On Thursday 28 August 2008 23:17, jdd sur free wrote:
Rodney Baker a écrit :
Actually, some laptops (notably ThinkPads) do have accelerometers on board to detect the case of the laptop being dropped and park the heads accordingly.
are you joking? in case of drop down, with ~80g acceleration, no head mechanism will be fast enough to park any head.
The detect the start of the fall, of course. The transition from 1G (stationary) to 0G (falling). Long before the device hits the ground, the heads are away from the platter and parked.
if there is an accelerometer, there must be an other use
Lots of laptops have accelerometers, now. The newer MacBooks have them and they can be accessed by user-level software leading some to write games of the variety "roll the ball through the maze" and whatnot. They're also used as motion detectors for theft alarms that can trigger a lock-down, noise-making and whatnot. I'm not sure how effective that would be, but it shows that people are imaginative about what you can do with different kinds of sensors. In the original IBM adds they repeated the phrase "it braces for impact" several times. Hardly technically apt, but I suppose it gets the idea across to the masses of those who work in the same garb as the guys in that ad (suit and tie).
jdd
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org