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Keep On Running

September 10th, 2008 · Posted by Skuds in Technology · No Comments · Technology

One of the things that have always made laptops an unattractive proposition for me is the battery life.  Every leap forward in battery technology has been matched by ever more power-hungry components so that the average laptop now packs up even quicker than the first ones did.  They were supposed to offer freedom to move around, and are still advertised with images of people using them in the middle of a field or on a beach butin reality you have to make sure you are near a plug socket most of the time.  Many of them won’t even last for the duration of a medium-haul flight, so the new HP EliteBook 6390p looks encouraging.

The promise is of 24-hour battery life, which is what I always thought it should be and why laptops have never appealed too much, but there appear to be several catches.  For a start it won’t be cheap.  I don’t know how expensive it will be because its not in the shops yet – just in press releases – but to get the long battery life you have to upgrade the base model with a special power-efficient screen, an 80GB solid stade disk drive and buy the special long-life battery.  I’m guessing that just the cost of those three optional extras will be more than gettnig a basic laptop.

There is no indication of whether the machine will take 24 hours of normal use, or whether the maximum time depends on things like turning wireless cards off, but it is a move in the right direction.  If the idea lodges in the collective mind of the buying public that 24-hour battery life is possible it will become less acceptable for manufacturers to keep churning out machines that die after three or four hours.

But all that is not what made me sit up and take notice of the story.  What really grabbed my attention was this quote from an Intel suit:

Intel architected its new line of high-performance solid-state drives specifically to bring a new level of performance and reliability to the computing platform and make significant impact to the way people use their PCs

Since when has “architected” been a real word?  Is there a dictionary in the world that has architect listed as a verb?   Should we follow this trend and refer to GM crops as biologisted plants?  Looked at some ways, it makes sense, but it’s still an inelegant construct. Even more distressing is that Google already has 747,000 examples of the word in use…

I know we turn professions or jobs into verbs all the time – you can referee something, doctor something, author something, engineer something or tailor something, and maybe they all sounded as awkward and grating the first time they were used that way but I still think architecting and architectured are pushing it a bit.  Or is it just me?

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