Why should I buy a Mac instead of buying a PC and dual-booting with Linux? The $600 extra cost attached to MacBook Pros (when compared to approximately equivalent Dell laptops) carries a lot more weight than GUI polish, in my book.
Did I say $600? Yes, that's what I've seen historically, but I just configured a Dell Inspiron 15 with approximately the same specs as the base MacBook Pro, and the Inspiron 15 is $1070 cheaper. (The Inspiron 15 has a slightly lower screen resolution, but a bigger hard drive.)
So... can you explain how, exactly, Apple's "more polished experience" is worth $1070?
I can think of a few reasons to install a Windows program in Linux, especially if that program doesn't have a Linux version.
* Commercial games, this should be obvious * MS Office, when certain features are required * Photoshop - The GIMP isn't always a good solution * Various random apps that work fine under Wine but aren't worth running a VM or rebooting into Windows for (e.g. various religious software)
And of course:
* Don't want to pay for Windows, but want/need one or more of the above Windows apps.
It's possible that you wouldn't install a Windows program in Linux, but don't assume that there's no valid reason to do so.
* x11-misc/googleearth
Latest version available: 4.2.205.5730
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of files: 22,507 kB
Homepage: http://earth.google.com/
Description: A 3D interface to the planet
License: googleearth MIT X11 SGI-B-1.1 openssl as-is ZLIB
And if you break one in a room with no ventilation (such as your average utility or storage room, where spare bulbs are likely to be stored)? How long should I stay out of *that* room? (Hint: it's more than 15 minutes.)
Oh, and the EPA site says you're supposed to air out the room again the next several times you vacuum, if you broke it on carpet. That can be a major inconvenience, especially if it's a high-traffic area like a living room.
Your "once in five years" claim is not reflected in my own experience with CFLs, so I remain skeptical.
But, as always, anecdotal evidence is sketchy at best, so YMMV.
Oh, and by the way, I have a pair of high-quality CFLs in my office, and I've never heard my wife complain about the lighting in there. It's only when I put the same bulbs in the living room that she complains.
Are all CFLs guaranteed to last X length of time, regardless of brand? My gut tells me that the ones that do are more expensive. Maybe I'm wrong; that's great. I've had enough $2.50 CFLs die on me in a few months (and enough $0.25 incandescents last years) that I'm still unconvinced I'd save money switching.
You can tell me "use the warranty" all you want, and you can claim that I don't know how they work if you wish (I didn't mention them; that doesn't mean I don't know how they work), but warranty returns have their own cost (in time, if nothing else) that should be considered. Maybe you go to the hardware store every other month; I might go once in 24 months.
I live in a half-basement apartment. I only have A/C in one room (the bedroom, a window unit). So the only bulbs that supposedly increase my cooling cost would be the ones in the bedroom, but those are rarely on for more than ten minutes a day, since I only turn them on to get ready for bed. In other words, my cooling costs are not affected by which light bulbs I use.
You'll notice that after I said my yearly savings would be -$0.96, I said I could buy three replacement incandescent bulbs and still come out ahead. No, they're not free, nor did I imply they were. I've said before that they cost $1 for 4.
You'll note that I've never said "CFLs are bad". I'm simply trying to show that it's not always a clear-cut situation.
It's great that your friend doesn't notice the difference. It doesn't change my situation - nor does it change my net loss if my wife wants to go to the doctor even a single time for purportedly CFL-induced headaches, much like your friend wanted to go to the hospital for migraines. Doctors cost more than the increased energy cost of incandescent bulbs, you know. In any case, all anecdotal evidence carries an implicit "YMMV" and doesn't prove anyone right or wrong.
Actually, yes, I would be, considering that the toxins found in various computer parts are not readily airborne, whereas the mercury in a CFL is.
How is not wanting to inhale mercury from a broken CFL "spreading fear and lies"? I may have been modded Flamebait, but that doesn't make me wrong.
If it matters, the EPA recommends leaving the room "for 15 minutes or more" after opening a window if you break a CFL - and doing so again the next several times you vacuum, if you broke it on carpet.
How long should I leave the room if it doesn't have windows? Would a few hours suffice? Do my earlier comments suddenly make sense?
Is the EPA a luddite organization spreading fear and lies?
(By the way, I'm a regular on slashdot, I'm a computer programmer by hobby and profession, and I enjoy tinkering with electronics in general. I'm hardly a luddite. If you're going to insult me, at least use your terms correctly.)
Ah, but finishing a basement is a relatively low one-time cost; a monthly energy bill is not. I'm willing to be that the total cost of all energy bills paid by my parents over the last fifteen years is much higher than the amount they spent finishing the basement.
(By the way, characterizing $160 as "a couple of dollars" is misleading at best, and you're assuming that none of those CFLs will burn out, which in a house with 65 lights could turn into a real monthly cost, as I pointed out earlier. Mmm, run-on sentences are fun.)
My point, which I've made elsewhere, is simply that there are other more glaring energy wasters than light bulbs (e.g. old refrigerators, space heaters, CRT TVs, etc.). In other words, I'm pointing out that this is less about energy savings and more about whether CFLs are a good replacement for incandescent bulbs (in aspects other than energy use).
Most of the bulbs in my house are 60W, not 75W, and I'm paying $0.09/kWh, which puts it at $4.04/year - which is still a savings, unless the bulb burns out just once during the year, at which point I've lost money (each bulb costs $2.50, remember). Let me say that again: a single CFL burn-out changes my total yearly savings from $1.54 ($4.04 - $2.50) to -$0.96! I can burn out three incandescents in the same time period and still come out ahead! Can you guarantee the CFL won't burn out within a year?
Oh, and the headaches? There's a reason I brought them up. You see, effective cost is a function of more than just monetary cost...
I didn't mean to justify the use of incandescent bulbs, I just meant to point out that if you were really concerned about wasted power, you'd be telling me to do one or more of the following:
Replace my refrigerator with an energy-efficient model (mine still has CFC warnings on it!)
Replace my dryer with an energy-efficient model
Replace my CRT TV with a more energy-efficient LCD TV, and/or don't watch it as much
Replace the ancient humidifier in my bedroom with a new, energy-efficient model
I see. You're assuming that because they have seven bedrooms, they must be rolling in money.
Let's do an experiment. Let's take a standard suburban house with an unfinished basement that cost $230k in 1995. It has a master bedroom and three other bedrooms. Now, save your spending money for five years, and then finish the basement. You now have three more bedrooms.
Look, you now have seven bedrooms and you didn't even have to rob a bank!
The vast majority of my electricity usage is not from light bulbs, despite what most pro-CFL people would have you believe. I really doubt I'd save more than a few dollars a month using CFLs, and when they cost $10 for 4...
Let's say I save $4/month after I spend $40 on the bulbs. That means it takes me 10 months to break even, assuming none of them burn out. (My apartment's power is crappy, so I bet they would, but let's ignore that for now.)
Now, would you care to put a monetary value on the headaches CFLs give my wife? If she decides to go to the doctor about it just once, I've spent significantly more than I would have sticking with incandescent bulbs. But even if she doesn't, are you so doggedly supportive of CFLs that you'd insist my wife live with headaches rather than use incandescent bulbs?
I'm not defending incandescent bulbs, I'm simply pointing out that it's not as clear-cut as some people say it is.
The utilities may not notice much, but if every home in the U.S. were saving $15/month on electricity, they'd have $15/month more to spend on other things (and you know they would...) so the economy could improve. Right?
$15 might not be a large number, but when you multiply that by 50 million households (random guess) that's $750 million dollars going into the economy that wasn't there before.
Of course, I'm not convinced the power savings are real, but I don't mind playing devil's advocate once in a while...
That's fine, until you break a CFL accidentally, and then suddenly it's not just mercury in your house, it's mercury in the air you breathe in your house, only this time in higher concentrations than it otherwise would be.
It's even worse if you *break* a CFL - you're supposed to open all the windows and leave the house for several hours until the mercury dust dissipates, so you don't get mercury poisoning.
Why, exactly, should I bring something like that into my house?
$40 is only 16 bulbs, if you go by the prices at my local grocery store. You must have a small house.
My parents' house, for example, has around 25 bulbs just on the main floor. The basement has around 20, and the top floor has around 20. That's $162.50 to replace them all, and with so many bulbs, how often is one going to need replacing? According to a quick google search I just did, some people see failure rates as high as 20% per month, if their wiring is bad. Now my parents' wiring isn't bad, but if the failure rate is just 5% per month, that means my parents would have to buy a new four-pack almost every month. That raises the cost by $10 per month, negating a large portion of the electricity savings.
The break even point isn't always as high as you think it is.
(By the way, before people start asking how anyone could have so many lights: three chandeliers on the main floor, in-ceiling lights in the kitchen, living room, family room, and most of the basement, seven bedrooms, and four bathrooms. It adds up.)
I have a hard time justifying spending $10 for four 60-watt-equivalent CFLs when I can get four 60W "regular" light bulbs for $1. Even if half of them burn out every month, I've still spent less than $10 in a year; in practice, I lose maybe one regular bulb a month. Sure, maybe my power bill is a little higher, but my TV uses more power than my light bulbs, and I leave that on practically all the time...
Furthermore, CFLs' lighting is different (it's whiter), and sometimes they flicker visibly (almost as if some cosmic GPU were rendering it at 10fps...). Maybe it's just a bad wiring job in the apartment. In any case, it gives my wife a headache.
This is exactly why I bought a Dell instead of a Macbook Pro two years ago. When I bought it, a slightly lower-spec MacBook Pro cost $600 more. It wasn't hard to make that decision.
On a related note, people complain that Dells aren't durable. They seem to forget that a computer is, in general, not as durable as your average college textbook, and should not be treated as such. Why spend $600 more for durability when you can simply avoid throwing your laptop across the room? (Obviously I'm ignoring the needs of people who take their laptops into rough environmental conditions, so no need to bring that up. But Macbooks probably aren't the most desirable for those conditions anyway.)
So you're arguing against gzipping websites? You realize webservers can decide whether or not to gzip a file based on what browser the user is running, right? All Google needs to do is have their webserver not gzip the file if the user is running a sufficiently old IE6.
This is precisely the kind of thing that makes me annoyed with people in general... if people didn't do this all the time (complain about the dike leaking a drip when six feet over there's a ten-foot hole) I wouldn't be so anti-social.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should I buy a Mac instead of buying a PC and dual-booting with Linux? The $600 extra cost attached to MacBook Pros (when compared to approximately equivalent Dell laptops) carries a lot more weight than GUI polish, in my book.
Did I say $600? Yes, that's what I've seen historically, but I just configured a Dell Inspiron 15 with approximately the same specs as the base MacBook Pro, and the Inspiron 15 is $1070 cheaper. (The Inspiron 15 has a slightly lower screen resolution, but a bigger hard drive.)
So... can you explain how, exactly, Apple's "more polished experience" is worth $1070?
I can think of a few reasons to install a Windows program in Linux, especially if that program doesn't have a Linux version.
* Commercial games, this should be obvious
* MS Office, when certain features are required
* Photoshop - The GIMP isn't always a good solution
* Various random apps that work fine under Wine but aren't worth running a VM or rebooting into Windows for (e.g. various religious software)
And of course:
* Don't want to pay for Windows, but want/need one or more of the above Windows apps.
It's possible that you wouldn't install a Windows program in Linux, but don't assume that there's no valid reason to do so.
heron@heron6400 ~ $ emerge --search googleearth
Searching...
[ Results for search key : googleearth ]
[ Applications found : 1 ]
* x11-misc/googleearth
Latest version available: 4.2.205.5730
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of files: 22,507 kB
Homepage: http://earth.google.com/
Description: A 3D interface to the planet
License: googleearth MIT X11 SGI-B-1.1 openssl as-is ZLIB
And if you break one in a room with no ventilation (such as your average utility or storage room, where spare bulbs are likely to be stored)? How long should I stay out of *that* room? (Hint: it's more than 15 minutes.)
Oh, and the EPA site says you're supposed to air out the room again the next several times you vacuum, if you broke it on carpet. That can be a major inconvenience, especially if it's a high-traffic area like a living room.
Your "once in five years" claim is not reflected in my own experience with CFLs, so I remain skeptical.
But, as always, anecdotal evidence is sketchy at best, so YMMV.
Oh, and by the way, I have a pair of high-quality CFLs in my office, and I've never heard my wife complain about the lighting in there. It's only when I put the same bulbs in the living room that she complains.
Are all CFLs guaranteed to last X length of time, regardless of brand? My gut tells me that the ones that do are more expensive. Maybe I'm wrong; that's great. I've had enough $2.50 CFLs die on me in a few months (and enough $0.25 incandescents last years) that I'm still unconvinced I'd save money switching.
You can tell me "use the warranty" all you want, and you can claim that I don't know how they work if you wish (I didn't mention them; that doesn't mean I don't know how they work), but warranty returns have their own cost (in time, if nothing else) that should be considered. Maybe you go to the hardware store every other month; I might go once in 24 months.
I live in a half-basement apartment. I only have A/C in one room (the bedroom, a window unit). So the only bulbs that supposedly increase my cooling cost would be the ones in the bedroom, but those are rarely on for more than ten minutes a day, since I only turn them on to get ready for bed. In other words, my cooling costs are not affected by which light bulbs I use.
You'll notice that after I said my yearly savings would be -$0.96, I said I could buy three replacement incandescent bulbs and still come out ahead. No, they're not free, nor did I imply they were. I've said before that they cost $1 for 4.
You'll note that I've never said "CFLs are bad". I'm simply trying to show that it's not always a clear-cut situation.
It's great that your friend doesn't notice the difference. It doesn't change my situation - nor does it change my net loss if my wife wants to go to the doctor even a single time for purportedly CFL-induced headaches, much like your friend wanted to go to the hospital for migraines. Doctors cost more than the increased energy cost of incandescent bulbs, you know. In any case, all anecdotal evidence carries an implicit "YMMV" and doesn't prove anyone right or wrong.
Actually, yes, I would be, considering that the toxins found in various computer parts are not readily airborne, whereas the mercury in a CFL is.
How is not wanting to inhale mercury from a broken CFL "spreading fear and lies"? I may have been modded Flamebait, but that doesn't make me wrong.
If it matters, the EPA recommends leaving the room "for 15 minutes or more" after opening a window if you break a CFL - and doing so again the next several times you vacuum, if you broke it on carpet.
How long should I leave the room if it doesn't have windows? Would a few hours suffice? Do my earlier comments suddenly make sense?
Is the EPA a luddite organization spreading fear and lies?
(By the way, I'm a regular on slashdot, I'm a computer programmer by hobby and profession, and I enjoy tinkering with electronics in general. I'm hardly a luddite. If you're going to insult me, at least use your terms correctly.)
Ah, but finishing a basement is a relatively low one-time cost; a monthly energy bill is not. I'm willing to be that the total cost of all energy bills paid by my parents over the last fifteen years is much higher than the amount they spent finishing the basement.
(By the way, characterizing $160 as "a couple of dollars" is misleading at best, and you're assuming that none of those CFLs will burn out, which in a house with 65 lights could turn into a real monthly cost, as I pointed out earlier. Mmm, run-on sentences are fun.)
My point, which I've made elsewhere, is simply that there are other more glaring energy wasters than light bulbs (e.g. old refrigerators, space heaters, CRT TVs, etc.). In other words, I'm pointing out that this is less about energy savings and more about whether CFLs are a good replacement for incandescent bulbs (in aspects other than energy use).
Most of the bulbs in my house are 60W, not 75W, and I'm paying $0.09/kWh, which puts it at $4.04/year - which is still a savings, unless the bulb burns out just once during the year, at which point I've lost money (each bulb costs $2.50, remember). Let me say that again: a single CFL burn-out changes my total yearly savings from $1.54 ($4.04 - $2.50) to -$0.96! I can burn out three incandescents in the same time period and still come out ahead! Can you guarantee the CFL won't burn out within a year?
Oh, and the headaches? There's a reason I brought them up. You see, effective cost is a function of more than just monetary cost...
I didn't mean to justify the use of incandescent bulbs, I just meant to point out that if you were really concerned about wasted power, you'd be telling me to do one or more of the following:
etc etc.
See my reply to Threni above. When they bought it, it only had four bedrooms. It's a standard house in the middle of suburbia.
Why do people make assumptions like that? *sigh*
Would you be willing to break a CFL right next to your face and take a deep breath?
I see. You're assuming that because they have seven bedrooms, they must be rolling in money.
Let's do an experiment. Let's take a standard suburban house with an unfinished basement that cost $230k in 1995. It has a master bedroom and three other bedrooms. Now, save your spending money for five years, and then finish the basement. You now have three more bedrooms.
Look, you now have seven bedrooms and you didn't even have to rob a bank!
Stop being an idiot.
The vast majority of my electricity usage is not from light bulbs, despite what most pro-CFL people would have you believe. I really doubt I'd save more than a few dollars a month using CFLs, and when they cost $10 for 4...
Let's say I save $4/month after I spend $40 on the bulbs. That means it takes me 10 months to break even, assuming none of them burn out. (My apartment's power is crappy, so I bet they would, but let's ignore that for now.)
Now, would you care to put a monetary value on the headaches CFLs give my wife? If she decides to go to the doctor about it just once, I've spent significantly more than I would have sticking with incandescent bulbs. But even if she doesn't, are you so doggedly supportive of CFLs that you'd insist my wife live with headaches rather than use incandescent bulbs?
I'm not defending incandescent bulbs, I'm simply pointing out that it's not as clear-cut as some people say it is.
The utilities may not notice much, but if every home in the U.S. were saving $15/month on electricity, they'd have $15/month more to spend on other things (and you know they would...) so the economy could improve. Right?
$15 might not be a large number, but when you multiply that by 50 million households (random guess) that's $750 million dollars going into the economy that wasn't there before.
Of course, I'm not convinced the power savings are real, but I don't mind playing devil's advocate once in a while...
That's fine, until you break a CFL accidentally, and then suddenly it's not just mercury in your house, it's mercury in the air you breathe in your house, only this time in higher concentrations than it otherwise would be.
Yeah, sounds like a great idea to me.
It's even worse if you *break* a CFL - you're supposed to open all the windows and leave the house for several hours until the mercury dust dissipates, so you don't get mercury poisoning.
Why, exactly, should I bring something like that into my house?
$40 is only 16 bulbs, if you go by the prices at my local grocery store. You must have a small house.
My parents' house, for example, has around 25 bulbs just on the main floor. The basement has around 20, and the top floor has around 20. That's $162.50 to replace them all, and with so many bulbs, how often is one going to need replacing? According to a quick google search I just did, some people see failure rates as high as 20% per month, if their wiring is bad. Now my parents' wiring isn't bad, but if the failure rate is just 5% per month, that means my parents would have to buy a new four-pack almost every month. That raises the cost by $10 per month, negating a large portion of the electricity savings.
The break even point isn't always as high as you think it is.
(By the way, before people start asking how anyone could have so many lights: three chandeliers on the main floor, in-ceiling lights in the kitchen, living room, family room, and most of the basement, seven bedrooms, and four bathrooms. It adds up.)
I have a hard time justifying spending $10 for four 60-watt-equivalent CFLs when I can get four 60W "regular" light bulbs for $1. Even if half of them burn out every month, I've still spent less than $10 in a year; in practice, I lose maybe one regular bulb a month. Sure, maybe my power bill is a little higher, but my TV uses more power than my light bulbs, and I leave that on practically all the time...
Furthermore, CFLs' lighting is different (it's whiter), and sometimes they flicker visibly (almost as if some cosmic GPU were rendering it at 10fps...). Maybe it's just a bad wiring job in the apartment. In any case, it gives my wife a headache.
The point being, I can't really commit to CFLs.
Perhaps he means a Pentium D 3.0 GHz? If that's the case, it wouldn't surprise me to hear that it's not very good at HD.
Remember, kids, "dual core" and "Core [2] Duo" are not the same thing.
This is exactly why I bought a Dell instead of a Macbook Pro two years ago. When I bought it, a slightly lower-spec MacBook Pro cost $600 more. It wasn't hard to make that decision.
On a related note, people complain that Dells aren't durable. They seem to forget that a computer is, in general, not as durable as your average college textbook, and should not be treated as such. Why spend $600 more for durability when you can simply avoid throwing your laptop across the room? (Obviously I'm ignoring the needs of people who take their laptops into rough environmental conditions, so no need to bring that up. But Macbooks probably aren't the most desirable for those conditions anyway.)
So you're arguing against gzipping websites? You realize webservers can decide whether or not to gzip a file based on what browser the user is running, right? All Google needs to do is have their webserver not gzip the file if the user is running a sufficiently old IE6.
This is precisely the kind of thing that makes me annoyed with people in general... if people didn't do this all the time (complain about the dike leaking a drip when six feet over there's a ten-foot hole) I wouldn't be so anti-social.