> Personal video chat is also one of the reasons (the bigger the picture the better), very realistic (as far as audiovisual goes) games and even Flash games.
Meh. Personal video -- that's nothing, in terms of CPU for machines built this century. Games are all but dead on the PC. Flash games (the ones that aren't disguised attack sites) still take very little CPU in modern terms. A friend plays flash games compulsively, and her machine is older than mine, which is circa 2003.
I strongly suspect that *consumer* client-side web apps will be carefully coded to work adequately on netbooks, (say, 1 Ghz Celeron as a baseline) simply because they can't afford to cut out that segment of the market. And I suspect that will be more than adequate. Professional client-side web apps may require more, but that's a niche, and we're talking what the great unwashed masses are likely to need.
I could debate with you on how much CPU (again, in modern terms) it takes to drive a 10G network adapter, but there's no point, because there's no application that needs it. I have a 20 megabit connection to the internet, and there's no legal use for that much bandwidth. I have one gig in the house, and only really use it rarely -- moving a video from my rendering workstation to the media center attached to the HDTV. Transfer is a few seconds. 10G in the home, for all but a few geeks, has no point. I'm glad people are working on it, and maybe there will be a usage for it some day, but now? Outside the computer room, it's a solution looking for a problem.
How old is "older"? Daughter is still happy with her dual 800 G4 from 2001. She's a heavy Photoshop user, and response on her elderly G4 is better than her more recent Dell (2 Ghz Pentium 4, circa 2004). There's a brisk business out there in non-current Macs -- you can probably offer her a substantial upgrade for a paltry sum without even stepping in a Mac store.
I do video editing at home, (my video camera is a little higher end than a Flip) and in 2008 I bought an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (I think it was $26) made in 2003, to replace the Sempron in my very elderly pre-X2 motherboard. The Athlon is still good enough for rendering movies, doing a half hour of video in about 45 minutes. Sure, I could probably do it in 20 minutes with a faster machine, but then I'd have to swap out the motherboard and that's more work than I feel like doing. And I'm a geek.
A friend of mine has a G5 with dual 1.8 processors. He pines for a new Intel-based Mac. He wants one because it's shiny and new and so much faster... I keep asking him "In what way is the G5 inadequate? What do you do, or do you plan to do, that the G5 doesn't do well?" He can't come up with a single example. He does heavy video manipulation and has some large disks attached to the machine. When pressed, he'll admit that the G5 performance is adequate for what he does. His computer was made in 2003.
What he ended up doing is buying a new monitor (which he really did need) and keyboard. Now, as long as you don't look under the table, his Mac looks like it just came from the showroom. He's now experimenting with SATA adapters so he can put larger, faster disks in it.
Yes, yes, I know, Leopard (released in 2007) will be the last OS for the Power-based macs. But Leopard is current. There's no practical reason to spend money on a new machine.
I recently bought a new laptop for my wife. Her old Toshiba was starting to have problems -- the battery would no longer hold a charge, the pointer was starting to go south, a couple other things. I checked on the cost of parts, and the total was right around $350. (Mostly the battery.) I bought her the lowest-end laptop I could find for about $380 and threw the old one away. The new one has four times the memory and eight times the CPU of her old laptop, way way WAY overkill for anything she's likely to do. (But it saved me a lot of work.) It's also the only Vista machine in the house. This, I submit, is one of the only realistic reasons for average users to replace their machine these days -- when the cost of repair is greater than the cost of replacement.
Mind you, I don't want to discourage you from going out and buying a ultra-cool stylish new Mac. But I think it's important to recognize *why* you're buying it.
>> And ~500Mhz of processing power is all you really need for that.
> Yeah, well, in the days of the Pentium II which topped out at 450MHz, that would have been "hardcore".
> So clearly the needs of even the most modest computer users have gone up substantially.
Yes, but have they gone up recently? Sure, if you go back far enough you'll find unusable computers by the standards of today's average user, but seriously... when was the last time the "average" user really had to upgrade?
Let's parameterize this to make sure we're all talking about the same thing. "Average", for the purposes of this comment, being defined as someone who uses email, browses the web, plays a few card games, and oh hell, including -- to be brutally fair -- casual video viewing from the likes of youtube and hulu.
Let's see... The absolute cheapest desktop system I can conveniently find at the moment has a 1.8G Celeron and a gig of memory. That's an embarrassment of riches to perform the paltry functions described above. Laptops: I have at home a Thinkpad 240X (500 Mhz Pentium III, memory maxed out) made in June 2000 -- that's a whole DECADE ago now -- that will do all of those things, *and* play DIVX encoded videos fullscreen without hesitations, and I don't think you could buy a new laptop anywhere today, for any price, that didn't have significantly better specs. *Phones* have better specs.
To the Linux geeks out there -- yes, you can get more bang for hardware buck with Linux, but don't flatter yourself into thinking that's the only reason ultra-cheap computers are "good enough". Windows XP runs fine for average usage (see above) on hardware made a decade ago. (And of Windows versions, XP itself is "good enough" for the average user, but that's another story.)
This is not a Linux Phenomenon. It's a case of the manufacturers not shifting paradigms fast enough. In the Old Days (say, the 1990's) we really needed a steep performance development curve because all kinds of new stuff was happening that would make use of every computing cycle one could conveniently afford. Windows tended to drive this, because each new version needed faster hardware to drive it, and there was (arguably) more functionality (or fewer bugs) in each new version to warrant upgrading.
But shortly after the turn of the century, two things happened: (1) A version was released of the most popular OS on the planet that (finally) was solid enough that the average user didn't immediately aspire to upgrade. (2) Hardware performance leapfrogged past what most people really needed, especially considering (1) above. With no Killer App and no new lugubrious-yet-tantalizing release of Windows to drive it, hardware was suddenly too fast for main street.
It was fairly recently that the industry finally understood that there was a market for Cheap. What followed was a scramble to adapt to this new market. You could hear the grinding of continental paradigm shift. Even Microsoft -- for God's sake -- is starting to become concerned about performance, instead of just assuming that Moore's Law will somehow compensate for unchecked bloat.
Let's face it: There is no consumer Killer App for the quad core Nehalem. There are a few painfully cutting edge geeks that may find a use for that kind of power, but most are just fooling themselves -- playing a game of my-cpu-runs-hotter-than-yours. Yet you can put together a killer Nehalem-based PC for less than the cost of a wide screen TV.
And that's not even taking the economy into account.
> And assuming the software industry continues to find interesting things for people like your mom to do with their computer, then this will continue.
That's the current problem (if you want to call it that). The software industry has nothing your mom would need current midrange hardware to run, with nothing in particular coming up.
Maybe there is a killer app waiting out there -- maybe when true AI becomes practical, it'll drive another technology race. But there hasn't been anything for awhile.
>...will make the next five years a fantastic time to be a science fiction movie enthusiast
Or, they could all suck and we'll be consoling ourselves with yet another director's cut of Blade Runner. I was at the front of the line for de Palma's Mission to Mars and Soderbergh's Solaris, and I still want my 213 minutes back. In both cases, the subject matter, cast and crew, sets, models, all the advance information looked stellar, but both films were dull and incoherent.
I'll probably go see Forever War because I'm a fan of the book and a fan of Scott. But I'll believe this ushers in a new age of science fiction when I see it on the screen. There's a huge amount of really good science fiction out there, and a lot of it is filmable. (A lot admittedly isn't.) Pick a novel, *that hasn't been done before*, (isn't anyone tired of remakes yet?) make a decent film, and then do it again. I'll be a believer then.
Maybe it was the theater, but the 3D effects for Coraline were, in my opinion, far better than Beowulf, and much less distracting. But I know what you mean. I think the level of distraction is to a certain extent a directorial choice -- whether they're going for atmosphere or gimmicks. Kind of like color when it became commonly available.
It's a compelling argument. But think of it another way; what if what's happening is that the major labels are driving the development and deployment of the technology (to their detriment, or so they say). The infrastructure is in place; it remains for you and other indies to figure out how to make use of it.
The porn industry drove the development of home video technology. The major record labels and the pap they produce are the porn of the music industry. I'm not surprised it tends to cater to their content.
It seems to me that the next move is yours. You and your compatriots need to figure out how to bend filesharing to your needs.
Consider this: What do the labels really provide? Marketing, right? Ok, let's look at an analogy -- how are the newspapers and network news doing? Generally going down the tubes, right? Because you can selectively pick and choose from a much larger pool of news online. Well hmm. An effective grassroots filesharing infrastructure exists. Perhaps what's needed now is a significant grassroots marketing effort. Not just sharing files, but sharing, I dunno, taste.
These days I tend to listen to indie artists. I hear about them through word of mouth. There's probably a better way, but I don't know what it is yet.
Fair enough, if that's the case, why is it that the spam box at my ISP, which I have to log in to sift through, (because they do occasonally get it wrong) has hundreds (typically over 200, less than 500, peaking at low thousands in early October and early January) of new entries every day? Those emails were not filtered at the MX, they were not stopped before HELO or any other part of the initial smtp transaction, they were successfully transmitted, received by my ISP and transferred to the spam folder for my email account, where they sit there until they expire or I forcibly remove them.
I understand there are efforts to stop the transmission of spam earlier in the process; parenthetically, the latest IP I've inherited from Verizon appears to have been used for spam in the past -- it's on an ignore list -- but for most people, spam filtering is something that happens on the receiving end. Better spam filters, as they are most often implemented, are not an ecological gain. Although it's easy to see how non-technical people would misunderstand that.
It's relatively easy to detect and shut down a single IP that's sending out thousands of emails a second, (speaking as one who has had to clean up compromised machines) but much more difficult, requiring more complex heuristics and significantly higher incidence of false positives, to try to filter the source when spam is sent out a few at a time from massive botnets. It's a nice fantasy, and the work in this direction is important, but I don't see it having significant impact. Holistically, all we're doing is breeding smarter mice.
What? You do understand what an "inbox" is, don't you? By the time spam touches your filter, it's already been sent, and probably traveled quite a distance. What are you talking about?
>'Imagine if every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter. We could save about 75% of the spam energy used today -- 25 TWh per year; that's like taking 2.3 million cars off the road.'
Um, yeah. No. Stopping spam at the recipient end, after it's already been generated at someone else's compromised machine and gone through all those tubes and things, isn't going to save much in the way of actual energy. I suspect this number is wildly optimistic, IE, made up.
I mean, I hate spam as much as the next computer user, maybe even more, as sysadmins see more of the larger impact. There is some amount of vicarious satisfaction in focusing the Fury of the Greens at spam. But if you're really sincere about saving energy, and not just indulging in hyperbole, you want to stop it at the sending end.
The places I've worked at divide the job into "Web Designer" and "Web Developer". The Designer decides the look and feel, and may do little or no actual coding. The Developer knows the code, but may not be up on ergonomics and usability. For simple designs, or if the designer is particularly sharp, the two roles could be the same person. But I've seen some pretty bad websites created by designers who were insufficient in coding, and developers who couldn't understand that you don't use a mauve font on a salmon background.
Is the primary revenue stream for the first few months of a new release actually from business? I would think it was from the perennially hopeful rank-and-file, the gamers thinking they need the latest version of DirectX, the shiny-object people, or pre-loaded on consumer PCs purchased in that time frame -- you know, all the usual early adopters. Business tends not to be early adopters unless what they have now is intolerable, and maybe not even then.
I don't see where this is even news. Is the author trying to make the case that Microsoft is in trouble because business is generally going to wait until SP1? For this to be true, they'd have to *already* be in trouble, and I don't think that's the case. This is trying to create a story out of nothing.
My company just last week switched from Office 2003 to Office 2007. Now we're 2 years behind instead of 6.
But $50,000 is more than I've ever paid for a car. You could buy a Jaguar XF for that much. How is even Tesla's low end not a luxury car? (Or an expensive curiosity.)
This is only marginally on topic (because we were talking about "value engineering") but I remember when CDs first came out and the sales people at The Good Guys were playing frisbee with them in the parking lot, and then bringing them inside and playing them, and they still played fine. Now we handle them like faberge eggs.
I think it's often the case that the first few years of a product's life cycle tend to be robust, followed by a long stretch of mediocrity, and then a short period before product death where they just ship any crap that's lying around. It seems like CFLs are currently in the "mediocrity" stage.
Yeah yeah, I know you can still buy CFLs that actually perform as advertised if you're willing to pay a higher price, but you know that most people are gonna buy Sam's Club, just as most people are gonna drop them in the trash instead of the recycling bin.
I was somewhat of a geek in high school back in the 1970's, and one part of George Orwell's 1984 struck me as extremely unlikely, verging on impossible -- that the television (some kind of flat screen bolted to the wall, as I recall) that every citizen was required to have would also double as a surveillance device, giving Big Brother (that term seems so quaint these days) the opportunity to keep tabs on the rank and file. I thought, even if you could mass-produce the hardware at some reasonable cost (bear in mind this was 1972), there's just not enough bandwidth in the world to accomplish this.
Well, now there is. And the first step of such a system would be to insure that the infrastructure was in place.
'S funny, but my outside CFLs (two in the front yard, one in the back) last as long or longer than the ones inside. They're not supposed to be put in environments with large temperature swings, but I have not seen different behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
> Personal video chat is also one of the reasons (the bigger the picture the better), very realistic (as far as audiovisual goes) games and even Flash games.
Meh. Personal video -- that's nothing, in terms of CPU for machines built this century. Games are all but dead on the PC. Flash games (the ones that aren't disguised attack sites) still take very little CPU in modern terms. A friend plays flash games compulsively, and her machine is older than mine, which is circa 2003.
I strongly suspect that *consumer* client-side web apps will be carefully coded to work adequately on netbooks, (say, 1 Ghz Celeron as a baseline) simply because they can't afford to cut out that segment of the market. And I suspect that will be more than adequate. Professional client-side web apps may require more, but that's a niche, and we're talking what the great unwashed masses are likely to need.
I could debate with you on how much CPU (again, in modern terms) it takes to drive a 10G network adapter, but there's no point, because there's no application that needs it. I have a 20 megabit connection to the internet, and there's no legal use for that much bandwidth. I have one gig in the house, and only really use it rarely -- moving a video from my rendering workstation to the media center attached to the HDTV. Transfer is a few seconds. 10G in the home, for all but a few geeks, has no point. I'm glad people are working on it, and maybe there will be a usage for it some day, but now? Outside the computer room, it's a solution looking for a problem.
How old is "older"? Daughter is still happy with her dual 800 G4 from 2001. She's a heavy Photoshop user, and response on her elderly G4 is better than her more recent Dell (2 Ghz Pentium 4, circa 2004). There's a brisk business out there in non-current Macs -- you can probably offer her a substantial upgrade for a paltry sum without even stepping in a Mac store.
I do video editing at home, (my video camera is a little higher end than a Flip) and in 2008 I bought an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (I think it was $26) made in 2003, to replace the Sempron in my very elderly pre-X2 motherboard. The Athlon is still good enough for rendering movies, doing a half hour of video in about 45 minutes. Sure, I could probably do it in 20 minutes with a faster machine, but then I'd have to swap out the motherboard and that's more work than I feel like doing. And I'm a geek.
A friend of mine has a G5 with dual 1.8 processors. He pines for a new Intel-based Mac. He wants one because it's shiny and new and so much faster... I keep asking him "In what way is the G5 inadequate? What do you do, or do you plan to do, that the G5 doesn't do well?" He can't come up with a single example. He does heavy video manipulation and has some large disks attached to the machine. When pressed, he'll admit that the G5 performance is adequate for what he does. His computer was made in 2003.
What he ended up doing is buying a new monitor (which he really did need) and keyboard. Now, as long as you don't look under the table, his Mac looks like it just came from the showroom. He's now experimenting with SATA adapters so he can put larger, faster disks in it.
Yes, yes, I know, Leopard (released in 2007) will be the last OS for the Power-based macs. But Leopard is current. There's no practical reason to spend money on a new machine.
I recently bought a new laptop for my wife. Her old Toshiba was starting to have problems -- the battery would no longer hold a charge, the pointer was starting to go south, a couple other things. I checked on the cost of parts, and the total was right around $350. (Mostly the battery.) I bought her the lowest-end laptop I could find for about $380 and threw the old one away. The new one has four times the memory and eight times the CPU of her old laptop, way way WAY overkill for anything she's likely to do. (But it saved me a lot of work.) It's also the only Vista machine in the house. This, I submit, is one of the only realistic reasons for average users to replace their machine these days -- when the cost of repair is greater than the cost of replacement.
Mind you, I don't want to discourage you from going out and buying a ultra-cool stylish new Mac. But I think it's important to recognize *why* you're buying it.
>> And ~500Mhz of processing power is all you really need for that.
> Yeah, well, in the days of the Pentium II which topped out at 450MHz, that would have been "hardcore".
> So clearly the needs of even the most modest computer users have gone up substantially.
Yes, but have they gone up recently? Sure, if you go back far enough you'll find unusable computers by the standards of today's average user, but seriously... when was the last time the "average" user really had to upgrade?
Let's parameterize this to make sure we're all talking about the same thing. "Average", for the purposes of this comment, being defined as someone who uses email, browses the web, plays a few card games, and oh hell, including -- to be brutally fair -- casual video viewing from the likes of youtube and hulu.
Let's see... The absolute cheapest desktop system I can conveniently find at the moment has a 1.8G Celeron and a gig of memory. That's an embarrassment of riches to perform the paltry functions described above. Laptops: I have at home a Thinkpad 240X (500 Mhz Pentium III, memory maxed out) made in June 2000 -- that's a whole DECADE ago now -- that will do all of those things, *and* play DIVX encoded videos fullscreen without hesitations, and I don't think you could buy a new laptop anywhere today, for any price, that didn't have significantly better specs. *Phones* have better specs.
To the Linux geeks out there -- yes, you can get more bang for hardware buck with Linux, but don't flatter yourself into thinking that's the only reason ultra-cheap computers are "good enough". Windows XP runs fine for average usage (see above) on hardware made a decade ago. (And of Windows versions, XP itself is "good enough" for the average user, but that's another story.)
This is not a Linux Phenomenon. It's a case of the manufacturers not shifting paradigms fast enough. In the Old Days (say, the 1990's) we really needed a steep performance development curve because all kinds of new stuff was happening that would make use of every computing cycle one could conveniently afford. Windows tended to drive this, because each new version needed faster hardware to drive it, and there was (arguably) more functionality (or fewer bugs) in each new version to warrant upgrading.
But shortly after the turn of the century, two things happened: (1) A version was released of the most popular OS on the planet that (finally) was solid enough that the average user didn't immediately aspire to upgrade. (2) Hardware performance leapfrogged past what most people really needed, especially considering (1) above. With no Killer App and no new lugubrious-yet-tantalizing release of Windows to drive it, hardware was suddenly too fast for main street.
It was fairly recently that the industry finally understood that there was a market for Cheap. What followed was a scramble to adapt to this new market. You could hear the grinding of continental paradigm shift. Even Microsoft -- for God's sake -- is starting to become concerned about performance, instead of just assuming that Moore's Law will somehow compensate for unchecked bloat.
Let's face it: There is no consumer Killer App for the quad core Nehalem. There are a few painfully cutting edge geeks that may find a use for that kind of power, but most are just fooling themselves -- playing a game of my-cpu-runs-hotter-than-yours. Yet you can put together a killer Nehalem-based PC for less than the cost of a wide screen TV.
And that's not even taking the economy into account.
> And assuming the software industry continues to find interesting things for people like your mom to do with their computer, then this will continue.
That's the current problem (if you want to call it that). The software industry has nothing your mom would need current midrange hardware to run, with nothing in particular coming up.
Maybe there is a killer app waiting out there -- maybe when true AI becomes practical, it'll drive another technology race. But there hasn't been anything for awhile.
Yes. No feeling whatsoever, and then pins and needles for 20 minutes. Definite disadvantage.
I'd pay money for that...
Door locked. Fan on. Nobody bothers you.
> ...will make the next five years a fantastic time to be a science fiction movie enthusiast
Or, they could all suck and we'll be consoling ourselves with yet another director's cut of Blade Runner. I was at the front of the line for de Palma's Mission to Mars and Soderbergh's Solaris, and I still want my 213 minutes back. In both cases, the subject matter, cast and crew, sets, models, all the advance information looked stellar, but both films were dull and incoherent.
I'll probably go see Forever War because I'm a fan of the book and a fan of Scott. But I'll believe this ushers in a new age of science fiction when I see it on the screen. There's a huge amount of really good science fiction out there, and a lot of it is filmable. (A lot admittedly isn't.) Pick a novel, *that hasn't been done before*, (isn't anyone tired of remakes yet?) make a decent film, and then do it again. I'll be a believer then.
Maybe it was the theater, but the 3D effects for Coraline were, in my opinion, far better than Beowulf, and much less distracting. But I know what you mean. I think the level of distraction is to a certain extent a directorial choice -- whether they're going for atmosphere or gimmicks. Kind of like color when it became commonly available.
It's a compelling argument. But think of it another way; what if what's happening is that the major labels are driving the development and deployment of the technology (to their detriment, or so they say). The infrastructure is in place; it remains for you and other indies to figure out how to make use of it.
The porn industry drove the development of home video technology. The major record labels and the pap they produce are the porn of the music industry. I'm not surprised it tends to cater to their content.
It seems to me that the next move is yours. You and your compatriots need to figure out how to bend filesharing to your needs.
Consider this: What do the labels really provide? Marketing, right? Ok, let's look at an analogy -- how are the newspapers and network news doing? Generally going down the tubes, right? Because you can selectively pick and choose from a much larger pool of news online. Well hmm. An effective grassroots filesharing infrastructure exists. Perhaps what's needed now is a significant grassroots marketing effort. Not just sharing files, but sharing, I dunno, taste.
These days I tend to listen to indie artists. I hear about them through word of mouth. There's probably a better way, but I don't know what it is yet.
> or a knock-off server from the old Soviet Union.
With vacuum tubes. Powered by turbines salvaged from a MIG 15.
Fair enough, if that's the case, why is it that the spam box at my ISP, which I have to log in to sift through, (because they do occasonally get it wrong) has hundreds (typically over 200, less than 500, peaking at low thousands in early October and early January) of new entries every day? Those emails were not filtered at the MX, they were not stopped before HELO or any other part of the initial smtp transaction, they were successfully transmitted, received by my ISP and transferred to the spam folder for my email account, where they sit there until they expire or I forcibly remove them.
I understand there are efforts to stop the transmission of spam earlier in the process; parenthetically, the latest IP I've inherited from Verizon appears to have been used for spam in the past -- it's on an ignore list -- but for most people, spam filtering is something that happens on the receiving end. Better spam filters, as they are most often implemented, are not an ecological gain. Although it's easy to see how non-technical people would misunderstand that.
It's relatively easy to detect and shut down a single IP that's sending out thousands of emails a second, (speaking as one who has had to clean up compromised machines) but much more difficult, requiring more complex heuristics and significantly higher incidence of false positives, to try to filter the source when spam is sent out a few at a time from massive botnets. It's a nice fantasy, and the work in this direction is important, but I don't see it having significant impact. Holistically, all we're doing is breeding smarter mice.
What? You do understand what an "inbox" is, don't you? By the time spam touches your filter, it's already been sent, and probably traveled quite a distance. What are you talking about?
>'Imagine if every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter. We could save about 75% of the spam energy used today -- 25 TWh per year; that's like taking 2.3 million cars off the road.'
Um, yeah. No. Stopping spam at the recipient end, after it's already been generated at someone else's compromised machine and gone through all those tubes and things, isn't going to save much in the way of actual energy. I suspect this number is wildly optimistic, IE, made up.
I mean, I hate spam as much as the next computer user, maybe even more, as sysadmins see more of the larger impact. There is some amount of vicarious satisfaction in focusing the Fury of the Greens at spam. But if you're really sincere about saving energy, and not just indulging in hyperbole, you want to stop it at the sending end.
The places I've worked at divide the job into "Web Designer" and "Web Developer". The Designer decides the look and feel, and may do little or no actual coding. The Developer knows the code, but may not be up on ergonomics and usability. For simple designs, or if the designer is particularly sharp, the two roles could be the same person. But I've seen some pretty bad websites created by designers who were insufficient in coding, and developers who couldn't understand that you don't use a mauve font on a salmon background.
Have you checked Hollywood?
Is the primary revenue stream for the first few months of a new release actually from business? I would think it was from the perennially hopeful rank-and-file, the gamers thinking they need the latest version of DirectX, the shiny-object people, or pre-loaded on consumer PCs purchased in that time frame -- you know, all the usual early adopters. Business tends not to be early adopters unless what they have now is intolerable, and maybe not even then.
I don't see where this is even news. Is the author trying to make the case that Microsoft is in trouble because business is generally going to wait until SP1? For this to be true, they'd have to *already* be in trouble, and I don't think that's the case. This is trying to create a story out of nothing.
My company just last week switched from Office 2003 to Office 2007. Now we're 2 years behind instead of 6.
But $50,000 is more than I've ever paid for a car. You could buy a Jaguar XF for that much. How is even Tesla's low end not a luxury car? (Or an expensive curiosity.)
p. ...to combat global warming. It's no less zany than some of the other proposals.
This is only marginally on topic (because we were talking about "value engineering") but I remember when CDs first came out and the sales people at The Good Guys were playing frisbee with them in the parking lot, and then bringing them inside and playing them, and they still played fine. Now we handle them like faberge eggs.
I think it's often the case that the first few years of a product's life cycle tend to be robust, followed by a long stretch of mediocrity, and then a short period before product death where they just ship any crap that's lying around. It seems like CFLs are currently in the "mediocrity" stage.
Yeah yeah, I know you can still buy CFLs that actually perform as advertised if you're willing to pay a higher price, but you know that most people are gonna buy Sam's Club, just as most people are gonna drop them in the trash instead of the recycling bin.
I was somewhat of a geek in high school back in the 1970's, and one part of George Orwell's 1984 struck me as extremely unlikely, verging on impossible -- that the television (some kind of flat screen bolted to the wall, as I recall) that every citizen was required to have would also double as a surveillance device, giving Big Brother (that term seems so quaint these days) the opportunity to keep tabs on the rank and file. I thought, even if you could mass-produce the hardware at some reasonable cost (bear in mind this was 1972), there's just not enough bandwidth in the world to accomplish this.
Well, now there is. And the first step of such a system would be to insure that the infrastructure was in place.
'S funny, but my outside CFLs (two in the front yard, one in the back) last as long or longer than the ones inside. They're not supposed to be put in environments with large temperature swings, but I have not seen different behavior.
Makes as much sense as anything else I've heard in the news lately.