That would be great if you had a 100% efficient way of creating electricity. Coal still creates around 50% of the power in the USA and is only around 40% efficient. And you've got to factor in transmission losses from the power plant to your 100% efficient electric motor.
And mercury is solid under certain conditions. Did you have a point or was this a start of a list of all of the metals that can be liquid under certain conditions?
I believe he is referring to the ability to add a very thin diamond coating to surfaces. this gives you the scratch residence without all of the brittleness issues.
Did you read the same post as me? He said:
Don't make things that are exposed to shocks, scratches and scrapes out of glass! Use diamondoid materials instead.
That doesn't sound like he's advocating evaporating a thin layer of diamond coating, it sounds like he's advocating using an diamond like material called diamonoid (which doesn't currently exist)
Adding a thin diamond coating would help with the issue of minor scratches, but coating glass with diamond wouldn't address the cracking/shattering problem people are experiencing when they drop their phones. Coating a ductile metal surface with a hard (and brittle) diamond coating sounds like it won't last very long since the diamond coating is likely to fracture and flake off as the metal flexes.
Actually, you don't want a harder material -- the harder the material it is, the more brittle it is. It will resist scrapes and scratches, but at some point, dropping or bending the phone will cause it to shatter (quite spectacularly, I wouldn't want your diamondoid phone in my back pocket when it shatters).
I think a more ductile material would be a better case material -- i've seen some work on self healing plastics where minor scratches eventually disappear. I suppose this may be where Apple's liquid metal purchase will come into the picture.
/.'rs are hypocrites. Just watch their arguments about rights when it comes to open source software. Than watch them support illegal downloading.
Actually, the open software advocates you're referring to are consistent -- I don't think you'll hear any of them saying that someone should be able to incorporate downloaded MP3's into commercial products that are then resold to others. They are absolutely fine with open source software being downloaded and used for free, where they have problems is when the open source software is incorporated into other products and sold rather than given away for free. So there's no double standard.
Of course, many (most?) open source software advocates (myself included) don't bother with downloading illegal content because it's easier to go to Amazon or iTunes and click the "Buy" button than to track down a torrent with a full and complete copy of the music we want to listen to. Once people get out of college and realize that their time costs money, the cost to pirate music exceeds the benefit for many people. There are, of course, the hardcore downloaders that download every album known to man in the genres they are interested in, but hey, it's not like they would have bought those 2000 albums so the music industry isn't losing much real income..
I hate loud commercials as much as the next guy, but rather than tell Cable Companies how to run their business, I'd rather have leglislation that provides true competition. Unbundle cable delivery from cable content - have a regulated utility in charge of the wires that pipe cable to the consumer, and let them sell access to whoever wants to provide content (where content includes internet access). And put the management of the network up for bid every 5 years.
If people really hate loud commercials, they won't watch the channels that have loud commercials. If channels with loud commercials are more profitable, well then I guess they aren't all that annoying to most people.
Right now it's hard to "vote with your feet" because often you have only a single cable provider choice and satellite is not always feasible. If there was true competition, consumers would move away from channels that are annoying.
Of course, that's easy for me to say - I've already moved away form cable entirely, relying on online content (mainly Netflix) for all of my TV viewing.
Two things about this: 1) I don't particularly care about the temperature difference between the exterior and interior of my house. What I care about is the temperature difference between the interior and exterior of my body 2) If I did care about the temperature outside, in circumstances where heating the house was necessary, I would prefer the exterior temperature to go up, not down.
1. That's the nice thing about a heat pump -- you don't need to know how it works so if all you care about is the temperature difference between the interior and exterior of your body, just set your thermostat to negative 26.6 degrees and your house will be a comfortable 72 degrees (an air-source heatpump may invoke auxillary heating to maintain that temperature but you don't need to know that). Though I wonder where you got a thermostat that lets you set the thermostat relative to your body temperature. Do you take into account daily fluctuations in body temperature? Most people just set an absolute temperature and leave it there, without regard to body temp.
2. Why do you care what happens to the outside temperature when you need to heat your house? The heat pump does make it colder outside while making it warmer inside, but of course in real life there is no measurable effect on outside temperatures.
If your battery were a "perfect" power source, then all of the heat would end up in the wire (whether copper or nichrome). However, a battery has internal resistance, so if you short out the battery with a low resistance copper wire, much of the heat will be generated in the battery itself.
I'm not aware of any mechanism for electrons to migrate outside of the battery cell from cathode to anode without doing work -- what is this mechanism you speak of?
If you have such a contract, then how did you get fired?
My agency contracts let me replace a resource for nearly any reason. And even if the contract didn't allow it, I'm certain the agency would pull out a contractor that I said was not working out.
Dude, you were a contractor - you can be let go for any reason, even including "I don't like you". All I have to do is call the agency and say "Hey, XXXX is not working out, he's not a good cultural fit here...can you send someone else?"
If you don't like the instability of being a contractor, don't do it - become a permanent employee instead. (possibly for less money, but hey everything in life is a tradeoff)
There was no "launch", this was an alpha code release. Alpha code often has bugs, sometimes major. They even called it a "Developer Release". So I don't understand the uproar about *gasp* bugs in alpha code! If they had branded it beta code then I'd be more concerned with fundamental bugs, but even the developers said it had security bugs when they released it:
Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it, but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable. If you do find something, be sure to log it in our bugtracker, and we would love screenshots and browser info.
Since the dedupe license came for "free" with my filer, yes, that 40% improvement cost less than buying 40% more disks.
And yes, it's much cheaper than building another fileserver with 100% more disk and syncing between them. How much do you think it costs to build a fileserver with 150TB of disk space, and how would you recommend that I sync the 75TB of data between them? I don't think this is a job for rsync.
I do actually replicate between two identical (nearly identical) arrays, but I use my array vendor's software to do this -- they can replicate only modified blocks, much faster that a tool that only has visibility at the filesystem level.
More disks don't neccessarily mean more IOPS, a better storage system means better IOPS. If all you're looking for is raw IOPS, I'm sure you can build a system from commodity components that outperforms a reasonably sized Netapp or EMC filer. But you wouldn't be able to scale that system to 100TB or more.
And I wouldn't trust that home-brew system to run my company's database and other critical servers that have to run 24x7x365.
You and Vancorps are talking about two different things. Deduplication (whether done by the filesystem or the storage system) doesn't preclude having snapshots.
Vancorps was talking about the futility of keeping multiple copies of files on the same storage device as an aid to recovering corrupt data. He was not arguing that regular snapshots should not be made, just that redundant data could be deduped away without sacrificing any real measure of file integrity.
I think what you're talking about is single instance storage in your mail server. But as you mentioned, it only works well on identical emails and attachments.
No dedupe system that I'm aware of does what you'd need to do to dedupe forwarded emails. It's technically possible by recognizing similar messages and doing diff's on them to find identical sections. But, it's computationally difficult and there's not much payback -- better to go after the lowhanging fruit and dedupe all of the identical gif's and mp3s that people have downloaded off the internet.
When we deduped our corporate fileserver, we got around 40% of our space back.
I don't think it takes a NetApp sales rep to recognize the value of a reliable storage system. I'm sure he would say the same of EMC - it's expensive but worth every penny when you've got hundreds (or thousands) of people relying on your storage.
If you're in a 10 person office, you can get by with less, but when you've got a large corporate environment, you'll recognize the advantage of paying for Netapp or EMC.
No, deduplication has quite a bit of policy attached to it. Sometimes you want multiple independent copies of a file (well, maybe not in a data center, but why should the filesystem know that?). The filesystem should store the data it's told to; leave the deduplication to higher layers of a system.
Why do you want multiple independent copies of a file? If you're doing it because your disk storage system is so flakey that you aren't sure you can read the file, deduplication policy is not what you need -- you need a more reliable storage system and backups.
Most disks have a fine line between throwing random unrecoverable read errors and failing completely, so there's little value in having multiple copies of the same file on the same physical disk. (and most storage systems will have automatically replaced the drive with a hot spare once it started throwing too many soft read errors)
Netflix already claims to stream 720p content over a 5mbps connection. I don't think most consumers are as picky about TV resolution as the typical Slashdot reader. I regularly stream Netflix movies to my 37" 1080i capable TV and have no complaints about the picture quality. My parents (who I use an indicator of mainstream demand) are quite happy with the 480i content they get on their pre-HD tv. They even thought they were getting HD because they kept seeing all of the HD ads from their cable company even though their TV is not capable of HD. I'd bet that most people are like that -- if Netflix tells them it's HD, they'll believe it regardless of how compressed the video is or what the actual resolution is -- 480i 720p 1080i 1080p is just a mismatch of numbers and letters for most people, they don't *really* understand it. And there's nothing to stop a provider from taking a 480i stream and upconverting to 1080p and claiming it's HD -- many people will "see" the increased picture quality even if it's not there.
I have a blu-ray player but use it for streaming Netflix 80% of the time, another 15% I use it for DVD's that aren't available on streaming and the remaining 5% I watch Blu-rays. I just don't see any big advantage in Blu-ray. Slightly better picture quality yes, but at the expense of slower load times, and even more previews and other "features" that are harder to skip over than on DVD.
Maybe 2K or 4K will be more compelling, but since a 4K TV costs around $50K - $500K today, 4K in the home is at least 5 - 10 years away. Especially considering that I'd want a much bigger TV so I could take advantage of the 4K resolution. I doubt that even a 50" TV is big enough to take advantage of 4K at normal viewing distances.
And you're not even thinking about the whole cost of physical media. Not only do you have to pay for the cost of physically manufacturing the things, but then there's the cost of shipping it to your retailers, and the cost of the retailer owning and maintaining a warehouse, and a shop. All that sort of thing gets absorbed into the final retail price too.
Digital distribution should be miles upon miles cheaper.
The poster I was replying to already made that distinction - he was comparing the cost of the distribution network to physical product creation:
The cost of maintaining a distribution network -- be it servers in a data center, theaters in malls across the country, or warehouses and trucks -- far exceeds the cost of manufacturing a physical article in bulk
So I was comparing the cost of electronic distribution only to the cost of creating the physical media. Which, even ignoring the costs associated with physical product, makes the point that electronic distribution is orders of magnitude cheaper than physical product.
Get this through your head: The cost of maintaining a distribution network -- be it servers in a data center, theaters in malls across the country, or warehouses and trucks -- far exceeds the cost of manufacturing a physical article in bulk. And the cost of CREATING content exceeds them both.
Uhh...I thought the big advantage of electronic distribution was that it's far cheaper than creating physical articles. I can get a server with 100mbit bandwidth + 10TB monthly transfer for $350/mo -- that will let me distribute 300K albums (at 30MB each). Or, one tenth of a cent each. Even if I hosted on Amazon EC2, my costs would be around 0.6 cents per CD.
I don't think you can press a CD for that little, even if you're buying 10 million of them at a time. I'd bet that the setup fee for a big CD run costs more than hosting the website for 6 months or a year.
Whether or not the cost of creating the content costs more than that depends on who the artist is and why they are creating it and what costs are included -- I have friends that burn CD's and give them out for free because they create music for the fun of it. I think their "recording studio" (including hardware and software) cost less than $500.
Actually there is a big difference between "move their thermostat 1/2 degree or add insulation" and "unplug chargers".
The first either decreases the amount of comfort or costs money (to insulate).
The second saves you money and has a positive impact on the environment.
And reaching behind my dresser every day to unplug my cell phone charger doesn't have an effect on my comfort? I'd say that the convenience of placing the phone on a charging mat every night rather than plugging it in and plugging in the charger has much less effect on my comfort than turning down my thermostat a tiny amount.
You're implying that turning down the thermostat or adding insulation doesn't save me money or have a positive impact on the environment, yet in truth it likely saves you more money and has a bigger positive effect on the environment than unplugging a cell phone charger. Especially given that a modern EnergyStar rated charger uses less than 0.5 watts in standby mode. That's 4KwH/year -- less then 50 cents worth of electricity for most people. I'll pay the 50 cents for the convenience of not having to plug my charger into the wall every time I plug in my phone.
(note that some people will say "Use a power strip with a switch, then you can just turn it on and off", but to that, I say that a large amount of energy goes into making a power strip - steel, plastic, copper all take energy to refine and shape - my guess is that switching off a 0.5 watt load when I'm not using it will never recoup the energy that went into making the power strip).
The electricity most people use for small electronics pales in comparison to the energy they use for heating and cooling.
The public awareness programs trying to get people to unplug chargers are ridiculous, that money should be spent trying to convince them to move their thermostat 1/2 degree or add insulation.
And please note that I'm not saying that it won't have any impact, I'm saying that the impact it has is so much smaller than other things that it is currently a wasted effort.
Yes! Thank you for making that point -- people don't think about sense of scale when they implement energy savings. (and of course, in cold climates, energy efficiency of appliances inside the home doesn't matter, since that inefficiency is dissipated as heat and goes toward heating your house)
They'll spend hundreds of $$ replacing chargers and installing smart power strips to save 5 watts of standby power, but they won't make capital improvements like additional insulation that may only cost $20/month amortized over 10 years and that can save real dollars in heating/cooling costs.
Or the guy with a 30mpg car will sell it and spend many thousands of dollars upgrading to a 40mpg hybrid and thinks he's saving the world, but the guy who upgrades his 15mpg car to a 20mpg car is actually saving twice as much gas per mile.
Granted, every little bit helps, but some bits help more than others.
At any rate I always have to stifle a chuckle when I notice machines where the person just decided (or undecided?) to leave the stickers on. Just another one of those mysterious details of the personal computer that some folks are completely oblivious to. Naturally most machines I see like that are also hindered by a host of other "details".
What is there to chuckle about? Many (most?) people buy a laptop to get work done, not to spend time removing stickers so it meets some aesthetic goal -- most of those people worried enough about aesthetics to remove the stickers probably buy Macs anyway so they don't have any stickers to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be great if you had a 100% efficient way of creating electricity. Coal still creates around 50% of the power in the USA and is only around 40% efficient. And you've got to factor in transmission losses from the power plant to your 100% efficient electric motor.
And mercury is solid under certain conditions. Did you have a point or was this a start of a list of all of the metals that can be liquid under certain conditions?
At the very least, mercury exposure could explain the behaviour of die-hard Apple fanboys :)
However, Liquid Metal is not mercury even though mercury is liquid metal.
I believe he is referring to the ability to add a very thin diamond coating to surfaces. this gives you the scratch residence without all of the brittleness issues.
Did you read the same post as me? He said:
Don't make things that are exposed to shocks, scratches and scrapes out of glass! Use diamondoid materials instead.
That doesn't sound like he's advocating evaporating a thin layer of diamond coating, it sounds like he's advocating using an diamond like material called diamonoid (which doesn't currently exist)
Adding a thin diamond coating would help with the issue of minor scratches, but coating glass with diamond wouldn't address the cracking/shattering problem people are experiencing when they drop their phones. Coating a ductile metal surface with a hard (and brittle) diamond coating sounds like it won't last very long since the diamond coating is likely to fracture and flake off as the metal flexes.
Actually, you don't want a harder material -- the harder the material it is, the more brittle it is. It will resist scrapes and scratches, but at some point, dropping or bending the phone will cause it to shatter (quite spectacularly, I wouldn't want your diamondoid phone in my back pocket when it shatters).
I think a more ductile material would be a better case material -- i've seen some work on self healing plastics where minor scratches eventually disappear. I suppose this may be where Apple's liquid metal purchase will come into the picture.
Actually, the open software advocates you're referring to are consistent -- I don't think you'll hear any of them saying that someone should be able to incorporate downloaded MP3's into commercial products that are then resold to others. They are absolutely fine with open source software being downloaded and used for free, where they have problems is when the open source software is incorporated into other products and sold rather than given away for free. So there's no double standard.
Of course, many (most?) open source software advocates (myself included) don't bother with downloading illegal content because it's easier to go to Amazon or iTunes and click the "Buy" button than to track down a torrent with a full and complete copy of the music we want to listen to. Once people get out of college and realize that their time costs money, the cost to pirate music exceeds the benefit for many people. There are, of course, the hardcore downloaders that download every album known to man in the genres they are interested in, but hey, it's not like they would have bought those 2000 albums so the music industry isn't losing much real income..
I hate loud commercials as much as the next guy, but rather than tell Cable Companies how to run their business, I'd rather have leglislation that provides true competition. Unbundle cable delivery from cable content - have a regulated utility in charge of the wires that pipe cable to the consumer, and let them sell access to whoever wants to provide content (where content includes internet access). And put the management of the network up for bid every 5 years.
If people really hate loud commercials, they won't watch the channels that have loud commercials. If channels with loud commercials are more profitable, well then I guess they aren't all that annoying to most people.
Right now it's hard to "vote with your feet" because often you have only a single cable provider choice and satellite is not always feasible. If there was true competition, consumers would move away from channels that are annoying.
Of course, that's easy for me to say - I've already moved away form cable entirely, relying on online content (mainly Netflix) for all of my TV viewing.
Two things about this:
1) I don't particularly care about the temperature difference between the exterior and interior of my house. What I care about is the temperature difference between the interior and exterior of my body
2) If I did care about the temperature outside, in circumstances where heating the house was necessary, I would prefer the exterior temperature to go up, not down.
1. That's the nice thing about a heat pump -- you don't need to know how it works so if all you care about is the temperature difference between the interior and exterior of your body, just set your thermostat to negative 26.6 degrees and your house will be a comfortable 72 degrees (an air-source heatpump may invoke auxillary heating to maintain that temperature but you don't need to know that). Though I wonder where you got a thermostat that lets you set the thermostat relative to your body temperature. Do you take into account daily fluctuations in body temperature? Most people just set an absolute temperature and leave it there, without regard to body temp.
2. Why do you care what happens to the outside temperature when you need to heat your house? The heat pump does make it colder outside while making it warmer inside, but of course in real life there is no measurable effect on outside temperatures.
If your battery were a "perfect" power source, then all of the heat would end up in the wire (whether copper or nichrome). However, a battery has internal resistance, so if you short out the battery with a low resistance copper wire, much of the heat will be generated in the battery itself.
I'm not aware of any mechanism for electrons to migrate outside of the battery cell from cathode to anode without doing work -- what is this mechanism you speak of?
If you have such a contract, then how did you get fired?
My agency contracts let me replace a resource for nearly any reason. And even if the contract didn't allow it, I'm certain the agency would pull out a contractor that I said was not working out.
Dude, you were a contractor - you can be let go for any reason, even including "I don't like you". All I have to do is call the agency and say "Hey, XXXX is not working out, he's not a good cultural fit here...can you send someone else?"
If you don't like the instability of being a contractor, don't do it - become a permanent employee instead. (possibly for less money, but hey everything in life is a tradeoff)
There was no "launch", this was an alpha code release. Alpha code often has bugs, sometimes major. They even called it a "Developer Release". So I don't understand the uproar about *gasp* bugs in alpha code! If they had branded it beta code then I'd be more concerned with fundamental bugs, but even the developers said it had security bugs when they released it:
http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/09/15/developer-release.html
Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it, but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable. If you do find something, be sure to log it in our bugtracker, and we would love screenshots and browser info.
Since the dedupe license came for "free" with my filer, yes, that 40% improvement cost less than buying 40% more disks.
And yes, it's much cheaper than building another fileserver with 100% more disk and syncing between them. How much do you think it costs to build a fileserver with 150TB of disk space, and how would you recommend that I sync the 75TB of data between them? I don't think this is a job for rsync.
I do actually replicate between two identical (nearly identical) arrays, but I use my array vendor's software to do this -- they can replicate only modified blocks, much faster that a tool that only has visibility at the filesystem level.
More disks don't neccessarily mean more IOPS, a better storage system means better IOPS. If all you're looking for is raw IOPS, I'm sure you can build a system from commodity components that outperforms a reasonably sized Netapp or EMC filer. But you wouldn't be able to scale that system to 100TB or more.
And I wouldn't trust that home-brew system to run my company's database and other critical servers that have to run 24x7x365.
You and Vancorps are talking about two different things. Deduplication (whether done by the filesystem or the storage system) doesn't preclude having snapshots.
Vancorps was talking about the futility of keeping multiple copies of files on the same storage device as an aid to recovering corrupt data. He was not arguing that regular snapshots should not be made, just that redundant data could be deduped away without sacrificing any real measure of file integrity.
I think what you're talking about is single instance storage in your mail server. But as you mentioned, it only works well on identical emails and attachments.
No dedupe system that I'm aware of does what you'd need to do to dedupe forwarded emails. It's technically possible by recognizing similar messages and doing diff's on them to find identical sections. But, it's computationally difficult and there's not much payback -- better to go after the lowhanging fruit and dedupe all of the identical gif's and mp3s that people have downloaded off the internet.
When we deduped our corporate fileserver, we got around 40% of our space back.
I don't think it takes a NetApp sales rep to recognize the value of a reliable storage system. I'm sure he would say the same of EMC - it's expensive but worth every penny when you've got hundreds (or thousands) of people relying on your storage.
If you're in a 10 person office, you can get by with less, but when you've got a large corporate environment, you'll recognize the advantage of paying for Netapp or EMC.
No, deduplication has quite a bit of policy attached to it. Sometimes you want multiple independent copies of a file (well, maybe not in a data center, but why should the filesystem know that?). The filesystem should store the data it's told to; leave the deduplication to higher layers of a system.
Why do you want multiple independent copies of a file? If you're doing it because your disk storage system is so flakey that you aren't sure you can read the file, deduplication policy is not what you need -- you need a more reliable storage system and backups.
Most disks have a fine line between throwing random unrecoverable read errors and failing completely, so there's little value in having multiple copies of the same file on the same physical disk. (and most storage systems will have automatically replaced the drive with a hot spare once it started throwing too many soft read errors)
Netflix already claims to stream 720p content over a 5mbps connection. I don't think most consumers are as picky about TV resolution as the typical Slashdot reader. I regularly stream Netflix movies to my 37" 1080i capable TV and have no complaints about the picture quality. My parents (who I use an indicator of mainstream demand) are quite happy with the 480i content they get on their pre-HD tv. They even thought they were getting HD because they kept seeing all of the HD ads from their cable company even though their TV is not capable of HD. I'd bet that most people are like that -- if Netflix tells them it's HD, they'll believe it regardless of how compressed the video is or what the actual resolution is -- 480i 720p 1080i 1080p is just a mismatch of numbers and letters for most people, they don't *really* understand it. And there's nothing to stop a provider from taking a 480i stream and upconverting to 1080p and claiming it's HD -- many people will "see" the increased picture quality even if it's not there.
I have a blu-ray player but use it for streaming Netflix 80% of the time, another 15% I use it for DVD's that aren't available on streaming and the remaining 5% I watch Blu-rays. I just don't see any big advantage in Blu-ray. Slightly better picture quality yes, but at the expense of slower load times, and even more previews and other "features" that are harder to skip over than on DVD.
Maybe 2K or 4K will be more compelling, but since a 4K TV costs around $50K - $500K today, 4K in the home is at least 5 - 10 years away. Especially considering that I'd want a much bigger TV so I could take advantage of the 4K resolution. I doubt that even a 50" TV is big enough to take advantage of 4K at normal viewing distances.
And you're not even thinking about the whole cost of physical media. Not only do you have to pay for the cost of physically manufacturing the things, but then there's the cost of shipping it to your retailers, and the cost of the retailer owning and maintaining a warehouse, and a shop. All that sort of thing gets absorbed into the final retail price too.
Digital distribution should be miles upon miles cheaper.
The poster I was replying to already made that distinction - he was comparing the cost of the distribution network to physical product creation:
The cost of maintaining a distribution network -- be it servers in a data center, theaters in malls across the country, or warehouses and trucks -- far exceeds the cost of manufacturing a physical article in bulk
So I was comparing the cost of electronic distribution only to the cost of creating the physical media. Which, even ignoring the costs associated with physical product, makes the point that electronic distribution is orders of magnitude cheaper than physical product.
I think he's talking about 8mm video tape, not film.
Get this through your head: The cost of maintaining a distribution network -- be it servers in a data center, theaters in malls across the country, or warehouses and trucks -- far exceeds the cost of manufacturing a physical article in bulk. And the cost of CREATING content exceeds them both.
Uhh...I thought the big advantage of electronic distribution was that it's far cheaper than creating physical articles. I can get a server with 100mbit bandwidth + 10TB monthly transfer for $350/mo -- that will let me distribute 300K albums (at 30MB each). Or, one tenth of a cent each. Even if I hosted on Amazon EC2, my costs would be around 0.6 cents per CD.
I don't think you can press a CD for that little, even if you're buying 10 million of them at a time. I'd bet that the setup fee for a big CD run costs more than hosting the website for 6 months or a year.
Whether or not the cost of creating the content costs more than that depends on who the artist is and why they are creating it and what costs are included -- I have friends that burn CD's and give them out for free because they create music for the fun of it. I think their "recording studio" (including hardware and software) cost less than $500.
Actually there is a big difference between "move their thermostat 1/2 degree or add insulation" and "unplug chargers".
The first either decreases the amount of comfort or costs money (to insulate).
The second saves you money and has a positive impact on the environment.
And reaching behind my dresser every day to unplug my cell phone charger doesn't have an effect on my comfort? I'd say that the convenience of placing the phone on a charging mat every night rather than plugging it in and plugging in the charger has much less effect on my comfort than turning down my thermostat a tiny amount.
You're implying that turning down the thermostat or adding insulation doesn't save me money or have a positive impact on the environment, yet in truth it likely saves you more money and has a bigger positive effect on the environment than unplugging a cell phone charger. Especially given that a modern EnergyStar rated charger uses less than 0.5 watts in standby mode. That's 4KwH/year -- less then 50 cents worth of electricity for most people. I'll pay the 50 cents for the convenience of not having to plug my charger into the wall every time I plug in my phone.
(note that some people will say "Use a power strip with a switch, then you can just turn it on and off", but to that, I say that a large amount of energy goes into making a power strip - steel, plastic, copper all take energy to refine and shape - my guess is that switching off a 0.5 watt load when I'm not using it will never recoup the energy that went into making the power strip).
The electricity most people use for small electronics pales in comparison to the energy they use for heating and cooling.
The public awareness programs trying to get people to unplug chargers are ridiculous, that money should be spent trying to convince them to move their thermostat 1/2 degree or add insulation.
And please note that I'm not saying that it won't have any impact, I'm saying that the impact it has is so much smaller than other things that it is currently a wasted effort.
Yes! Thank you for making that point -- people don't think about sense of scale when they implement energy savings. (and of course, in cold climates, energy efficiency of appliances inside the home doesn't matter, since that inefficiency is dissipated as heat and goes toward heating your house)
They'll spend hundreds of $$ replacing chargers and installing smart power strips to save 5 watts of standby power, but they won't make capital improvements like additional insulation that may only cost $20/month amortized over 10 years and that can save real dollars in heating/cooling costs.
Or the guy with a 30mpg car will sell it and spend many thousands of dollars upgrading to a 40mpg hybrid and thinks he's saving the world, but the guy who upgrades his 15mpg car to a 20mpg car is actually saving twice as much gas per mile.
Granted, every little bit helps, but some bits help more than others.
At any rate I always have to stifle a chuckle when I notice machines where the person just decided (or undecided?) to leave the stickers on. Just another one of those mysterious details of the personal computer that some folks are completely oblivious to. Naturally most machines I see like that are also hindered by a host of other "details".
What is there to chuckle about? Many (most?) people buy a laptop to get work done, not to spend time removing stickers so it meets some aesthetic goal -- most of those people worried enough about aesthetics to remove the stickers probably buy Macs anyway so they don't have any stickers to deal with.