MS Surface

What’s your pooping skill now? Low 20’s?

I have an average poop rate (APR) of 1.3 PD (per day). If Tom would let us have .sigs on this forum, I’d add my full stats. Go fiber!

Optical multi-wavelength poop?

Super toilet can flush anything. Yes. This is safe for work. If you watch the whole thing, it will make you smile.

And that, folks, is why you never buy a used tablet.

ANYWAYS, I did pre-order the Surface 2 pro, 128gb.

I am really anxious to see how much better the battery life is over my Surface 1 Pro, since I confirmed they do use LPDDR now and theoretically some kind of lower power mSATA – they did significantly more than just “rub some Haswell on it”.

  • interested to see how much thinner the new type cover is, because existing one is a bit chunky
  • backlight on the type cover will be great, and totally unexpected
  • two position kickstand will help with on-lap layout
  • but mostly I want more than 2 1/2 hours of freakin’ battery life, I am hoping for a solid doubling of battery life. Fuckin’ Ivy Bridge, man.

The additional power savings primarily come from windows 8.1.

I kept waiting for that video to show it flushing something challenging. Little objects, even lots of them, usually aren’t the problem. It’s the giant, um, salamis, yes, salamis that defeat most toilets.

I was not aware 8.1 had improved power management. Link?

2 and one-half salamis! FWOOSH!

Yeah I searched and I’m not finding anything on magical 8.1 power savings. I call bullshit. Can you provide a link?

Search for “connected standby”.

The surface 2 may have panel self refresh, which would be a major hardware power savings improvement. I don’t believe anyone asked MS about it.

So “panel self refresh” is what they’re calling ye olde hardware frame buffers now, eh?

It is indeed a hardware frame buffer, but I can’t recall anyone ever putting one on the display before.

Hmm. Nice in theory, but I have yet to read any reviews of Windows 8.1 showing any significant battery life wins. I guess we will see.

It’s a tablet/smartphone. Not like you can run a BNC cable to it. Besides, I’m sure there have been LCD controllers with an onboard buffer. At this level of integration it’s almost an issue of semantics regarding where the controller ends and the panel begins.

How sure are you? If everybody already did it, why did nobody call MS or LG or anyone on bruiting it about as a new innovation?

With your comments on the controller vs the panel, I think you’re missing the point of panel self refresh. This doesn’t save any battery at the display side-- what it does do is allow the CPU (or SoC in this case) to sit at a lower power state while the image on the display is static. Modern SoCs can switch power states incredibly quickly, so that is a tangible savings. Here’s Anandtech’s explanation.

@wumpus: I haven’t seen anybody comparing win8.0 vs win8.1 battery life with haswell either. Haswell ultrabooks just started coming out, and of course win8.1 is not officially available yet.

Because that totally happens every time an old technology is given a shiny new name, right?

Sure. Anandtech, the verge, etc, someone would call them on it. Nobody’s getting anything past Brian Klug.

I’m curious, I have a Surface Pro 1 and was wondering if it will be updated to Windows 8.1. I like the tablet but would like to find a portable 12 volt 4 amp battery to go along with it. I have a portable battery that will charge it while it’s off or in standby and would like a battery that will charge it while running.