cycles to reasonably correlate to the capacity loss, they’ll replace it under warranty.

Source: marco

DIGC202 Week 7 (incomplete)

IT’S TRUE!! If something does not concerns us, any plea or advert or campaign would not persuade to care any less than we already do(n’t).

MENGO - Malaysian Environmental NGOs

http://www.mengo.org/aboutus.shtml

MESSAGE

ASK
- DONATE
- SIGN A PETITION

TARGET

WHO IS BEING SPOKEN TO

WHAT ARE THEY BEING OFFERED MEMBERSHIP OF

DESIGN

INTERACTIVE?

SCOPE?

DICC202 Week 6: Nintendo Co. Ltd.

WHO - ownership, management, employees
Owned by Satori Iwata, Nintendo was founded in 1889 and was previously Marufuku Co., Ltd. who in 1951 later changed its name to Nintendo Playing Card Co., Ltd.; and then in 1963 to Nintendo Co., Ltd which is in use until now.

This is the list of the Board of Directors, with Satoru Iwata as the President and Representative Director, Tatsumi Kimishima as the Director, President of Nintendo of America Inc. and Director of Nintendo of America Inc, and so on.

WHAT - business, assets

Nintendo’s products and services:

• Nintendo DS - a handheld gaming device with a touch screen and microphone port that enables intuitive game play.
• Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection - a wireless Internet service for the Nintendo DS
• Nintendo DS Lite
• Touch! Generations
• Nintendogs - which allows the player to interact with virtual puppies on the screen
• Mario Kart DS
• Animal Crossing: Wild World
• Nintendo GameCube such as ‘Mario Party 7’ and ‘Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness’. Other than what it sells, Nintendo’s most precious asset is its employees. According to Smart Company, its average worker netts $US1.26 million in company profit.

This 2008 annual report shows the breakdown of which product under Nintendo sells more.

WHEN - history (recent history)

In 2002, Nintendo was taken over by a new management and its first task was to buck up in order to beat its opponents Sony and Microsoft.

WHERE - where are the assets, where is the business conducted. a geography question, where are their outlets

The company is headquartered in Kyoto, Japan.

Outlets are scattered around the Asia Pacific (Japan Korea Taiwan Australia New Zealand), the Americas (USA Canada, Mexico, Brazil), Europe (Netherlands Belgium Germany Spain France Italy Portuguese UK Holland Ireland)

WHY - political influence (to leverage political interest?), link ownership and political interest

SWOT - future: strength weakness opportunity threat

http://www.nintendo.com/corp/csr/index.jsp#environment

http://www.nintendo.com/corp/mission.jsp

Week 5: Jobs

1. Freelance photojournalist for Media MICE of the printing/publishing industry based in Malaysia and Singapore

• required language: English
• at least 2 years of working experience in the related field
• have work samples
• negotiable salary
• job is to take really good pictures of events/conferences

2. As a Blogger Liaison at for Nuffnang Malaysia

• PR skills as it requires dealing with bloggers
• able to organise events and parties
• pay is not mentioned
• preferably owns own transport

3. Assistant Producer for advertising agency Sirius Art:

• Willing to work independently
• 1- 2 years in film production work (preferable but not compulsory)
• Good writing and presentation skills
• Able to conceptualise, time-manage and plan for projects
• Knowledge in video softwares (eg. Final Cut)
• Negotiable salary

Also this link for my own understanding of the job scope of a producer.

Overall,  it seems that for every job, they demand some working experience in the related fields. That’s a lot of working I’ve got to do/cover before I can take on either one of those jobs!