Your Computer and Cell Phone Are Lying To You

Ant writes with a story from Dan's Data, which says that the battery meter and connection-strength displays in your portable electronics are lying to you, "and not just when they whisper to you in the night." Quoting: "Mobile phones, and most modern laptops, have signal strength and battery life displays. One or both of these displays has probably been the focus of all of your attention at one time or another. Neither display is actually telling you what you think it's telling you. The signal strength bars on a mobile phone or laptop do, at least, say something about how strong the local signal is. But they don't tell you the ratio between that signal and the inevitable, and often very considerable, noise that accompanies it ..."

Comments

Re:[Citation-Needed]

[amram9999]

I used to work for Motorola, and I can attest that the standard 3 bar battery gauge showed:

50% of the battery life at 3 bars
30% at 2 bars
15% at 1 bar
5% at 0 bars

And yes, this was customizable by the carrier to make it better or worse. Of course, this is hard to prove to the sceptics unless the software is open source.

There are numerous other technical reasons why the gauges might not be accurate, but this is a big factor.

Re:Pshaw

[element-o.p.]

After living in Alaska for nearly 20 years, I have found that if the road surface is so slick that braking is essentially nil, I can almost always stop the car and avoid an accident by gently nudging the curb with my tires. Unless you've already screwed up so badly that you are spinning out of control, there is almost always enough traction to change your direction of travel by a few degrees, and by rubbing your front tires against the curb, you can get enough traction to stop just about every time. I've only had to do this a couple of times when road conditions at an intersection were much worse than the conditions on the rest of the road, but it has always worked.