Which is why they sell CFLs specifcally "designed" for recessed fixtures, which are by definition mostly enclosed?
IMHO, it seems absurd that they would sell a bulb specifically designed to be used in a recessed can if heat was an issue. Many recessed cans are sealed and insulated for direct contact with insulation, so not only will they trap heat due to their orientation, they will shed it very very slowly since they are insulated.
I think CFLs seem happiest when they have a lot of ventilation.
Like you, I've found wildly varying longevity. Store-brand yellow "bug" CFLs have run for years in our outdoor fixtures, and light reliably even in below-zero F temperatures. I'm pretty sure I still have one of the very old late 90s CFLs in the cupboard that I haven't thrown out because it still works (but the shape doesn't really fit any fixture).
The problems have always come with fixtures that enclose or partially enclose the CFL -- with fixtures like that, I've seen as little as a week out of a light run a few hours per week. PAR-60 recessed CFLs are a waste of money -- I've had none last longer than six months, one fixture ate 3 in six months and the incandescent replacement has being going strong for at least 2 years.
And I've found that wifi sync mostly doesn't work well. It's locked up and bombed on my iPad 1 and iPhone 3GS. I just don't bother with my daily-use 4S as GoodReader/SugarSync/Dropbox handle my "right now" file needs and ActiveSync takes care of mail/calendar/contacts.
I'd actually prefer my backups to be local and encrypted.
One improvement I would like would be specifying my local backup directory on a per-device basis (instead of relying on the Windows user profile clusterfuck) and the ability to say how many backup revisions I want to keep. The current system is far to opaque and makes it difficult to backup backups.
One thing Apple could do would be to rip the store out of iTunes and make it "really" web based -- purchases could then just show up in iTunes; it's horrible to browse the store via iTunes; on an i5-2500 with 16 GB of RAM it feels like I'm browsing the web on a low-end P4 with 512 MB of RAM.
I don't know, but the whole program kind of feels like its running some kind of interpreted code -- written for MacOS and somehow been run through a translation layer that converts MacOS system calls to Windows system calls.
They buy the politicians, and the politicians pass laws in a way that allows them to structure their policies and contracts in a way that makes violating them a criminally enforceable action, allowing them to use the government's police powers to guarantee compliance to their policies.
Ultimately the US is going to be just like China; same corrupt style of government, complete with in-name-only ideological justifications for repression ("stability" there, "war on terrorism" here), same group of guys on top manipulating the power of the state for their own financial compensation.
I've been to Vegas four times and maybe gambled $50 among all visits.
Everyone should go to Vegas at least once just to take in the spectacle. The large casino/hotel complexes are kind of awe-inspiring in the way that Disneyworld is. The shopping mall attached to Caesar's Palace has a spiral escalator in its 3 story marble atrium. And that's just a minor example.
There are a ton of great restaurants, the hotel rooms are usually a cut above, and the pools are pretty cool, too.
And even if you don't want that aspect of Las Vegas, you can always go a short distance and see the Hoover Dam and the almost-as-amazing 93 bridge they just completed south of the Hoover Dam (you can walk over it, and its pretty spectacular in and of itself).
I like Las Vegas as a weekend-getaway kind of a place. Take in a show, hang out at the pool, eat a couple of good meals and maybe throw away $10 in the slot machines for the free drinks.
Frankly, they should have built the ship. It would have fit in perfectly.
So you're a content distributor/producer, and you have 3 "name" channels everybody wants and a bunch of low-rated specialty channels that show a ton of re-runs, "marathons" and a small handful of low-rated original niche programs ("Low Carb Househunter Pawn Star Bachelorette Bounty Hunters").
Of course you bundle everything, requiring cable/satellite providers to take the crap to get the in-demand channels.
In many cases, the crap channels seem *so* crappy you wonder how they even cover the overhead of technical production -- in many cases these kind of channels run 3 unique commercials for mail order products per hour and the rest of the time are promotionals for other programs on this and other channels.
I sometimes wonder if the bundling isn't about trying to make the niche channels profitable by getting them a wider audience, but a kind of land-rush, channel squatting to make sure they have a slots on every cable channel. This allows them to re-invent a channel (remember when Bravo was meant to be a 'serious' culture channel) anytime they want and automatically have a slot for it. And more importantly, especially for older cable systems, limit competition from new channels or other content packagers.
It makes less sense in a digital cable world where there's nearly endless spectrum, but it often seems to be the only rational reason for subsidizing a lot of crummy channels when that money might buy better leather for the executive jet.
I always assumed that they were just basing those characters on Oswald Mosley.
Of course the larger irony is that Edward VIII was accused of Nazi sympathies during WW II and there was some sympathy for the Nazi party among English aristocrats prior to WW II.
I live in Minneapolis and work as an IT contractor/consultant.
About once every couple of weeks, some client needs something, usually small, TODAY. My first choice is to go to Microcenter -- they have just about everything, from PSUs, CPUs, fans, weird cables, tools, but mostly it's a computer store oriented at consumers, selling name brand stuff, a store brand and with their own little Apple section.
And it's always busy. Even right after opening, the checkout line is like 10 people deep, later on during the day, lunchtime or God forbid on the weekend, it's 25 people deep. And their prices are nothing to write home about.
Yet if I go into a Best Buy during the day, it's a graveyard.
Now, to be fair to Microcenter they sell a lot of "geek" parts/tools, but when I'm in the checkout line it's mostly consumers with the same kinds of stuff you'd find at Best Buy.
It mystifies me that Microcenter is wall-wall whenever it's open but Best Buy is only really kind of busy on the weekends.
...in American movies set in non-English speaking countries?
This dawned on me while watching "The Reader" -- Kate Winslet speaks her lines in English, with a German accent during the course of the movie.
Either the entire movie should be in German with subtitles, or the actors should all speak their lines in a common accent of English. It makes no sense to have a film set in a "foreign" country have its actors speak their lines in English accented by the locale's native language.
It kind of makes me wonder if a German movie set in America has its actors speak German with an American English accent.
A large number of self-identified conservatives are also self-identified as being "religious" as well.
If you remove questions which threaten the faith of these conservatives (ie, evolution, questions about the existence of God) how is their perception of science then?
How do conservatives who do not profess a religious affiliation or are atheist view science? It would probably surprise most liberals, whose characterizations of all conservatives as ignorant religious racists is as inaccurate as conservatives characterizations of liberals as wooly-headed layabouts on the dole, that there are a number of conservatives, especially of the libertarian bent, who are atheists or whom observe religion as a cultural and social tradition and not as a set of blinders.
You don't think that Apple already controls a whole handful of companies not called Apple Computer and not linked the Apple except through some obscure piece of paper locked in a vault someplace?
Some of them may do useful work in their fields and most of the employees know zip about their ownership, some may just be three guys in chinos in a 1500 square foot suburban office who know who they work for but change what their company is depending on what Apple might need.
James Howard Kunstler is a huge advocate of much more decentralized living -- essentially small town living with an emphasis on local agriculture, etc.
If you have people living in a town of 1000 people near a river, small hydro seems to make sense -- that size of a town could probably get by with 10MW, which assumes 10kW per person average consumption, which I'd guess is probably a little high.
The problem with criminal background checks is there's no constraints on how they are used -- say I got a DUI when I was 23, this will be flagged as an arrest at minimum and a conviction if I plead guilty or was convicted in a trial.
However, unless they are paying me to drive, how relevant is it to me now in my 40s?
So many HR busybodies conclude that *any* brush with law enforcement means you're a criminal, regardless of the "crime" or if you were even convicted of it.
So, for example, I'm driving through some rural county someplace and I get pulled over for speeding, which in this county may mean "being from out of state and not slowing below the speed limit in the sight of a county sheriff's deputy." My license, insurance, etc is in order but the deputy (making 19.5 a year with an associates degree in law enforcement) believes that because I am from out of state, I must pay the full fine in cash on the spot. Since I can't, he arrests me and impounds my car.
I'm taken back to the county jail and booked. The sheriff finds out, reminds the deputy that I don't need to pay in cash on the spot, I'm released, the ticket waived and my car released. 2 hours of hassle, but now I have an ARREST RECORD! (cue evil music).
Now when I apply for a job, Busy Betty runs a "background check" and it turns up an ARREST! Not a conviction, an arrest, and I'm rejected as a criminal.
Anyway, there needs to be strict limits on what information can be used and how long it can be used for.
I think for ordinary jobs they should just evaluate your job history and ongoing performance and not try to read tea leaves to divine your personality.
I personally think that so much of this is driven by the unchecked growth of HR busy bodies who need to justify their existence. To do so, they glom onto all kinds of methodologies to reject candidates -- credit scores, "background" checks, all with the sound pseudologic that the more candidates they reject, the more they are protecting the company from hiring problem employees.
Corrections jobs and Law Enforcement jobs often have much higher standards for "background references" than other jobs.
I think in a lot of cases they don't just want to look at your friends and neighbors, they actually go to their houses and talk them about you and ask all kinds of questions.
You kind of wonder if it helps, though, since cops seem to routinely get into trouble taking bribes, beating the shit out of people for no reason, etc.
It strikes me that this is just par for the course for most Apple releases.
iPhone 3GS, iPad 1 -- both of mine had wifi problems until software updates came out.
iPhone 4 -- antennagate -- appeared totally fine by the time I got my 4 in March of 2011.
iPhone 4s -- batterygate -- greatly improved in 5.01 and mostly fixed by 5.1.
Overall, it seems like there's about 6 months after a device's release that Apple releases a serious of fixes to fix or mitigate some deficiency and that by that time the device is largely as good as it will get.
I just wish they would add bluetooth profiles to the iPad for microphone headsets and mice, although the latter I only want with RDP apps, although I think it might be handy if you were using a full-screen editor, too.
It kind of makes me wonder why no one has made a BT mouse adapter that plugs into the microphone port or the dock connector. With an open SDK, vendors who wanted mouse capabilities could add support for the hardware.
I know there's a lot of complaints about distractions, specifically cell phones, texting, smartphones, etc but has anyone reached the conclusion that driving is somehow more dangerous than it used to be?
I'm a little concerned that we're managing by statistics and only interested in lower numbers, which is not evil, it seems kind of misleading and leads to kind of draconian ideas to find the changes necessary to alter the statistics without taking into account some kind of bigger picture.
For example, if N people are killed or seriously injured due to futzing with a GPS, we decide to make the GPS less useful, without ever understanding that pre-GPS X people will killed or seriously injured fumbling with a piece of paper, looking for street signs and trying to read addresses in traffic.
I don't know if N or X is the larger number, but what if they are the same? We can't ban fumbling with a sheet of paper, but we can ban or hinder GPS. We may "solve" the GPS deaths but we just end up re-creating the other navigation deaths as well as inconveniencing people who otherwise find great benefit in GPS devices.
And not just for their offices, but for their homes and the homes, schools and offices of their families, friends and anyone else they might care about.
It strikes me that these are people you don't want to try to play around with and that some might try to influence you to give a better deal to their side than another side, perhaps using things like pictures of your kids walking to school or your wife gardening.
I had problems with my login at one point, but it's been pretty bulletproof across 3 computers, an iPad and my iPhone for a couple of years at least.
What annoys me more is the new JavaScript "dynamic" comments engine. I really enjoy the comments on articles and the new system is borderline unusable on the iPad.
I wonder if its possible, though, for *everyone* to get skills and move up the job ladder. It seems to me that there's a natural (enough) bell curve involving pay and jobs that statistically means that a lot of people will be at the low end of the job curve, regardless of their skills.
There's only so many jobs in the economy for lawyers, doctors, etc. Not everyone can be an executive.
Even ignoring this, there are structural issues such as regional unemployment and job opportunity disparities, and then there's questions at a national level as to total job opportunities.
There's tons of people trained to be lawyers who can't find work, for example. I doubt you'd classify someone capable of graduating law school and passing the bar exam as dumb or lazy or incapable of "hard work".
Why would a stock buyback do nothing in theory to share price?
It seems like there's an assumption that there's no demand for the stock or the needed shares for a buyback are 'excess' shares otherwise unavailable through normal markets.
It seems to me under normal market conditions, a stock buy-back of meaningful volume should increase share price at least minimally because the buyback is taking shares out of the marketplace -- reducing supply without an increase in demand should result in increased prices, right?
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Which is why they sell CFLs specifcally "designed" for recessed fixtures, which are by definition mostly enclosed?
IMHO, it seems absurd that they would sell a bulb specifically designed to be used in a recessed can if heat was an issue. Many recessed cans are sealed and insulated for direct contact with insulation, so not only will they trap heat due to their orientation, they will shed it very very slowly since they are insulated.
I think CFLs seem happiest when they have a lot of ventilation.
Like you, I've found wildly varying longevity. Store-brand yellow "bug" CFLs have run for years in our outdoor fixtures, and light reliably even in below-zero F temperatures. I'm pretty sure I still have one of the very old late 90s CFLs in the cupboard that I haven't thrown out because it still works (but the shape doesn't really fit any fixture).
The problems have always come with fixtures that enclose or partially enclose the CFL -- with fixtures like that, I've seen as little as a week out of a light run a few hours per week. PAR-60 recessed CFLs are a waste of money -- I've had none last longer than six months, one fixture ate 3 in six months and the incandescent replacement has being going strong for at least 2 years.
Kind of like how the formal definition of "freedom" differs from the colloquial version?
And I've found that wifi sync mostly doesn't work well. It's locked up and bombed on my iPad 1 and iPhone 3GS. I just don't bother with my daily-use 4S as GoodReader/SugarSync/Dropbox handle my "right now" file needs and ActiveSync takes care of mail/calendar/contacts.
I'd actually prefer my backups to be local and encrypted.
One improvement I would like would be specifying my local backup directory on a per-device basis (instead of relying on the Windows user profile clusterfuck) and the ability to say how many backup revisions I want to keep. The current system is far to opaque and makes it difficult to backup backups.
One thing Apple could do would be to rip the store out of iTunes and make it "really" web based -- purchases could then just show up in iTunes; it's horrible to browse the store via iTunes; on an i5-2500 with 16 GB of RAM it feels like I'm browsing the web on a low-end P4 with 512 MB of RAM.
I don't know, but the whole program kind of feels like its running some kind of interpreted code -- written for MacOS and somehow been run through a translation layer that converts MacOS system calls to Windows system calls.
I can't believe I had to scroll down so far to find someone pointing out that LSD and Ecstasy are not narcotics.
Fucking geeks arguing over the technology, while silently accepting the big lie that helps keep the war on freedom alive.
Sure they do.
They buy the politicians, and the politicians pass laws in a way that allows them to structure their policies and contracts in a way that makes violating them a criminally enforceable action, allowing them to use the government's police powers to guarantee compliance to their policies.
Ultimately the US is going to be just like China; same corrupt style of government, complete with in-name-only ideological justifications for repression ("stability" there, "war on terrorism" here), same group of guys on top manipulating the power of the state for their own financial compensation.
I've been to Vegas four times and maybe gambled $50 among all visits.
Everyone should go to Vegas at least once just to take in the spectacle. The large casino/hotel complexes are kind of awe-inspiring in the way that Disneyworld is. The shopping mall attached to Caesar's Palace has a spiral escalator in its 3 story marble atrium. And that's just a minor example.
There are a ton of great restaurants, the hotel rooms are usually a cut above, and the pools are pretty cool, too.
And even if you don't want that aspect of Las Vegas, you can always go a short distance and see the Hoover Dam and the almost-as-amazing 93 bridge they just completed south of the Hoover Dam (you can walk over it, and its pretty spectacular in and of itself).
I like Las Vegas as a weekend-getaway kind of a place. Take in a show, hang out at the pool, eat a couple of good meals and maybe throw away $10 in the slot machines for the free drinks.
Frankly, they should have built the ship. It would have fit in perfectly.
So you're a content distributor/producer, and you have 3 "name" channels everybody wants and a bunch of low-rated specialty channels that show a ton of re-runs, "marathons" and a small handful of low-rated original niche programs ("Low Carb Househunter Pawn Star Bachelorette Bounty Hunters").
Of course you bundle everything, requiring cable/satellite providers to take the crap to get the in-demand channels.
In many cases, the crap channels seem *so* crappy you wonder how they even cover the overhead of technical production -- in many cases these kind of channels run 3 unique commercials for mail order products per hour and the rest of the time are promotionals for other programs on this and other channels.
I sometimes wonder if the bundling isn't about trying to make the niche channels profitable by getting them a wider audience, but a kind of land-rush, channel squatting to make sure they have a slots on every cable channel. This allows them to re-invent a channel (remember when Bravo was meant to be a 'serious' culture channel) anytime they want and automatically have a slot for it. And more importantly, especially for older cable systems, limit competition from new channels or other content packagers.
It makes less sense in a digital cable world where there's nearly endless spectrum, but it often seems to be the only rational reason for subsidizing a lot of crummy channels when that money might buy better leather for the executive jet.
I'd also like to see the animation speed scaled or scalable to match the map scale/zoom level.
It sure looks cool, but the animation speed is misleading relative to the actual wind speed.
I always assumed that they were just basing those characters on Oswald Mosley.
Of course the larger irony is that Edward VIII was accused of Nazi sympathies during WW II and there was some sympathy for the Nazi party among English aristocrats prior to WW II.
I live in Minneapolis and work as an IT contractor/consultant.
About once every couple of weeks, some client needs something, usually small, TODAY. My first choice is to go to Microcenter -- they have just about everything, from PSUs, CPUs, fans, weird cables, tools, but mostly it's a computer store oriented at consumers, selling name brand stuff, a store brand and with their own little Apple section.
And it's always busy. Even right after opening, the checkout line is like 10 people deep, later on during the day, lunchtime or God forbid on the weekend, it's 25 people deep. And their prices are nothing to write home about.
Yet if I go into a Best Buy during the day, it's a graveyard.
Now, to be fair to Microcenter they sell a lot of "geek" parts/tools, but when I'm in the checkout line it's mostly consumers with the same kinds of stuff you'd find at Best Buy.
It mystifies me that Microcenter is wall-wall whenever it's open but Best Buy is only really kind of busy on the weekends.
...in American movies set in non-English speaking countries?
This dawned on me while watching "The Reader" -- Kate Winslet speaks her lines in English, with a German accent during the course of the movie.
Either the entire movie should be in German with subtitles, or the actors should all speak their lines in a common accent of English. It makes no sense to have a film set in a "foreign" country have its actors speak their lines in English accented by the locale's native language.
It kind of makes me wonder if a German movie set in America has its actors speak German with an American English accent.
A large number of self-identified conservatives are also self-identified as being "religious" as well.
If you remove questions which threaten the faith of these conservatives (ie, evolution, questions about the existence of God) how is their perception of science then?
How do conservatives who do not profess a religious affiliation or are atheist view science? It would probably surprise most liberals, whose characterizations of all conservatives as ignorant religious racists is as inaccurate as conservatives characterizations of liberals as wooly-headed layabouts on the dole, that there are a number of conservatives, especially of the libertarian bent, who are atheists or whom observe religion as a cultural and social tradition and not as a set of blinders.
You don't think that Apple already controls a whole handful of companies not called Apple Computer and not linked the Apple except through some obscure piece of paper locked in a vault someplace?
Some of them may do useful work in their fields and most of the employees know zip about their ownership, some may just be three guys in chinos in a 1500 square foot suburban office who know who they work for but change what their company is depending on what Apple might need.
James Howard Kunstler is a huge advocate of much more decentralized living -- essentially small town living with an emphasis on local agriculture, etc.
If you have people living in a town of 1000 people near a river, small hydro seems to make sense -- that size of a town could probably get by with 10MW, which assumes 10kW per person average consumption, which I'd guess is probably a little high.
The problem with criminal background checks is there's no constraints on how they are used -- say I got a DUI when I was 23, this will be flagged as an arrest at minimum and a conviction if I plead guilty or was convicted in a trial.
However, unless they are paying me to drive, how relevant is it to me now in my 40s?
So many HR busybodies conclude that *any* brush with law enforcement means you're a criminal, regardless of the "crime" or if you were even convicted of it.
So, for example, I'm driving through some rural county someplace and I get pulled over for speeding, which in this county may mean "being from out of state and not slowing below the speed limit in the sight of a county sheriff's deputy." My license, insurance, etc is in order but the deputy (making 19.5 a year with an associates degree in law enforcement) believes that because I am from out of state, I must pay the full fine in cash on the spot. Since I can't, he arrests me and impounds my car.
I'm taken back to the county jail and booked. The sheriff finds out, reminds the deputy that I don't need to pay in cash on the spot, I'm released, the ticket waived and my car released. 2 hours of hassle, but now I have an ARREST RECORD! (cue evil music).
Now when I apply for a job, Busy Betty runs a "background check" and it turns up an ARREST! Not a conviction, an arrest, and I'm rejected as a criminal.
Anyway, there needs to be strict limits on what information can be used and how long it can be used for.
I think for ordinary jobs they should just evaluate your job history and ongoing performance and not try to read tea leaves to divine your personality.
I personally think that so much of this is driven by the unchecked growth of HR busy bodies who need to justify their existence. To do so, they glom onto all kinds of methodologies to reject candidates -- credit scores, "background" checks, all with the sound pseudologic that the more candidates they reject, the more they are protecting the company from hiring problem employees.
Corrections jobs and Law Enforcement jobs often have much higher standards for "background references" than other jobs.
I think in a lot of cases they don't just want to look at your friends and neighbors, they actually go to their houses and talk them about you and ask all kinds of questions.
You kind of wonder if it helps, though, since cops seem to routinely get into trouble taking bribes, beating the shit out of people for no reason, etc.
It strikes me that this is just par for the course for most Apple releases.
iPhone 3GS, iPad 1 -- both of mine had wifi problems until software updates came out.
iPhone 4 -- antennagate -- appeared totally fine by the time I got my 4 in March of 2011.
iPhone 4s -- batterygate -- greatly improved in 5.01 and mostly fixed by 5.1.
Overall, it seems like there's about 6 months after a device's release that Apple releases a serious of fixes to fix or mitigate some deficiency and that by that time the device is largely as good as it will get.
I just wish they would add bluetooth profiles to the iPad for microphone headsets and mice, although the latter I only want with RDP apps, although I think it might be handy if you were using a full-screen editor, too.
It kind of makes me wonder why no one has made a BT mouse adapter that plugs into the microphone port or the dock connector. With an open SDK, vendors who wanted mouse capabilities could add support for the hardware.
I know there's a lot of complaints about distractions, specifically cell phones, texting, smartphones, etc but has anyone reached the conclusion that driving is somehow more dangerous than it used to be?
I'm a little concerned that we're managing by statistics and only interested in lower numbers, which is not evil, it seems kind of misleading and leads to kind of draconian ideas to find the changes necessary to alter the statistics without taking into account some kind of bigger picture.
For example, if N people are killed or seriously injured due to futzing with a GPS, we decide to make the GPS less useful, without ever understanding that pre-GPS X people will killed or seriously injured fumbling with a piece of paper, looking for street signs and trying to read addresses in traffic.
I don't know if N or X is the larger number, but what if they are the same? We can't ban fumbling with a sheet of paper, but we can ban or hinder GPS. We may "solve" the GPS deaths but we just end up re-creating the other navigation deaths as well as inconveniencing people who otherwise find great benefit in GPS devices.
What kind of battery life do you expect from a 4G feature phone that's pumping 4G data over bluetooth?
My guess is the iPhone is probably as battery efficient at acting as a portable hotspot as a feature phone is.
And not just for their offices, but for their homes and the homes, schools and offices of their families, friends and anyone else they might care about.
It strikes me that these are people you don't want to try to play around with and that some might try to influence you to give a better deal to their side than another side, perhaps using things like pictures of your kids walking to school or your wife gardening.
I had problems with my login at one point, but it's been pretty bulletproof across 3 computers, an iPad and my iPhone for a couple of years at least.
What annoys me more is the new JavaScript "dynamic" comments engine. I really enjoy the comments on articles and the new system is borderline unusable on the iPad.
I wonder if its possible, though, for *everyone* to get skills and move up the job ladder. It seems to me that there's a natural (enough) bell curve involving pay and jobs that statistically means that a lot of people will be at the low end of the job curve, regardless of their skills.
There's only so many jobs in the economy for lawyers, doctors, etc. Not everyone can be an executive.
Even ignoring this, there are structural issues such as regional unemployment and job opportunity disparities, and then there's questions at a national level as to total job opportunities.
There's tons of people trained to be lawyers who can't find work, for example. I doubt you'd classify someone capable of graduating law school and passing the bar exam as dumb or lazy or incapable of "hard work".
Why would a stock buyback do nothing in theory to share price?
It seems like there's an assumption that there's no demand for the stock or the needed shares for a buyback are 'excess' shares otherwise unavailable through normal markets.
It seems to me under normal market conditions, a stock buy-back of meaningful volume should increase share price at least minimally because the buyback is taking shares out of the marketplace -- reducing supply without an increase in demand should result in increased prices, right?