You're lucky. Most of the time, she doesn't even show up, because the eBay pimp's account was stolen from some guy in Cleveland. And of course, PayPal's Terms of Service ensure that you won't get your money back....:-D
After all, smoking is known to cause lung cancer, even though smoke is also non-ionizing.
Actually, cigarette smoke is quite often contaminated with Polonium-210. Polonium-210 is an alpha particle emitter, and alpha particles are considered to be ionizing radiation. For a better example, try asbestos.
Causation definitely implies correlation. so I don't think contrapositive was the word you're looking for. If a statement is true, then its contrapositive is also true, by definition.
Lack of correlation is strong evidence of lack of causation, but the inverse---correlation being strong evidence of causation---is not necessarily true.
That said, you're missing the point of that statement. Other studies have established correlation. Therefore, lack of correlation in this study might be the result of no causation, or it might be that some people are affected by cell phone radiation, but not Scandinavians and/or that the particular cell phone technologies used in Scandinavian countries are different in some way. Even something as simple as tower gain settings could make a difference.
I disagree. With compressed files, it's even more important. Compression and dense binary formats are precisely the reason that ECC on files is useful. A one-bit error in a text file does not render the entire file unreadable. A one-bit error in an XML file might, but can be easily detected with xmllint and fixed.
By contrast, a one-bit error in a run-length-encoded file format like JPEG causes the entire rest of the file to be unusable. And even if you stopped using run-length coding, a one-bit header in the right place causes an entire block to be scaled wrong, though this is more easily repaired.
Similarly, break an I-frame in an MPEG stream and you've just corrupted several seconds of video.
The maximum power consumption of a quad G5, including CPUs, chipset, etc. is about 550W in the stock configuration (no extra RAM, no second HD, etc.). So the GP's number is high, but not by nearly as much as you think. I actually had to buy a separate UPS for just the CPU, and when that smoked (literally) after a couple of years, I never replaced it.
As an aside, IMHO, manufacturers of desktop CPUs should provide a 12VDC input and a charge circuit capable of recharging your choice of sealed motorcycle or car battery, complete with a trickle charge mode and an automatic shutoff designed to allow at least a 5% sag before the charge circuit kicks back in. It would cost a tenth as much as a UPS (no high current inverter circuit needed, mass-produced off-the-shelf batteries from Wal-Mart instead of custom batteries specific to a given UPS model, no redundant voltage step-down hardware, etc.) and wouldn't constantly burn out batteries every two years like most UPSes do, assuming they designed the charge circuit correctly.
1. I never said heat would break the lamp itself. I said that heat can fry the circuitry in the base of a CFL. The fact that you've never observed early failure from CFL heat death doesn't mean it doesn't occur. The Energy Star website agrees with me that this is a problem with at least some CFLs. There's your citation.
2. I certainly did not intend to imply that LEDs could not be used in refrigerators. I intended for the refrigerator part to be just about CFLs and for the oven part to be about both CFLs and LEDs. Sorry if that wasn't clear. The epoxy shell of LEDs would almost certainly melt in ovens (Epoxy apparently melts at about 375 degrees F), and although a fluorescent tube might survive, provided the ballast were located elsewhere, such an installation would require significant modifications to the oven, making it impractical to eliminate this use for the foreseeable future. And of course, when it comes to refrigerators, fluorescent tubes don't appreciate extreme cold, though LEDs could conceivably be used there, provided that the rapid temperature swings when they come on don't cause the solder joints to crack too quickly. I'd probably want to do some experimentation before I said LEDs would be fine there, but it's quite possible that they'd be fine.
3. LED-based bicycle lights and flashlights are a largely unrelated subject. These devices do not use any voltage conversion except possibly a current limiting resistor in series with the LED. The parts that are problematic in terms of requiring adequate ventilation don't exist in those devices because you're starting with DC instead of AC.
4. The failure mode of CFLs dimming is just one of several failure modes that these bulbs can exhibit. Other failure modes include the flicker of death (when the tube won't quite come on) and the electrolytic big bang (where the capacitor in the charge pump blow and the light fails to illuminate entirely). I don't have any statistics on the frequency of these failure modes. It would be an interesting bit of information to have. You know, now that I think about it, it might not be possible to get the flicker of death with CFLs because of the way their ballasts are designed. So it may just be the two failure modes---fading in brightness or suddenly going dead (or fading in brightness and then suddenly going dead).
5. I'm assuming when you said that your lights don't contain electrolytic capacitors, you meant that you spent more money to use film or ceramic caps instead. Unfortunately, most mass-produced devices use mostly electrolytic caps whenever they can because they are cheaper. Expecting your design decisions to be the norm is like expecting people not to eat.
If you don't use any capacitors at all, then how precisely to you generate anything approaching filtered DC without capacitors? And if you say that you use a full wave bridge without any smoothing caps like those @$&% LED Christmas lights that flicker obnoxiously as the light pulsing interacts with the facets on the bulb, I'm going to have to hurt you.:-D
The LEDs, no, but how are you going to get anything approaching regulated DC from a 110VAC or 220VAC line without capacitors? The LED-based lamps for buildings are almost certain to contain electrolytic caps. They're going to build it as cheaply as possible, which probably means doing a half-wave or full-wave bridge followed by a line voltage (110VAC or 220VAC) smoothing capacitor, followed by a whole bunch of LEDs wired in series so you can avoid the current limiting resistor that would otherwise waste power. At least I think you can do it that way. I can't say I've ever tried it. Certainly seems to work well enough for Christmas lights (except that they omit the smoothing capacitor, so you get a lovely 60 Hz jitter).
Now I'll grant you that it's probably not getting beaten on as hard as a capacitor in a charge pump circuit....:-)
Yeah. Using 58 watts instead of 100. If this is a cheap CFL, the power factor can be as bad as 0.5, which mean the real power consumption (the load on the grid) could actually be slightly *more* than the incandescent (116VA instead of 100VA).
And if you use halogen bulbs instead of plain incandescent bulbs, the CFLs look even worse by comparison....
I meant more similar in terms of having an external ballast driving the bulb rather than trying to step the AC up to a higher voltage inside the base of the bulb. At least I believe that sodium/mercury bulbs are not internally ballasted.
I assume by "control gear", you're talking about a charge pump? Yeah, I've seen those. The only problem with them is that you're beating the living crap out of the capacitor, and assuming it's electrolytic (cheap), if it isn't in a reasonably sized air space, you eventually get electrolyte failure and it pops like a firecracker, leaking corrosive goo out everywhere. Case in point, the graphite Airport Base Station from a few years back.
If the enclosure is big enough and the parts have large enough tolerance, you're fine. Sadly, far too many electronic devices these days seem to be designed with inadequate tolerances....
Well, I was just going by the specs from cpu-world.com for the chips as far as figuring out the maximum power it can dissipate. Presumably those are actual published specs from Intel. I have no idea what conditions are required to make it actually dissipate that much heat.:-)
With regards to color vs energy, CFLs and white LEDs use a phoshpor to reradiate a broader color spectrum. The efficacy losses due to light outside of your visual spectrum are a very small fraction of the total output. While your comments with regard to color quality vs aesthetics are important, you assumptions about color vs efficacy are more or less false.
All I can tell you is that my experience with CFLs has consistently been that equivalently sized CFLs seemed perceptibly brighter when I looked out at the room but caused greater difficulty making out detail, e.g. for reading. Doubling the amount of CFL-produced light always fixes this, but then there went the energy savings.
It's not the LEDs that fail. It's the circuitry needed to step down from 110VAC or 220VAC to single-digit VDC that fails. The alternative to that is using a hack like LED Christmas lights do, but then you get a horrible 60 Hz flicker.
That is NOT a compact fluorescent bulb. They don't usually work the same way. A straight tube bulb generally uses a simple transformer to step the voltage up. A CFL is invariably a high frequency design that uses a charge pump or similar because the component cost is cheaper and the size of the CFL base won't hold a transformer.
Further, as soon as you talk about a long tube design, you've completely missed the point. The limited volume of air inside the enclosed space is what causes the charge pump circuit to fail. Compared with one of those globe lamps above your door, a long tube enclosure is freaking *huge* volumetrically.
What does this have to do with a discussion of CFLs? Yes, sodium and mercury vapor lights are relatives of fluorescent tubes, but only because they both use an electrical arc. They have more in common with the long-tube-style fluorescent bulbs than they do with CFLs.
The logical fallacy is only because the quote has gotten distorted severely over the years. The original saying, translated to English from Old French, reads "Bad workers will never find a good tool." This version makes much more sense.
My money would be on electrolytic capacitors. They don't like heat much at all, and have a tendency to fail catastrophically when they get too warm and dry out. They're the #1 cause of electronics failures, and you're unlikely to see CFLs or LEDs without electrolytic caps in them. Wrap that in a tight thermal envelope like a closed glass sphere around a light fixture, and the heat dissipation of the voltage converter circuits (up for CFLs, down for LEDs) alone would be enough to fry electrolytic caps in short order.
That said, you could also be running into solder joints breaking from thermal stress for the same reason. Either way, the fatal flaw for all of these new kinds of lighting is that they are so much more complicated in their design than incandescent bulbs.
The problem with all these calculations is that they're crap, and not just because they didn't factor in breakage. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
They forgot to take into account that the lumen is in many ways a subjective measurement when different light types are involved, as any true measurement of brightness perception must necessarily depend not only on the light source, but also on the environment around it. First, different people's eyes may perceive light differently, so there is no one true measure of how bright people perceive a light source when it is at a particular frequency. Second, if I am trying to look at something whose colors happen to fall between the characteristic wavelengths of the phosphors in a fluorescent bulb, it can take several times as many lumens to achieve the same perceived brightness as with a continuous spectrum. This is why I'm always horrified by stores selling clothing under fluorescent light. It's complete fiction in terms of color perception.
They also failed to take into account the fact that CFLs become dramatically dimmer before they fail, unlike modern incandescent blubs. If you care at all about the amount of light, count on having to either swap bulbs out at a faster rate (thus increasing the up-front cost) or turning on more lights than you otherwise would (thus increasing the energy cost). Thus, it is likely that if you look at all the factors involved, CFLs are not significantly more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs, all while producing light that is less pleasing, causing headaches, depression, and other negative health effects, and costing a heck of a lot more. Divide this by the power factor to find out the actual load on the power grid, and you may well find that incandescents are actually more efficient, depending on the circumstances.
But by far, the biggest problem with these studies is that they universally fail to take into account all the places where neither CFL nor LED bulbs can be used at all. Start with outdoor lighting. Outdoor lights, by their very nature, must be sealed. CFLs contain lots of electronic components, including electrolytic capacitors. In a sealed enclosure, these parts can heat up beyond the thermal limits of their components within minutes. Therefore, for outdoor use, you should not use CFLs, period. (Yes, some manufacturers claim that their bulbs can be used outdoors in certain circumstances, but if you install them, be aware that the bulbs will fail much, much sooner than their rated lifespan would suggest, and if it is cold out, you should expect to have no light at all; in short, unless you life in California or Oregon, you shouldn't seriously consider CFLs as a viable outdoor light source.)
LED lamps will almost certainly have the same thermal failure problems for precisely the same reason. Electronic circuits are simply not designed to operate at such high temperatures, and when you try to use them that way, they will fail much, much sooner than they ordinarily would. This use can make incandescent bulbs seem positively cheap by comparison.
Likewise, ovens, refrigerators, etc. cannot use any of these types of lights because fluorescent tubes are highly sensitive to temperature extremes and LEDs are AFAIK always made of plastic and would melt. Perhaps somebody could design one with a solid glass lens, but even still, I doubt they would survive the temperature swings of an oven for very long.
http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.htm gives a great explanation of pretty much everything wrong with these sorts of "studies". I'm pretty fed up with the same tired B.S. arguments being trotted out by manufacturers to try to convince people to buy CFLs and LED lights. They look ugly, their light is ugly, and they have a high up-front cost. I'd rather wait for some of these new incandescent bulb technologies to exceed the efficiency targets instead.
You're talking about the TDP, not the actual maximum amount of heat output. We were talking about how fast a CPU can run with speed stepping (and presumably all other power management) disabled inside a laptop case. When you're talking about a CPU with no thermal management, the TDP number no longer applies because that number assumes at least a partially power-managed CPU with a reasonable workload, not a CPU running at full clock speed with maximum core voltage, power management disabled, and no way to throttle the CPU if the workload becomes absurd (a tightly rolled loop that keeps all the pipelines full without accessing RAM, for example).
To give you some more accurate numbers to work with, the maximum thermal dissipation on some mobile Core 2 Duo CPUs can be as high as 57W for the CPU itself. So assuming your cooling system is designed based on the TDP number (and given that 99% of people will not disable power management, this seems like a reasonable assumption). the maximum thermal output is more than 50% higher than your cooling system can handle. At best, that means that if you design for TDP, a 2 GHz CPU can only run at a maximum of 1.33 GHz safely with power management disabled. Add a little wiggle room as a safety margin, and locking the clock at 1 GHz doesn't seem at all unreasonable. Running it at 2 GHz is going to fail, and by that, I mean it will fail catastrophically....
Put another way, working with the real maximum figures instead of the TDP, the heat dissipation numbers are more than double your 35W number. Add 50-57W for the mobile CPU as a worst case plus at least 5W for the chipset plus 12W for the GPU, and you're talking about dissipating potentially a whopping 75W, all within a few square inches of board space. That's hot, hot, hot.
Regarding the problem with the speed getting reduced massively, after thinking about it further, I have a hunch that they either made the CPU and GPU share a heat sink or put a chipset heat sensor too close to the GPU's heat pipe/spreader. Having a CPU-related thermal sensor too close to a hot GPU could easily explain this behavior in its entirety.
Almost certainly. I doubt any of the modern laptops can run Core 2 Duo CPUs at full throttle without it going supernova. Laptops are just plain too thin to dissipate that much heat through mere air cooling of CPU heat sinks. The only reason we have laptops that come anywhere close to this level of performance is because the cores are going to be in an idle state 90% of the time and they can throttle the bajeezus out of them if they get too hot when you run them too hard for too long. That said, this report suggests two things:
Windows throttling is way too infrequent and not nearly aggressive enough at the onset, leading to way-too-aggressive throttling later on.
The NVIDIA graphics drivers are broken and are throttling the CPU instead of the GPU upon exceeding thermal limits (which are themselves way too low, probably as a result of paranoia over the solder bump problems in previous generations of NVIDIA GPUs).
Of these, the second one is the more significant problem.
Sounds like a typo. There's no way a laptop would choke at 60 degrees Fahrenheit. That would make it never run at any usable speed, for all practical purposes. Even a few seconds after you wake the thing up, it's going to be at least a few degrees over ambient, which puts the bottom of the typical operating range immediately after waking from sleep somewhere in the upper 70s or lower 80s Fahrenheit unless you're running it outdoors during the winter. 60C is about 140 degrees Fahrenheit and is a much more plausible temperature for hardware to start acting up.
In this regard, AdBlock makes a significant difference if you tell it to not download ads at all, but I am not comfortable with denying revenue streams to the websites I visit, after all, they are providing me with a service I enjoy, for free.
That's why I use a targetted DNS black hole instead. I don't block ads until they cause a noticeable disruption in my browsing behavior. As soon as they add more than a second or so to a page load time, that particular ad server gets blocked permanently, and my caching DNS server returns a bogus response directed at 127.0.0.1 or a host not found, depending on the subdomain/host part. All of the various google-analytics domains are on my block list because they consistently fail to have adequate performance. Similarly, most of the larger ad networks are blocked for the same reason. The smaller ad networks, which usually have a more sane load average per server, are generally not blocked until they get too big for their breeches. This serves three purposes: reduces page load times, punishes ad servers that have slow performance, and promotes competition by encouraging the use of smaller ad networks.
Also, they really need to fix this summary. it should be "iPhone3,1", not "iPhone 3.1". The first is the format for an Apple product identifier. The second is likely to be confused with an iPhone OS version number that is already shipping to the general public and has been for several months.
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You're lucky. Most of the time, she doesn't even show up, because the eBay pimp's account was stolen from some guy in Cleveland. And of course, PayPal's Terms of Service ensure that you won't get your money back.... :-D
Actually, cigarette smoke is quite often contaminated with Polonium-210. Polonium-210 is an alpha particle emitter, and alpha particles are considered to be ionizing radiation. For a better example, try asbestos.
Causation definitely implies correlation. so I don't think contrapositive was the word you're looking for. If a statement is true, then its contrapositive is also true, by definition.
Lack of correlation is strong evidence of lack of causation, but the inverse---correlation being strong evidence of causation---is not necessarily true.
That said, you're missing the point of that statement. Other studies have established correlation. Therefore, lack of correlation in this study might be the result of no causation, or it might be that some people are affected by cell phone radiation, but not Scandinavians and/or that the particular cell phone technologies used in Scandinavian countries are different in some way. Even something as simple as tower gain settings could make a difference.
I disagree. With compressed files, it's even more important. Compression and dense binary formats are precisely the reason that ECC on files is useful. A one-bit error in a text file does not render the entire file unreadable. A one-bit error in an XML file might, but can be easily detected with xmllint and fixed.
By contrast, a one-bit error in a run-length-encoded file format like JPEG causes the entire rest of the file to be unusable. And even if you stopped using run-length coding, a one-bit header in the right place causes an entire block to be scaled wrong, though this is more easily repaired.
Similarly, break an I-frame in an MPEG stream and you've just corrupted several seconds of video.
The maximum power consumption of a quad G5, including CPUs, chipset, etc. is about 550W in the stock configuration (no extra RAM, no second HD, etc.). So the GP's number is high, but not by nearly as much as you think. I actually had to buy a separate UPS for just the CPU, and when that smoked (literally) after a couple of years, I never replaced it.
As an aside, IMHO, manufacturers of desktop CPUs should provide a 12VDC input and a charge circuit capable of recharging your choice of sealed motorcycle or car battery, complete with a trickle charge mode and an automatic shutoff designed to allow at least a 5% sag before the charge circuit kicks back in. It would cost a tenth as much as a UPS (no high current inverter circuit needed, mass-produced off-the-shelf batteries from Wal-Mart instead of custom batteries specific to a given UPS model, no redundant voltage step-down hardware, etc.) and wouldn't constantly burn out batteries every two years like most UPSes do, assuming they designed the charge circuit correctly.
1. I never said heat would break the lamp itself. I said that heat can fry the circuitry in the base of a CFL. The fact that you've never observed early failure from CFL heat death doesn't mean it doesn't occur. The Energy Star website agrees with me that this is a problem with at least some CFLs. There's your citation.
2. I certainly did not intend to imply that LEDs could not be used in refrigerators. I intended for the refrigerator part to be just about CFLs and for the oven part to be about both CFLs and LEDs. Sorry if that wasn't clear. The epoxy shell of LEDs would almost certainly melt in ovens (Epoxy apparently melts at about 375 degrees F), and although a fluorescent tube might survive, provided the ballast were located elsewhere, such an installation would require significant modifications to the oven, making it impractical to eliminate this use for the foreseeable future. And of course, when it comes to refrigerators, fluorescent tubes don't appreciate extreme cold, though LEDs could conceivably be used there, provided that the rapid temperature swings when they come on don't cause the solder joints to crack too quickly. I'd probably want to do some experimentation before I said LEDs would be fine there, but it's quite possible that they'd be fine.
3. LED-based bicycle lights and flashlights are a largely unrelated subject. These devices do not use any voltage conversion except possibly a current limiting resistor in series with the LED. The parts that are problematic in terms of requiring adequate ventilation don't exist in those devices because you're starting with DC instead of AC.
4. The failure mode of CFLs dimming is just one of several failure modes that these bulbs can exhibit. Other failure modes include the flicker of death (when the tube won't quite come on) and the electrolytic big bang (where the capacitor in the charge pump blow and the light fails to illuminate entirely). I don't have any statistics on the frequency of these failure modes. It would be an interesting bit of information to have. You know, now that I think about it, it might not be possible to get the flicker of death with CFLs because of the way their ballasts are designed. So it may just be the two failure modes---fading in brightness or suddenly going dead (or fading in brightness and then suddenly going dead).
5. I'm assuming when you said that your lights don't contain electrolytic capacitors, you meant that you spent more money to use film or ceramic caps instead. Unfortunately, most mass-produced devices use mostly electrolytic caps whenever they can because they are cheaper. Expecting your design decisions to be the norm is like expecting people not to eat.
If you don't use any capacitors at all, then how precisely to you generate anything approaching filtered DC without capacitors? And if you say that you use a full wave bridge without any smoothing caps like those @$&% LED Christmas lights that flicker obnoxiously as the light pulsing interacts with the facets on the bulb, I'm going to have to hurt you. :-D
The LEDs, no, but how are you going to get anything approaching regulated DC from a 110VAC or 220VAC line without capacitors? The LED-based lamps for buildings are almost certain to contain electrolytic caps. They're going to build it as cheaply as possible, which probably means doing a half-wave or full-wave bridge followed by a line voltage (110VAC or 220VAC) smoothing capacitor, followed by a whole bunch of LEDs wired in series so you can avoid the current limiting resistor that would otherwise waste power. At least I think you can do it that way. I can't say I've ever tried it. Certainly seems to work well enough for Christmas lights (except that they omit the smoothing capacitor, so you get a lovely 60 Hz jitter).
Now I'll grant you that it's probably not getting beaten on as hard as a capacitor in a charge pump circuit.... :-)
Yeah. Using 58 watts instead of 100. If this is a cheap CFL, the power factor can be as bad as 0.5, which mean the real power consumption (the load on the grid) could actually be slightly *more* than the incandescent (116VA instead of 100VA).
And if you use halogen bulbs instead of plain incandescent bulbs, the CFLs look even worse by comparison....
I meant more similar in terms of having an external ballast driving the bulb rather than trying to step the AC up to a higher voltage inside the base of the bulb. At least I believe that sodium/mercury bulbs are not internally ballasted.
Well, I always solved it by turning on a second light, but you could do it either way, I suppose. :-)
I assume by "control gear", you're talking about a charge pump? Yeah, I've seen those. The only problem with them is that you're beating the living crap out of the capacitor, and assuming it's electrolytic (cheap), if it isn't in a reasonably sized air space, you eventually get electrolyte failure and it pops like a firecracker, leaking corrosive goo out everywhere. Case in point, the graphite Airport Base Station from a few years back.
If the enclosure is big enough and the parts have large enough tolerance, you're fine. Sadly, far too many electronic devices these days seem to be designed with inadequate tolerances....
Well, I was just going by the specs from cpu-world.com for the chips as far as figuring out the maximum power it can dissipate. Presumably those are actual published specs from Intel. I have no idea what conditions are required to make it actually dissipate that much heat. :-)
Really? So you work a single 8-hour shift every second week that spans from Saturday night to Sunday morning? How odd.
All I can tell you is that my experience with CFLs has consistently been that equivalently sized CFLs seemed perceptibly brighter when I looked out at the room but caused greater difficulty making out detail, e.g. for reading. Doubling the amount of CFL-produced light always fixes this, but then there went the energy savings.
It's not the LEDs that fail. It's the circuitry needed to step down from 110VAC or 220VAC to single-digit VDC that fails. The alternative to that is using a hack like LED Christmas lights do, but then you get a horrible 60 Hz flicker.
That is NOT a compact fluorescent bulb. They don't usually work the same way. A straight tube bulb generally uses a simple transformer to step the voltage up. A CFL is invariably a high frequency design that uses a charge pump or similar because the component cost is cheaper and the size of the CFL base won't hold a transformer.
Further, as soon as you talk about a long tube design, you've completely missed the point. The limited volume of air inside the enclosed space is what causes the charge pump circuit to fail. Compared with one of those globe lamps above your door, a long tube enclosure is freaking *huge* volumetrically.
What does this have to do with a discussion of CFLs? Yes, sodium and mercury vapor lights are relatives of fluorescent tubes, but only because they both use an electrical arc. They have more in common with the long-tube-style fluorescent bulbs than they do with CFLs.
The logical fallacy is only because the quote has gotten distorted severely over the years. The original saying, translated to English from Old French, reads "Bad workers will never find a good tool." This version makes much more sense.
Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/a-bad-workman-blames-his-tools.
My money would be on electrolytic capacitors. They don't like heat much at all, and have a tendency to fail catastrophically when they get too warm and dry out. They're the #1 cause of electronics failures, and you're unlikely to see CFLs or LEDs without electrolytic caps in them. Wrap that in a tight thermal envelope like a closed glass sphere around a light fixture, and the heat dissipation of the voltage converter circuits (up for CFLs, down for LEDs) alone would be enough to fry electrolytic caps in short order.
That said, you could also be running into solder joints breaking from thermal stress for the same reason. Either way, the fatal flaw for all of these new kinds of lighting is that they are so much more complicated in their design than incandescent bulbs.
The problem with all these calculations is that they're crap, and not just because they didn't factor in breakage. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
They forgot to take into account that the lumen is in many ways a subjective measurement when different light types are involved, as any true measurement of brightness perception must necessarily depend not only on the light source, but also on the environment around it. First, different people's eyes may perceive light differently, so there is no one true measure of how bright people perceive a light source when it is at a particular frequency. Second, if I am trying to look at something whose colors happen to fall between the characteristic wavelengths of the phosphors in a fluorescent bulb, it can take several times as many lumens to achieve the same perceived brightness as with a continuous spectrum. This is why I'm always horrified by stores selling clothing under fluorescent light. It's complete fiction in terms of color perception.
They also failed to take into account the fact that CFLs become dramatically dimmer before they fail, unlike modern incandescent blubs. If you care at all about the amount of light, count on having to either swap bulbs out at a faster rate (thus increasing the up-front cost) or turning on more lights than you otherwise would (thus increasing the energy cost). Thus, it is likely that if you look at all the factors involved, CFLs are not significantly more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs, all while producing light that is less pleasing, causing headaches, depression, and other negative health effects, and costing a heck of a lot more. Divide this by the power factor to find out the actual load on the power grid, and you may well find that incandescents are actually more efficient, depending on the circumstances.
But by far, the biggest problem with these studies is that they universally fail to take into account all the places where neither CFL nor LED bulbs can be used at all. Start with outdoor lighting. Outdoor lights, by their very nature, must be sealed. CFLs contain lots of electronic components, including electrolytic capacitors. In a sealed enclosure, these parts can heat up beyond the thermal limits of their components within minutes. Therefore, for outdoor use, you should not use CFLs, period. (Yes, some manufacturers claim that their bulbs can be used outdoors in certain circumstances, but if you install them, be aware that the bulbs will fail much, much sooner than their rated lifespan would suggest, and if it is cold out, you should expect to have no light at all; in short, unless you life in California or Oregon, you shouldn't seriously consider CFLs as a viable outdoor light source.)
LED lamps will almost certainly have the same thermal failure problems for precisely the same reason. Electronic circuits are simply not designed to operate at such high temperatures, and when you try to use them that way, they will fail much, much sooner than they ordinarily would. This use can make incandescent bulbs seem positively cheap by comparison.
Likewise, ovens, refrigerators, etc. cannot use any of these types of lights because fluorescent tubes are highly sensitive to temperature extremes and LEDs are AFAIK always made of plastic and would melt. Perhaps somebody could design one with a solid glass lens, but even still, I doubt they would survive the temperature swings of an oven for very long.
http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.htm gives a great explanation of pretty much everything wrong with these sorts of "studies". I'm pretty fed up with the same tired B.S. arguments being trotted out by manufacturers to try to convince people to buy CFLs and LED lights. They look ugly, their light is ugly, and they have a high up-front cost. I'd rather wait for some of these new incandescent bulb technologies to exceed the efficiency targets instead.
You're talking about the TDP, not the actual maximum amount of heat output. We were talking about how fast a CPU can run with speed stepping (and presumably all other power management) disabled inside a laptop case. When you're talking about a CPU with no thermal management, the TDP number no longer applies because that number assumes at least a partially power-managed CPU with a reasonable workload, not a CPU running at full clock speed with maximum core voltage, power management disabled, and no way to throttle the CPU if the workload becomes absurd (a tightly rolled loop that keeps all the pipelines full without accessing RAM, for example).
To give you some more accurate numbers to work with, the maximum thermal dissipation on some mobile Core 2 Duo CPUs can be as high as 57W for the CPU itself. So assuming your cooling system is designed based on the TDP number (and given that 99% of people will not disable power management, this seems like a reasonable assumption). the maximum thermal output is more than 50% higher than your cooling system can handle. At best, that means that if you design for TDP, a 2 GHz CPU can only run at a maximum of 1.33 GHz safely with power management disabled. Add a little wiggle room as a safety margin, and locking the clock at 1 GHz doesn't seem at all unreasonable. Running it at 2 GHz is going to fail, and by that, I mean it will fail catastrophically....
Put another way, working with the real maximum figures instead of the TDP, the heat dissipation numbers are more than double your 35W number. Add 50-57W for the mobile CPU as a worst case plus at least 5W for the chipset plus 12W for the GPU, and you're talking about dissipating potentially a whopping 75W, all within a few square inches of board space. That's hot, hot, hot.
Regarding the problem with the speed getting reduced massively, after thinking about it further, I have a hunch that they either made the CPU and GPU share a heat sink or put a chipset heat sensor too close to the GPU's heat pipe/spreader. Having a CPU-related thermal sensor too close to a hot GPU could easily explain this behavior in its entirety.
Almost certainly. I doubt any of the modern laptops can run Core 2 Duo CPUs at full throttle without it going supernova. Laptops are just plain too thin to dissipate that much heat through mere air cooling of CPU heat sinks. The only reason we have laptops that come anywhere close to this level of performance is because the cores are going to be in an idle state 90% of the time and they can throttle the bajeezus out of them if they get too hot when you run them too hard for too long. That said, this report suggests two things:
Of these, the second one is the more significant problem.
Sounds like a typo. There's no way a laptop would choke at 60 degrees Fahrenheit. That would make it never run at any usable speed, for all practical purposes. Even a few seconds after you wake the thing up, it's going to be at least a few degrees over ambient, which puts the bottom of the typical operating range immediately after waking from sleep somewhere in the upper 70s or lower 80s Fahrenheit unless you're running it outdoors during the winter. 60C is about 140 degrees Fahrenheit and is a much more plausible temperature for hardware to start acting up.
That's why I use a targetted DNS black hole instead. I don't block ads until they cause a noticeable disruption in my browsing behavior. As soon as they add more than a second or so to a page load time, that particular ad server gets blocked permanently, and my caching DNS server returns a bogus response directed at 127.0.0.1 or a host not found, depending on the subdomain/host part. All of the various google-analytics domains are on my block list because they consistently fail to have adequate performance. Similarly, most of the larger ad networks are blocked for the same reason. The smaller ad networks, which usually have a more sane load average per server, are generally not blocked until they get too big for their breeches. This serves three purposes: reduces page load times, punishes ad servers that have slow performance, and promotes competition by encouraging the use of smaller ad networks.
Also, they really need to fix this summary. it should be "iPhone3,1", not "iPhone 3.1". The first is the format for an Apple product identifier. The second is likely to be confused with an iPhone OS version number that is already shipping to the general public and has been for several months.