Idle

Idle (idling) is a term which generally refers to a lack of motion and/or energy.

Uses

In describing a person or machine, idle means the act of nothing or no work (for example: "John Smith is an idle person"). This is a person who spends his days doing nothing could be said to be "idly passing his days." (For example: Mary has been idle on her instant messenger account for hours.) A computer processor or communication circuit is described as idle when it is not being used by any program, application or message. Similarly, an engine of an automobile may be described as idle when it is running only to sustain its running (not doing any useful work), this is also called the tickover (see idle).

Idleness as dependent upon cultural norms

Typically, when one describes a machine as idle, it is an objective statement regarding its current state. However, when used to describe a person, idle typically carries a negative connotation, with the assumption that the person is wasting their time by doing nothing of value.

BatteryMAX (idle detection)

BatteryMAX is an Idle Detection System used for computer power management developed at Digital Research, Inc.'s European Development Centre (EDC) in Hungerford, UK. It was invented by British borne engineers Roger Gross and John Constant in August 1989 and was first released with DR DOS 5.0. It was created to address the new genre of portable personal computers (lap-tops) which ran from battery power. As such, it was also an integral part of Novell's PalmDOS 1.0 operating system tailored for early palmtops in 1992.

Description

Power saving in laptop computers traditionally relied on hardware inactivity timers to determine whether a computer was idle. It would typically take several minutes before the computer could identify idle behavior and switch to a lower power consumption state. By monitoring software applications from within the operating system, BatteryMAX is able to reduce the time taken to detect idle behavior from minutes to microseconds. Moreover it can switch power states around 20 times a second between a user's keystrokes. The technique was named Dynamic Idle Detection and includes halting, or stopping the CPU for periods of just a few microseconds until a hardware event occurs to restart it.

Idle (disambiguation)

Idle generally refers to a lack of motion or energy.

Idle may also refer to:

People

Places

Technology