[Sugar-devel] automatic backlight control

[C. Scott Ananian]

Just to reinforce a few points which maybe might not be clear to
people who haven't played with the new hardware:

1) the switch point is set that *you cannot tell when we turn the
backlight off*.  Ie, the threshold is so high that by the time we turn
it off, you couldn't never have told whether the backlight was on or
not.  This is very different from the "auto dim" feature in Macs, for
example.  (And it's the primary reason why the switch to monochrome
was so visible -- you couldn't tell that we were turning the backlight
on and off, you could only tell that the images on the display were
shifting greyscale values intermittently for no obvious reason.)

2) this is a very important power-saving feature for young kids, who
generally aren't savvy enough to manually do all these measures which
prolong battery life.  So, even if "power tweakers" might want a
little more control, it's important to make the default behavior as
power-friendly as possible (especially as we move further into
deployments where access to power is a big big deal).  We should keep
in mind the trade-offs here.

  --scott

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