Standard may help smother notebook fires

Springsteen said you can't start a fire with a spark, but for Apple Computer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and others, there wouldn't have been a spark to action with fires. The laptop vendors and others are working together in an IPC technical committee to devise standards for safety in lithion-ion batteries. They're reconsidering the arcane details of cell designs, chemistry, cabling and more, and they admit the agenda is flexible. As for the committee itself, you've heard of IEEE and ISO, but what's the IPC? It's the former Institute for Printed Circuits.

For more on batteries:
- read this eWeek article

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