I think they are refering to the fact that so many people still run their LCDs through the VGA port, which is just plain ugly past about 1280x1024 or so.
Current technology does not do a good job of properly showing all the possible colors. Though it's not really a problem of throwing more bits at it, it's a problem of the way it works. Your monitor is only capable of displaying 3 colors - a specific shade of each red, blue, and green (well, 4 if you want to count black). To make another color, your monitor mixes these three colors together to fool your eye into thinking it sees the color you want to display. But it's not the same thing. Your monitor cannot display the same color that a sodium light puts out, for example, as it cannot create light in the proper wavelength - it can only approximate it.
I can easily see the individual pixels on most any desktop monitor (the IBM T221 may be an exception, but I have never seen one in the flesh). I don't think there is as big of a need to make larger screens as there is a need to make high DPI screens. Imagine that 23" monitor using something like 16000x9000 pixels instead of 1920x1080 pixels or whatever we have today.
The ability to transport cargo? A bike is even worse - I can carry more with my hands than I can haul on my bike. I try to use my bike (or walk) whenever possible, but that doesn't mean that I don't use my car too.
Nothing is as good for the environment as trading in a one or two year old 2000-4000 lb hunk of aluminum, steel, glass, and rubber that has at least 8 more years of life left so you can save a marginal amount on gas mileage.
What, do you honestly think that they haul your trade-in directly to the crusher whenever you buy a new car? What really happened is that the lightly used late model trades were put on the used car lot, which were sold to people who traded in even older vehicles, which were then auctioned off to 2nd tier used car lots, which were then bought by other people to replace a dying 10-20 year old polluting hulk which was then sent to the junk yard to be scrapped and recycled.
On the other hand the Corvette, like many sports cars, are notoriously unreliable and you'll spend thousands fixing it to keep it going for 100K miles. I don't know much about the Telsa, but if it's like most other electric cars, there is simply not as much stuff to break or to even have to maintain, hence it's probably pretty reliable.
Why would the value of the stolen iPod be zero? What's to keep the theif from fencing the iPod before the battery goes dead? He'll be able to demonstrate that the iPod works, and by the time you figure out that you just bought a stolen iPod and that you cannot charge it, the theif is going to be long gone with your money.
They could always chip the battery too. Which means that you would then have to hack apart the battery to get around the chip. Still possible, but a lot harder and potentially more dangerous depending on how hard it is to crack open the battery's case.
More likely the radio quit so a line could be added to a bullet list of features for the car. Talking to police officers in my area, they have never, ever had a report of a car being broken into for a factory stereo. Even for fancy high end units found in new cars. Thieves only bother with aftermarket stuff because it has a much wider market and is much easier to fence than some radio that only fits in a couple of models of car.
You're correct that this won't affect AC and car chargers. Only a computer can send the kill signal to the charging circuit.
Depends on how they do it. If the battery charging circuit only charges when it's able to communicate with a computer that provides the correct ID, then all of those millions of devices that currently charge the iPod by providing +5V accross the right pins will cease to be useful.
Actually, recycling glass is eco-friendly. In order to make things out of glass, you need molten glass that you can shape into things (bottles, windshields, whatever). You can melt sand to get this molten glass, or you can melt glass to get molten glass. Why would one take significantly more energy than another? Furthermore, recycling glass does not change its structure, hence you can recycle glass indefinently, unlike papers and plastics that can only be reprocessed so many times. I can see the argument against paper and plastics, which do require more processing and you end up with a recycled product that's inferior, but not for things like glass.
Is it really more energy efficient to replace perfectly good CRTs with TFTs? Remember, it takes energy (quite a bit apparently) to properly dispose of those CRTs, not to mention energy to build the new TFT monitors. In the end, it seems that the TFT monitor is only going to use about 1/3 ~ 1/2 of the energy the CRT used anyway, so it's not like we are talking orders of magnitude either. It seems to me the best thing to do might just be to let those CRTs be run until they finally give up the ghost, then replace them with whatever the best tech is at that time, which could be OLEDs, or simply LED-lit TFTs that are just starting to become more available now.
Though I agree, corporate waste seems to be huge. Where I work, probably about 60-80% of the PCs are left on overnight on a regular basis. Most of them have no reason to be left on at all, as they basically just sit at the login in screen from 5PM to 8AM (no, and there is no central WSUS server at work here pushing updates in the middle of the night either - these computers literally do nothing for 12-13 hours a day). I've tried to switch some of them to go into standby after 1 hour of being idle, but it seems that setting tends to get undone, while some of the other PCs seem to completely ignore it and never enter standby for some reason.
Probably the biggest difference amonst monitors is going to be where they have their brightness set at. However, with my Kilowatt meter, I measure older 15" Trinitrons at about 60W apiece which does seem pretty high (I have the brightness fairly low too). Perhaps newer CRTs are just more efficient.
Nobody wants CRTs. My company recently put out several dozen in front of the road (free/works stickers-hoping to avoid removal cost) - maybe 3 out of 50 were picked up. Took 4 days too before we decided to bring them in to recycling.
That's pretty sad, but even I will turn my nose up unless it's either a Trinitron, a flat screen, or has some other useful feature that I might be able to make use out of (like multiple inputs or BNC connectors or something).
Amonst home desktop systems, I would say that about 2/3 of them are still CRTs from my informal observations. People don't upgrade that quickly, and a good number of people recognize that they can save money by reusing their old screen even when they do upgrade. On the other hand, businesses seem to be getting pretty close to almost all LCD now.
I haven't seen a new CRT in ages though. All new monitors people buy are LCDs, and those that still like to use or don't mind CRTs are able to draw from a large supply of lightly used, once high-end CRTs that are now basically free for the taking.
Most decent notebooks use 40W-60W total when under load, while older desktops routinely have PSUs that eat 30W in the *off*-state (computer powered down, but cable plugged in).
Most really old desktops use exactly 0W when off, because "off" a switch that physically disconnects the power supply from the AC line. Typical desktops when off for ATX systems seem to be around 2-15W or so with the newer desktops more towards the higher end of that - mostly dependent on whether or not the computer utilizes WOL, and if it leaves the USB powered on when "off" (a behavior I don't really understand, but I guess it could be useful in a couple of situations like devices that can charge off of USB).
Another advantage to doing this is that all that water takes a very long time to heat back up. That way, if you lose power for some reason, it takes a lot longer for your food to get warm because all that water has to be heated up too. And if disaster really has struck, you'll have bunch of clean water on hand too.
Of course, your fridge will take extra energy to initially cool down that water once you put it in the fridge. Hence, if you really want to do this in the most efficient way possible, I would recommend doing it before you go to bed so that the fridge is expending the extra energy during the night when the demand is less.
I don't know if it's substantial when compared to older TV sets from the 60's and 70's, but I just pulled out my Kilowatt meter and tried a couple of monitors. 2 older Sony 15" CRTs pulled ~3W and ~2W each when they were off, while a slightly newer 17" Gateway monitor was reported to pull 0W when off. Since the 2 15" CRTs aren't used that much, they are now unplugged for the time being. I'm guessing that the Sony's with what appears to be a soft-off switch likes to keep some things powered on all the time, while the monitors with the hard-off switches with the physical contacts that give that nice clicking sound actually do power everything off.
I can see why Sony might do that though. I have another 17" Trinitron that does seem to have the physical hard-off style of switch, and it takes forever to come up from a cold start.
It's pretty annoying how Linksys loves to recycle their product names. When I helped my parents set up their DSL back in 2000, they bought a BEFSR41 router. I'm not sure what revision it is, but I'm pretty sure it's a 1.0. Seven years later, being used almost continously* it's still going. Never has to be rebooted, never seems to have any problems. Probably running some version of the firmware from back in 2003 when I last updated it. Of course, what they are selling now is likely a completely different machine that happens to share the same name and basic look.
*When their original Cisco 675 modem got obsoleted as it was no longer supported by the telco, they got some cheap Speedstream that had a built in router. Seeing that the Linksys was redundent, I pulled it out of the network. Then I found out that the Speedstream was a total piece of crap, seemingly randomly locking up whenever a computer disconnected from the network (such as when it was shut off) or simply not responding to DHCP requests. So I pulled the BEFSR41 off the shelf, put the modem into bridge mode, and that's the way it's been ever since.
I think they tend to overheat a lot. The design on a lot of Linksys gear is designed to be stacked, so commonly people will put a switch on top of their router. However, it seems that when you do that they just can't dissipate the heat well enough and they bake themselves to death. It doesn't help that a lot of them seem to have only tiny holes - almost more decorative than functional - in the case instead of a proper vent. That and people like to stuff them in closets or have them on the floor sitting on carpet (at home).
My experience is that if you have one some place relatively cool (like a basement), and let plenty of air flow around it, they'll last a long time.
Apple shipped some G4 series PowerMacs with internal firewire ports. Presumably for a harddrive. While nothing seems to have ever come out of it, there is evidence that they atleast toyed with the idea.
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I think they are refering to the fact that so many people still run their LCDs through the VGA port, which is just plain ugly past about 1280x1024 or so.
Current technology does not do a good job of properly showing all the possible colors. Though it's not really a problem of throwing more bits at it, it's a problem of the way it works. Your monitor is only capable of displaying 3 colors - a specific shade of each red, blue, and green (well, 4 if you want to count black). To make another color, your monitor mixes these three colors together to fool your eye into thinking it sees the color you want to display. But it's not the same thing. Your monitor cannot display the same color that a sodium light puts out, for example, as it cannot create light in the proper wavelength - it can only approximate it.
5
This webpage does a pretty good job of showing how bad most monitors are at the color green:
http://www.skytopia.com/project/light/light.html#
Anyway, the /. story mentions color smear. I don't understand what that means. Dual link DVI does fine, it doesn't color smear either that I've seen.
They may have meant in comparison to VGA, which should have gone the way of the Dodo along with the CRT, but seems to be alive and well regardless.
I can easily see the individual pixels on most any desktop monitor (the IBM T221 may be an exception, but I have never seen one in the flesh). I don't think there is as big of a need to make larger screens as there is a need to make high DPI screens. Imagine that 23" monitor using something like 16000x9000 pixels instead of 1920x1080 pixels or whatever we have today.
The ability to transport cargo? A bike is even worse - I can carry more with my hands than I can haul on my bike. I try to use my bike (or walk) whenever possible, but that doesn't mean that I don't use my car too.
Nothing is as good for the environment as trading in a one or two year old 2000-4000 lb hunk of aluminum, steel, glass, and rubber that has at least 8 more years of life left so you can save a marginal amount on gas mileage.
What, do you honestly think that they haul your trade-in directly to the crusher whenever you buy a new car? What really happened is that the lightly used late model trades were put on the used car lot, which were sold to people who traded in even older vehicles, which were then auctioned off to 2nd tier used car lots, which were then bought by other people to replace a dying 10-20 year old polluting hulk which was then sent to the junk yard to be scrapped and recycled.
On the other hand the Corvette, like many sports cars, are notoriously unreliable and you'll spend thousands fixing it to keep it going for 100K miles. I don't know much about the Telsa, but if it's like most other electric cars, there is simply not as much stuff to break or to even have to maintain, hence it's probably pretty reliable.
Why would the value of the stolen iPod be zero? What's to keep the theif from fencing the iPod before the battery goes dead? He'll be able to demonstrate that the iPod works, and by the time you figure out that you just bought a stolen iPod and that you cannot charge it, the theif is going to be long gone with your money.
They could always chip the battery too. Which means that you would then have to hack apart the battery to get around the chip. Still possible, but a lot harder and potentially more dangerous depending on how hard it is to crack open the battery's case.
More likely the radio quit so a line could be added to a bullet list of features for the car. Talking to police officers in my area, they have never, ever had a report of a car being broken into for a factory stereo. Even for fancy high end units found in new cars. Thieves only bother with aftermarket stuff because it has a much wider market and is much easier to fence than some radio that only fits in a couple of models of car.
You're correct that this won't affect AC and car chargers. Only a computer can send the kill signal to the charging circuit.
Depends on how they do it. If the battery charging circuit only charges when it's able to communicate with a computer that provides the correct ID, then all of those millions of devices that currently charge the iPod by providing +5V accross the right pins will cease to be useful.
Funny, I tried clicking on the "Buy Now" button, and got this message:
"Sorry
The item you have selected is currently not available from the Apple Store.
Please note that Apple cannot guarantee availability of any product."
Looks like they no longer sell them.
why the hell would you have 5 ipods?
Because 4 of them have flat batteries and refuse to charge?
Actually, recycling glass is eco-friendly. In order to make things out of glass, you need molten glass that you can shape into things (bottles, windshields, whatever). You can melt sand to get this molten glass, or you can melt glass to get molten glass. Why would one take significantly more energy than another? Furthermore, recycling glass does not change its structure, hence you can recycle glass indefinently, unlike papers and plastics that can only be reprocessed so many times. I can see the argument against paper and plastics, which do require more processing and you end up with a recycled product that's inferior, but not for things like glass.
Is it really more energy efficient to replace perfectly good CRTs with TFTs? Remember, it takes energy (quite a bit apparently) to properly dispose of those CRTs, not to mention energy to build the new TFT monitors. In the end, it seems that the TFT monitor is only going to use about 1/3 ~ 1/2 of the energy the CRT used anyway, so it's not like we are talking orders of magnitude either. It seems to me the best thing to do might just be to let those CRTs be run until they finally give up the ghost, then replace them with whatever the best tech is at that time, which could be OLEDs, or simply LED-lit TFTs that are just starting to become more available now.
Though I agree, corporate waste seems to be huge. Where I work, probably about 60-80% of the PCs are left on overnight on a regular basis. Most of them have no reason to be left on at all, as they basically just sit at the login in screen from 5PM to 8AM (no, and there is no central WSUS server at work here pushing updates in the middle of the night either - these computers literally do nothing for 12-13 hours a day). I've tried to switch some of them to go into standby after 1 hour of being idle, but it seems that setting tends to get undone, while some of the other PCs seem to completely ignore it and never enter standby for some reason.
Probably the biggest difference amonst monitors is going to be where they have their brightness set at. However, with my Kilowatt meter, I measure older 15" Trinitrons at about 60W apiece which does seem pretty high (I have the brightness fairly low too). Perhaps newer CRTs are just more efficient.
Nobody wants CRTs. My company recently put out several dozen in front of the road (free/works stickers-hoping to avoid removal cost) - maybe 3 out of 50 were picked up. Took 4 days too before we decided to bring them in to recycling.
That's pretty sad, but even I will turn my nose up unless it's either a Trinitron, a flat screen, or has some other useful feature that I might be able to make use out of (like multiple inputs or BNC connectors or something).
Amonst home desktop systems, I would say that about 2/3 of them are still CRTs from my informal observations. People don't upgrade that quickly, and a good number of people recognize that they can save money by reusing their old screen even when they do upgrade. On the other hand, businesses seem to be getting pretty close to almost all LCD now.
I haven't seen a new CRT in ages though. All new monitors people buy are LCDs, and those that still like to use or don't mind CRTs are able to draw from a large supply of lightly used, once high-end CRTs that are now basically free for the taking.
Most decent notebooks use 40W-60W total when under load, while older desktops routinely have PSUs that eat 30W in the *off*-state (computer powered down, but cable plugged in).
Most really old desktops use exactly 0W when off, because "off" a switch that physically disconnects the power supply from the AC line. Typical desktops when off for ATX systems seem to be around 2-15W or so with the newer desktops more towards the higher end of that - mostly dependent on whether or not the computer utilizes WOL, and if it leaves the USB powered on when "off" (a behavior I don't really understand, but I guess it could be useful in a couple of situations like devices that can charge off of USB).
Another advantage to doing this is that all that water takes a very long time to heat back up. That way, if you lose power for some reason, it takes a lot longer for your food to get warm because all that water has to be heated up too. And if disaster really has struck, you'll have bunch of clean water on hand too.
Of course, your fridge will take extra energy to initially cool down that water once you put it in the fridge. Hence, if you really want to do this in the most efficient way possible, I would recommend doing it before you go to bed so that the fridge is expending the extra energy during the night when the demand is less.
I don't know if it's substantial when compared to older TV sets from the 60's and 70's, but I just pulled out my Kilowatt meter and tried a couple of monitors. 2 older Sony 15" CRTs pulled ~3W and ~2W each when they were off, while a slightly newer 17" Gateway monitor was reported to pull 0W when off. Since the 2 15" CRTs aren't used that much, they are now unplugged for the time being. I'm guessing that the Sony's with what appears to be a soft-off switch likes to keep some things powered on all the time, while the monitors with the hard-off switches with the physical contacts that give that nice clicking sound actually do power everything off.
I can see why Sony might do that though. I have another 17" Trinitron that does seem to have the physical hard-off style of switch, and it takes forever to come up from a cold start.
It's pretty annoying how Linksys loves to recycle their product names. When I helped my parents set up their DSL back in 2000, they bought a BEFSR41 router. I'm not sure what revision it is, but I'm pretty sure it's a 1.0. Seven years later, being used almost continously* it's still going. Never has to be rebooted, never seems to have any problems. Probably running some version of the firmware from back in 2003 when I last updated it. Of course, what they are selling now is likely a completely different machine that happens to share the same name and basic look.
*When their original Cisco 675 modem got obsoleted as it was no longer supported by the telco, they got some cheap Speedstream that had a built in router. Seeing that the Linksys was redundent, I pulled it out of the network. Then I found out that the Speedstream was a total piece of crap, seemingly randomly locking up whenever a computer disconnected from the network (such as when it was shut off) or simply not responding to DHCP requests. So I pulled the BEFSR41 off the shelf, put the modem into bridge mode, and that's the way it's been ever since.
I think they tend to overheat a lot. The design on a lot of Linksys gear is designed to be stacked, so commonly people will put a switch on top of their router. However, it seems that when you do that they just can't dissipate the heat well enough and they bake themselves to death. It doesn't help that a lot of them seem to have only tiny holes - almost more decorative than functional - in the case instead of a proper vent. That and people like to stuff them in closets or have them on the floor sitting on carpet (at home).
My experience is that if you have one some place relatively cool (like a basement), and let plenty of air flow around it, they'll last a long time.
I mean that they will just target things over than America if that happened, possibly each other. Just take a look at Africa.
Apple shipped some G4 series PowerMacs with internal firewire ports. Presumably for a harddrive. While nothing seems to have ever come out of it, there is evidence that they atleast toyed with the idea.