Well, they already have this dark energy and acceleration of the universe. I attended a talk on this last Sunday and the evidence for this is pretty strong now from multiple sources.
Just because I have a couple gigs of memory doesn't mean I want Firefox to consume it all. I run more than just a web browser. I don't want a lot of caching anyway, since most pages I hit are dynamic and I don't use back very frequently. I don't want a program to look and see I have a couple gigs of memory and assume it can use it all.
The article claims that there is no good IPv6 test equipment. I know this to be false. The old test equipment we have in our lab at work (Adtech) handles IPv6 performance testing just fine, just as well as IPv4. Granted, we only have OC-48 adapters, but higher speeds are available. This will test for speed, dropped packets, out of order, etc. I would be very surprised if any modern test equipment did not natively support IPv6 since supporting IPv6 is basically required for any decent router, especially if you plan to sell to the enterprise or government market.
The biggest problem I see at this point in terms of equipment is that few home firewall routers support IPv6, plus it sounds like Windows XP is missing some needed functionality if it doesn't properly handle IPv6 DNS or AD. I have a small Linux network at home running dual IPv4/IPv6 and have had no issues with IPv6.
Most of the Internet backbones no longer do IP routing, instead using MPLS for making forwarding decisions. MPLS doesn't really care what protocol runs on top of it, only the routing protocols do (i.e. BGP) which do support IPv6.
It is similar where I work. There are around 400 employees, yet the company has an entire class B as well as a couple class C's. Every computer, gets its own public IP address even though very few are actually needed. Everything is protected behind a firewall of course.
Image magick doesn't help in that it's missing some of the functionality I need and I need to do different operations on different pictures or groups of pictures, like shadow recovery or curves or whitebalance. I.e. I go some place and 5 pictures need their WB adjusted and 10 others could use shadow recovery or other things. IM is great for scripting things, but this can't be scripted. Plus, I like the fact that all the image processing for my photos is done with 16 bits/color until the final jpeg conversion phase, which is batched and done on the background. The batch processing often takes an hour or more on my current setup.
It just works so much better with great workflow support. If you haven't dealt with workflow image editing with lots of photos you don't know what you're missing. I can do things like copy and paste modifications to photos from one to another. If I want to do something to all of them, Ctrl-A and make the changes. And all of the tools I need are right there without having to use menus. WB, color, contrast, sharpening, straightening, cropping and a useful feature called "Perfectly Clear" that tends to do just about everything, bringing out shadows, recovering highlights, red-eye elimination, sharpening, etc.
All are just a click or two away and with a few clicks I can apply them to as many pictures as I want, all at once.
Gimp doesn't do any of this, hence it's useless to me unless there's a single photo I really want to work on, and even then I've given up in frustration trying to deal with Gimp's horrid UI.
I'm an amateur photographer as well and have always given up in frustration when using the Gimp and could never see processing dozens or hundreds of photos at a time with it. I have not played with Photoshop but will definitely look into it when it runs well under Wine, since I won't invest money in something that doesn't run well. Currently I use Bibble Professional for my workflow processing since it supports Linux natively and has good workflow support. I would also love to try Photoshop as well.
For me, Gimp isn't even useful for basic stuff since it can't handle the 12 or 14 bits per color my camera spits out for things like shadow recovery and whatnot. I also shudder at using it to process a batch of 1500 photos.
I've played with Picasa, but it's too limited for what I want and it currently does not support Nikon's updated raw format my camera uses.
While I have not used Photoshop I use a package available on Linux called Bibble to do my photo editing. I have tried Gimp and quickly gave up in frustration and found it far too limited for me to use. I need something that handles 12 and 14 bits per color properly for one, and I want something where I can quickly process dozens or hundreds of photos. The UI in Bibble makes photo processing a breeze, where I can make adjustments to multiple photos with only a few clicks to do things like adjusting "vibrance", contrast, curves, shadow recovery, white balance or fixing things like lens distortion or other things. I also love the fact that it never modifies the original raw or jpeg file and stores a corresponding file indicating all the changes that need to be made to the photo before exporting it.
Each time I've fired up Gimp I gave up in frustration over the UI and other limitations. I won't touch it for photos until some basic things are fixed (i.e. more than 8 bits per color).
I would love to use Photoshop and look forward to the result of Google's investment. I also would love it if Wine ran with Nikon Capture as well (it can't get past the installation phase).
While I love free software, I'm not so stuck up on it that I don't use commercial products instead if they are better or other closed source products. I also use Picasa, though mostly for organizing since it does not yet handle the new raw format my camera uses.
According to a friend of mine who worked at Nasa he said the wind tunnels drew many megawatts of power and they had their own direct supply from the utilities.
I think you nailed my Marantz DVD player to a tee. Though I have been able to play all the DVDs I've thrown at it except one and some others cause it to lock up at certain points and its retail cost (which I didn't pay) was well into the 4 digits. It handles DVD+R/-R but I doubt it will handle RW and I know it fails CD-R discs thanks to it's first generation DVD ROM drive.
Three years ago I got a LG VX6100 tri-mode phone. I have had places where the only signal I can get is analog and it came in handy. Due to the lack of bluetooth and the fact that analog is going away I finally upgraded to a new phone, but there were times where I could make calls whereas nobody else could.
Revenues from taxes rise and fall depending on the economy. In boom times, it makes sense for the government to have some money put aside to help fund things when the economy is slow so they don't have to keep drastically cutting and funding programs, which is a lot more expensive. It also makes sense for the government to set aside money for future requirements. In the US case, it could be used to help pay down the debt so the interest payments become less of a burden on the economy.
Doing this also helps blunt any major hits the economy takes since the government can use the surplus to do things like cut taxes without incurring a huge amount of debt that must be repaid at some future point. For example, if the economy is hit hard, the government could use the surplus to pay for needed infrastructure, which puts people back to work and helps feed the entire economy.
It would be like somebody spending every dollar they get without putting anything in savings or paying down expensive debt.
It has been shown time and again that paying for somebody's college education pays for itself many times over in higher tax revenue after the person graduates. To me, that's probably the best investment we can make since it more than pays for itself.
Comcast does that to me as well. I routinely see a HTTP or FTP download start at 2-3MB/sec then have it slow down to around 1MB/sec.
Bittorrent is definitely throttled to the point of being unusable. I pay for the higher speed package (8Mbps down, 640kbps up) since I tend to use the upstream bandwidth for uploading pictures.
With Bittorrent, no matter what settings I try I routinely get only 10-30KB/sec download speeds. The same download at work (where the entire building has the same downstream bandwidth as my home (minus burst) I can easily saturate the 8Mbps connection (I do this after-hours for work related files only, i.e. Linux ISOs).
I would add one more to this. If the code or algorithm is rather complex it also helps describing why you're doing what you are, since being able to recreate your thought process years later can be a huge timesaver should you have to debug or modify the code later.
1. Repeal laws that deal with people's private lives if it doesn't affect anybody else. You can't legislate all morality. Note that this would not affect laws where a person's actions negatively affect those around them. 2. Invest more money in the NSF and DOE emphasizing alternative energy sources and better energy efficiency. 3. Repeal the ethanol corn subsidy and tax it like any other fuel. Encourage better solutions. 4. Encourage more nuclear power. Repeal Carter's executive order banning breeder reactors and fund research and development for them to deal with wastes and provide a long term fuel source. 5. Invest in education to make college more affordable. It's a great investment that pays for itself in the long term. 6. Re-adjust taxes to lower the burden the middle class pays and increase it on the top 5% and especially the top 1%. 7. Increase funding for middle and high schools, especially in subjects like science and math. Use the money to train more teachers in these subjects. 8. Clean up the corporations are people. Make them more responsible for their actions. 9. Clean up copyright law. Cut it back to the original 20 years but allow it to be renewed by paying a fee. The longer it is renewed, the higher the fee. 10. Clean up patent law so obvious patents can no longer be filed and help overturn previous ones. 11. Offer an alternative government not-for-profit government insurance program with rates adjusted based on income. Mandate that everyone must have insurance unless they specifically opt-out. 12. Make it easier for students to get college loans especially if they apply for fields in science and medicine. 13. Clean up immigration. Bring back the old guest worker program where immigrants can come in to pick crops and return home to their native countries after the season. When this was dropped they brought their entire families in and stayed. 14. Make it easier for foreign students to come in to the country to get an education in science and technology. 15. Repeal the every child left behind act. 16. Bring back trade schools. 17. Ease censorship laws on TV across the board. 18. Drop politically popular programs if there is no scientific basis that they work (i.e. abstinence only sex-ed). 19. Start withdrawing from Iraq and re-deploy in Afghanistan. 20. Move support away from outside corporations for the military and do more internally to save money. 21. Increase funding for NASA for research missions and for new technology. 22. Improve transportation and encourage high speed rail. 23. Replace the DHS and a lot of the stupid rules (i.e. TSA). Base policies on scientific research and not feel-good political policies. 24. Appoint qualified experienced people to be in charge of all departments over political friends. 25. No more signing statements. The executive branch is subject to the same laws as everyone else. 26. Make government more open. No more secret meetings on key issues with industry lobbyist. 27. Promote government use of open standards and OSS. Encourage development of OSS software to meet government needs to save taxpayer money. 28. Promote network neutrality. 29. Clean up the FCC to make it more friendly to the public and encourage open use of the spectrum. 30. Increase taxes on corporations who move their headquarters off-shore. 31. Tax outsourced jobs. 32. Use the money from the above taxes to promote training of US citizens for the positions most needed. 33. Work to make the budget balanced. Veto laws that have pork in them. 34. Veto laws that do not make much sense. 35. Repeal the DMCA. 36. Promote fair use. 37. Reduce the war on drugs. Legalize marijuana and other drugs known to not be very harmful or addictive. Tax as needed. Allow hemp to be grown. 38. Promote use of solar, wind and other technologies through tax cuts and subsidies. Tax carbon to help pay for it. 39. Encourage research into new battery technology and infrastructure for electric vehicles. 40. Work to be co
I may not carry a laptop, but I do travel with a few cameras. I have my dSLR with one spare lithium battery, a small point-and-shoot camera with a bunch of spares, and a video camera. I need a bunch of spares for my old P&S camera since it eats them like there's no tomorrow and if I use that camera much I'll easily go through 3-4 batteries before I can get back and have a chance to charge them. Granted, the batteries are quite small but I don't feel like replacing it just yet.
Being limited to one spare battery for everything absolutely sucks and is unacceptable. I could see carrying one spare for a laptop, but this will really suck for photographers.
I have seen them occasionally at Home Depot and some of the other hardware stores. Unfortunately they are not as widely available, possibly due to patent issues (I think Philips holds the patent). I bought a number of them online from Topbulb and they have worked fairly well.
Fact: the television studio I've volunteered at uses fluorescent lighting to help light the talent so they look good on TV without subjecting them to a lot of heat.
Fact: if your power comes from coal, using a CFL bulb will release less mercury into the environment if not properly disposed of than the coal wasted using an incandescent bulb. The amount of mercury decreases as it is absorbed by the glass which results in one of the most common failure modes. Being entombed in glass makes it less likely for the mercury to be released back into the environment if the bulb is improperly discarded.
Fact: high CRI (color rendering index) fluorescent bulbs are available. The higher the CRI index, the better the color. You just have to do some research to find them. Just google "fluorescent cri".
Fact: a camera can deal with fluorescent lighting if it has decent white balance support, though high CRI helps a lot.
Fact: fluorescent bulbs will produce more vitamin D in humans than regular incandescent bulbs due to the higher amount of UV light, and thus can benefit health. Though none of these bulbs is a substitute for getting some sunlight or having a diet with the proper amount of vitamin D.
Fact: they make fluorescent bulbs specifically for reptile cages which produce more UV light. Fluorescent bulbs work because the mercury in them produces UV light which is converted to the visible spectrum by the phosphor coating.
Fact: LED lighting is still significantly more expensive than other forms of lighting.
I agree that this is a problem, though I also think most of the X10 stuff is unreliable crap. There is absolutely no reason why they cannot make it compatible with fluorescent bulbs. I've used mine with those bulbs without any problems. My biggest complaint is that they don't allow you to turn off the dimming capability in their light switches unless you buy an expensive relay-based switch. I've complained to them in the past but that just sticks me on their god-awful mailing list. It should be as simple as changing a few lines of their PIC code and hooking up the neutral wire to insure receiving a good signal. The other alternative would be for more dimmable CFLs to become available and come down in price.
I have fluorescent bulbs that look pretty good, but they're not the $0.50 bulbs on sale in all of the stores. I have a nice GE bulb in my favorite desk lamp, but it is a $15 bulb instead of the usual $0.50 bulb.
As for UV and artwork, designing fixtures to block it is relatively trivial with all of the UV blocking materials out there. All it needs is one of the many films out there that block UV. Ordinary glass blocks most UV light (though not all, especially UVA), but specialty glass can block all of it.
I use Konqueror a lot and find it rarely crashes. I'll often have Konqueror going for days at a time. And while Konqueror's ad-block is not as nice as Firefox, I've managed to add enough rules to block most of the ads I see.
I've seen strange behavior in Konqueror at times, like the slow download speed, at which point I restart it.
I also like the fact that if I find a bunch of flash stuff running I can just kill nspluginviewer and it all disappears and all the memory is freed up, without affecting the browser.
My big problem with Firefox (and Thunderbird) is at work. My home directory is NFS mounted and if I switch computers (which I often do, between my cubical and our lab), only one instance of Firefox and Thunderbird may run on the network at any given time. If I'm running it in my cubical and go to the lab, I can't run it there as well.
I consistently get noticeably better performance using Firewire 400 for external drives than USB with much less CPU overhead. In addition, at least on Linux, the stability has been much better. I found with USB that if I had multiple applications accessing an external USB drive at the same time the interface would hang, but no such problems with Firewire.
I haven't played around with the USB reliability with my latest Linux update since I just use Firewire instead.
Plus, I have no problem ganging Firewire drives together without the need for a hub.
After my first experience with Firewire vs USB I make sure any external drive I get supports Firewire, though I want to try playing around with eSata as well. I just need to pick up some cables one of these days to try it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they already have this dark energy and acceleration of the universe. I attended a talk on this last Sunday and the evidence for this is pretty strong now from multiple sources.
Just because I have a couple gigs of memory doesn't mean I want Firefox to consume it all. I run more than just a web browser. I don't want a lot of caching anyway, since most pages I hit are dynamic and I don't use back very frequently. I don't want a program to look and see I have a couple gigs of memory and assume it can use it all.
-Aaron
The article claims that there is no good IPv6 test equipment. I know this to be false. The old test equipment we have in our lab at work (Adtech) handles IPv6 performance testing just fine, just as well as IPv4. Granted, we only have OC-48 adapters, but higher speeds are available. This will test for speed, dropped packets, out of order, etc. I would be very surprised if any modern test equipment did not natively support IPv6 since supporting IPv6 is basically required for any decent router, especially if you plan to sell to the enterprise or government market.
The biggest problem I see at this point in terms of equipment is that few home firewall routers support IPv6, plus it sounds like Windows XP is missing some needed functionality if it doesn't properly handle IPv6 DNS or AD. I have a small Linux network at home running dual IPv4/IPv6 and have had no issues with IPv6.
Most of the Internet backbones no longer do IP routing, instead using MPLS for making forwarding decisions. MPLS doesn't really care what protocol runs on top of it, only the routing protocols do (i.e. BGP) which do support IPv6.
It is similar where I work. There are around 400 employees, yet the company has an entire class B as well as a couple class C's. Every computer, gets its own public IP address even though very few are actually needed. Everything is protected behind a firewall of course.
Image magick doesn't help in that it's missing some of the functionality I need and I need to do different operations on different pictures or groups of pictures, like shadow recovery or curves or whitebalance. I.e. I go some place and 5 pictures need their WB adjusted and 10 others could use shadow recovery or other things. IM is great for scripting things, but this can't be scripted. Plus, I like the fact that all the image processing for my photos is done with 16 bits/color until the final jpeg conversion phase, which is batched and done on the background. The batch processing often takes an hour or more on my current setup.
It just works so much better with great workflow support. If you haven't dealt with workflow image editing with lots of photos you don't know what you're missing. I can do things like copy and paste modifications to photos from one to another. If I want to do something to all of them, Ctrl-A and make the changes. And all of the tools I need are right there without having to use menus. WB, color, contrast, sharpening, straightening, cropping and a useful feature called "Perfectly Clear" that tends to do just about everything, bringing out shadows, recovering highlights, red-eye elimination, sharpening, etc.
All are just a click or two away and with a few clicks I can apply them to as many pictures as I want, all at once.
Gimp doesn't do any of this, hence it's useless to me unless there's a single photo I really want to work on, and even then I've given up in frustration trying to deal with Gimp's horrid UI.
I'm an amateur photographer as well and have always given up in frustration when using the Gimp and could never see processing dozens or hundreds of photos at a time with it. I have not played with Photoshop but will definitely look into it when it runs well under Wine, since I won't invest money in something that doesn't run well. Currently I use Bibble Professional for my workflow processing since it supports Linux natively and has good workflow support. I would also love to try Photoshop as well.
For me, Gimp isn't even useful for basic stuff since it can't handle the 12 or 14 bits per color my camera spits out for things like shadow recovery and whatnot. I also shudder at using it to process a batch of 1500 photos.
I've played with Picasa, but it's too limited for what I want and it currently does not support Nikon's updated raw format my camera uses.
While I have not used Photoshop I use a package available on Linux called Bibble to do my photo editing. I have tried Gimp and quickly gave up in frustration and found it far too limited for me to use. I need something that handles 12 and 14 bits per color properly for one, and I want something where I can quickly process dozens or hundreds of photos. The UI in Bibble makes photo processing a breeze, where I can make adjustments to multiple photos with only a few clicks to do things like adjusting "vibrance", contrast, curves, shadow recovery, white balance or fixing things like lens distortion or other things. I also love the fact that it never modifies the original raw or jpeg file and stores a corresponding file indicating all the changes that need to be made to the photo before exporting it.
Each time I've fired up Gimp I gave up in frustration over the UI and other limitations. I won't touch it for photos until some basic things are fixed (i.e. more than 8 bits per color).
I would love to use Photoshop and look forward to the result of Google's investment. I also would love it if Wine ran with Nikon Capture as well (it can't get past the installation phase).
While I love free software, I'm not so stuck up on it that I don't use commercial products instead if they are better or other closed source products. I also use Picasa, though mostly for organizing since it does not yet handle the new raw format my camera uses.
According to a friend of mine who worked at Nasa he said the wind tunnels drew many megawatts of power and they had their own direct supply from the utilities.
I think you nailed my Marantz DVD player to a tee. Though I have been able to play all the DVDs I've thrown at it except one and some others cause it to lock up at certain points and its retail cost (which I didn't pay) was well into the 4 digits. It handles DVD+R/-R but I doubt it will handle RW and I know it fails CD-R discs thanks to it's first generation DVD ROM drive.
Three years ago I got a LG VX6100 tri-mode phone. I have had places where the only signal I can get is analog and it came in handy. Due to the lack of bluetooth and the fact that analog is going away I finally upgraded to a new phone, but there were times where I could make calls whereas nobody else could.
A very good talk on this was given last Friday, 02/08/2008 on NPR's Science Friday.
I would argue the exact opposite.
Revenues from taxes rise and fall depending on the economy. In boom times, it makes sense for the government to have some money put aside to help fund things when the economy is slow so they don't have to keep drastically cutting and funding programs, which is a lot more expensive. It also makes sense for the government to set aside money for future requirements. In the US case, it could be used to help pay down the debt so the interest payments become less of a burden on the economy.
Doing this also helps blunt any major hits the economy takes since the government can use the surplus to do things like cut taxes without incurring a huge amount of debt that must be repaid at some future point. For example, if the economy is hit hard, the government could use the surplus to pay for needed infrastructure, which puts people back to work and helps feed the entire economy.
It would be like somebody spending every dollar they get without putting anything in savings or paying down expensive debt.
It has been shown time and again that paying for somebody's college education pays for itself many times over in higher tax revenue after the person graduates. To me, that's probably the best investment we can make since it more than pays for itself.
-Aaron
Not only that, he recommended against bubble sort! The video in the parent is good to watch and they also have another with Hillary.
Oh, like the unopened ballot boxes found in a Florida in the swamp after the 2000 election?
Comcast does that to me as well. I routinely see a HTTP or FTP download start at 2-3MB/sec then have it slow down to around 1MB/sec.
Bittorrent is definitely throttled to the point of being unusable. I pay for the higher speed package (8Mbps down, 640kbps up) since I tend to use the upstream bandwidth for uploading pictures.
With Bittorrent, no matter what settings I try I routinely get only 10-30KB/sec download speeds. The same download at work (where the entire building has the same downstream bandwidth as my home (minus burst) I can easily saturate the 8Mbps connection (I do this after-hours for work related files only, i.e. Linux ISOs).
I would add one more to this. If the code or algorithm is rather complex it also helps describing why you're doing what you are, since being able to recreate your thought process years later can be a huge timesaver should you have to debug or modify the code later.
1. Repeal laws that deal with people's private lives if it doesn't affect anybody else. You can't legislate all morality. Note that this would not affect laws where a person's actions negatively affect those around them.
2. Invest more money in the NSF and DOE emphasizing alternative energy sources and better energy efficiency.
3. Repeal the ethanol corn subsidy and tax it like any other fuel. Encourage better solutions.
4. Encourage more nuclear power. Repeal Carter's executive order banning breeder reactors and fund research and development for them to deal with wastes and provide a long term fuel source.
5. Invest in education to make college more affordable. It's a great investment that pays for itself in the long term.
6. Re-adjust taxes to lower the burden the middle class pays and increase it on the top 5% and especially the top 1%.
7. Increase funding for middle and high schools, especially in subjects like science and math. Use the money to train more teachers in these subjects.
8. Clean up the corporations are people. Make them more responsible for their actions.
9. Clean up copyright law. Cut it back to the original 20 years but allow it to be renewed by paying a fee. The longer it is renewed, the higher the fee.
10. Clean up patent law so obvious patents can no longer be filed and help overturn previous ones.
11. Offer an alternative government not-for-profit government insurance program with rates adjusted based on income. Mandate that everyone must have insurance unless they specifically opt-out.
12. Make it easier for students to get college loans especially if they apply for fields in science and medicine.
13. Clean up immigration. Bring back the old guest worker program where immigrants can come in to pick crops and return home to their native countries after the season. When this was dropped they brought their entire families in and stayed.
14. Make it easier for foreign students to come in to the country to get an education in science and technology.
15. Repeal the every child left behind act.
16. Bring back trade schools.
17. Ease censorship laws on TV across the board.
18. Drop politically popular programs if there is no scientific basis that they work (i.e. abstinence only sex-ed).
19. Start withdrawing from Iraq and re-deploy in Afghanistan.
20. Move support away from outside corporations for the military and do more internally to save money.
21. Increase funding for NASA for research missions and for new technology.
22. Improve transportation and encourage high speed rail.
23. Replace the DHS and a lot of the stupid rules (i.e. TSA). Base policies on scientific research and not feel-good political policies.
24. Appoint qualified experienced people to be in charge of all departments over political friends.
25. No more signing statements. The executive branch is subject to the same laws as everyone else.
26. Make government more open. No more secret meetings on key issues with industry lobbyist.
27. Promote government use of open standards and OSS. Encourage development of OSS software to meet government needs to save taxpayer money.
28. Promote network neutrality.
29. Clean up the FCC to make it more friendly to the public and encourage open use of the spectrum.
30. Increase taxes on corporations who move their headquarters off-shore.
31. Tax outsourced jobs.
32. Use the money from the above taxes to promote training of US citizens for the positions most needed.
33. Work to make the budget balanced. Veto laws that have pork in them.
34. Veto laws that do not make much sense.
35. Repeal the DMCA.
36. Promote fair use.
37. Reduce the war on drugs. Legalize marijuana and other drugs known to not be very harmful or addictive. Tax as needed. Allow hemp to be grown.
38. Promote use of solar, wind and other technologies through tax cuts and subsidies. Tax carbon to help pay for it.
39. Encourage research into new battery technology and infrastructure for electric vehicles.
40. Work to be co
I may not carry a laptop, but I do travel with a few cameras. I have my dSLR with one spare lithium battery, a small point-and-shoot camera with a bunch of spares, and a video camera. I need a bunch of spares for my old P&S camera since it eats them like there's no tomorrow and if I use that camera much I'll easily go through 3-4 batteries before I can get back and have a chance to charge them. Granted, the batteries are quite small but I don't feel like replacing it just yet.
Being limited to one spare battery for everything absolutely sucks and is unacceptable. I could see carrying one spare for a laptop, but this will really suck for photographers.
I have seen them occasionally at Home Depot and some of the other hardware stores. Unfortunately they are not as widely available, possibly due to patent issues (I think Philips holds the patent). I bought a number of them online from Topbulb and they have worked fairly well.
Fact: the television studio I've volunteered at uses fluorescent lighting to help light the talent so they look good on TV without subjecting them to a lot of heat.
Fact: if your power comes from coal, using a CFL bulb will release less mercury into the environment if not properly disposed of than the coal wasted using an incandescent bulb. The amount of mercury decreases as it is absorbed by the glass which results in one of the most common failure modes. Being entombed in glass makes it less likely for the mercury to be released back into the environment if the bulb is improperly discarded.
Fact: high CRI (color rendering index) fluorescent bulbs are available. The higher the CRI index, the better the color. You just have to do some research to find them. Just google "fluorescent cri".
Fact: a camera can deal with fluorescent lighting if it has decent white balance support, though high CRI helps a lot.
Fact: fluorescent bulbs will produce more vitamin D in humans than regular incandescent bulbs due to the higher amount of UV light, and thus can benefit health. Though none of these bulbs is a substitute for getting some sunlight or having a diet with the proper amount of vitamin D.
Fact: they make fluorescent bulbs specifically for reptile cages which produce more UV light. Fluorescent bulbs work because the mercury in them produces UV light which is converted to the visible spectrum by the phosphor coating.
Fact: LED lighting is still significantly more expensive than other forms of lighting.
I agree that this is a problem, though I also think most of the X10 stuff is unreliable crap. There is absolutely no reason why they cannot make it compatible with fluorescent bulbs. I've used mine with those bulbs without any problems. My biggest complaint is that they don't allow you to turn off the dimming capability in their light switches unless you buy an expensive relay-based switch. I've complained to them in the past but that just sticks me on their god-awful mailing list. It should be as simple as changing a few lines of their PIC code and hooking up the neutral wire to insure receiving a good signal. The other alternative would be for more dimmable CFLs to become available and come down in price.
I have fluorescent bulbs that look pretty good, but they're not the $0.50 bulbs on sale in all of the stores. I have a nice GE bulb in my favorite desk lamp, but it is a $15 bulb instead of the usual $0.50 bulb.
As for UV and artwork, designing fixtures to block it is relatively trivial with all of the UV blocking materials out there. All it needs is one of the many films out there that block UV. Ordinary glass blocks most UV light (though not all, especially UVA), but specialty glass can block all of it.
I use Konqueror a lot and find it rarely crashes. I'll often have Konqueror going for days at a time. And while Konqueror's ad-block is not as nice as Firefox, I've managed to add enough rules to block most of the ads I see.
I've seen strange behavior in Konqueror at times, like the slow download speed, at which point I restart it.
I also like the fact that if I find a bunch of flash stuff running I can just kill nspluginviewer and it all disappears and all the memory is freed up, without affecting the browser.
My big problem with Firefox (and Thunderbird) is at work. My home directory is NFS mounted and if I switch computers (which I often do, between my cubical and our lab), only one instance of Firefox and Thunderbird may run on the network at any given time. If I'm running it in my cubical and go to the lab, I can't run it there as well.
I consistently get noticeably better performance using Firewire 400 for external drives than USB with much less CPU overhead. In addition, at least on Linux, the stability has been much better. I found with USB that if I had multiple applications accessing an external USB drive at the same time the interface would hang, but no such problems with Firewire.
I haven't played around with the USB reliability with my latest Linux update since I just use Firewire instead.
Plus, I have no problem ganging Firewire drives together without the need for a hub.
After my first experience with Firewire vs USB I make sure any external drive I get supports Firewire, though I want to try playing around with eSata as well. I just need to pick up some cables one of these days to try it out.
It appears that there are many edits from this IP address. At least one person at this IP address seems to have a major problem with Catholics. At least some of the other edits appear to be rather destructive as well. The person also appears to have some sort of Tequila fetish as well.