The warrantee is for the power supply, in case it has an early failure. The LEDs will last forever—they just get dimmer over time, and they reach the end of their lifetime when they are 70% as bright as they were when new—that's what the 50k hour figure refers to.
You should use LEDs where you have lights on all the time, and halogen in places where you hardly ever have the light on. 5 hours a day is ~1500 hours a year, so figure 90kwh/year per light bulb that you're running five hours a day. That's ~$2/year at typical current rates. That's not going to pay off in a year, but it'll pay off. Plus, remember that at that rate you're probably buying a new incandescent every year, so that's another $1/year in savings per bulb.
I think you missed my point. A subsidy that someone is receiving does not change the benefit of an energy saving measure. It simply changes who benefits from the savings. If the beneficiary in the subsidy case doesn't also subsidize energy efficiency, they are just being stupid.
And not that there's any point in assuring you of this, but I'm not a free market hater. There is no such thing as a free market, of course, but markets are a very useful way of driving commerce. If you intervene in markets through the use of subsidies, you should do so in ways that are effective, not in ways that are ineffective.
Everything breaks. Everything is hard to fix. If you're a glass-half-empty sort of person, anyway. I've lived in three houses with heat pumps, and never had one fail. They are in wide use, and are considered quite reliable. I expect that as the heat pump in the house we live in ages, at some point it will in fact fail. If we're lucky, it'll be in the summer. Otherwise, it'll need a repair. That's life with appliances. Resistive heaters fail too, but because they're individual units you're right that it's less of a problem. They're also cheaper to replace. But the added cost of heating a house in New England with resistive heat is enough to pay for a new heat pump every winter. So the math is pretty easy.
Stop fucking around trying to prevent the right thing from happening and do something constructive for a change? No, that's probably too much to ask. If the local power delivery system is that crappy, what needs to be done is to fix it. But heaven forfend we actually try to improve anything about our country's infrastructure. That would be communism.
You're better off heating with a heat pump—it's about three times more efficient than resistive heat, which is what you get out of a light bulb. Of course, if all you have is resistive heat, you're right that it makes no difference, but people who live in cold climates typically don't use resistive heat because it's so bloody expensive. We use oil, or gas, or heat pump, or wood, or some combination of these.
Different LEDs have different properties. We have bought numerous different varieties. Some of them dim really well; some of them dim poorly. You get what you pay for. The new Cree bulbs are the best so far. The big thing is that dimming them doesn't make them warmer, which we're used to because that's how incandescents behave. Some lights actually fake the color temperature shift, but that's an expensive extra feature, not standard.
So if you're paying below market rates, you might as well use less efficient light bulbs? Sounds like a classic market failure. CFLs suck—don't waste your money. If you are poor, get halogen or cheap LEDs. If you can afford it, get more expensive LEDs. Volume will bring the price down.
It's also worth noting that LEDs last for at least 50k hours. The failure mode is that they get dimmer, not that they fail completely. Whereas that $1 light bulb will last for about 1000 hours. Maybe more, maybe less, depends on the setting and the individual variations in manufacture. So a $1 light bulb is actually quite a bit more expensive than a good-quality LED light bulb. Don't waste your money on the cheap ones. If you're desperate to continue using incandescent, get halogen bulbs—they produce good light and consume about 70% of the power doing it. But we're using Cree bulbs and loving them. The really cheap ones have lousy color rendering, but the Cree bulbs do really well.
In answer to my question, no, it is not dirt cheap. For any size cache you will get fewer cache misses if your data structures are smaller than if they are larger. Until the cache is so big that everything fits in it, you always win if you can double what you can cram into it.
I'm so old I used to program a computer with core memory. 64kx16 of core memory. FWIW, Node isn't better than Ruby, but it is in some sense more convenient, in that you only need to be immediately fluent in one programming language. But if I had my druthers, I'd go back to using scheme, just like we used to back in the days of the Old Republic. There's just no point in bragging about the programming language you're using if it's got two different ways of ending a sentence.
To expand, your router is plugged into the Internet. Your packets traverse many unfriendly wires. They might even trombone through Belarus. So if you want real privacy, find a Tor router you know you can trust. Good luck!
Yes, it's fortunate that they've gone with a country that doesn't spy on its friends. Säpo would never do anything like that.:)
Anyway, this is more grist for the "NSA bad behavior is bad for business" argument. Sucks for the Boeing employees who miss out on this work, but it's an entirely understandable outcome.
In previous years, people did scoff at the idea of BIOS hacks, but they were fairly common for older BIOSes, even without this special NIST BIOS standard.
Now if you were to propose that the NIST standard was deliberately broken by the NSA, that would be an interesting speculation to pursue, but the point is that BIOS-flashing malware is a very real problem, and has been for a long time.
I'm not saying the NSA never did anything wrong prior to 9/11, but their remit was a lot more restrained. This is not to say that they wouldn't have done more if they'd had the resources, but really Moore's law is what's turned them into the juggernaut they are today.
Slashdot Mirror
The warrantee is for the power supply, in case it has an early failure. The LEDs will last forever—they just get dimmer over time, and they reach the end of their lifetime when they are 70% as bright as they were when new—that's what the 50k hour figure refers to.
You should use LEDs where you have lights on all the time, and halogen in places where you hardly ever have the light on. 5 hours a day is ~1500 hours a year, so figure 90kwh/year per light bulb that you're running five hours a day. That's ~$2/year at typical current rates. That's not going to pay off in a year, but it'll pay off. Plus, remember that at that rate you're probably buying a new incandescent every year, so that's another $1/year in savings per bulb.
I think you missed my point. A subsidy that someone is receiving does not change the benefit of an energy saving measure. It simply changes who benefits from the savings. If the beneficiary in the subsidy case doesn't also subsidize energy efficiency, they are just being stupid.
And not that there's any point in assuring you of this, but I'm not a free market hater. There is no such thing as a free market, of course, but markets are a very useful way of driving commerce. If you intervene in markets through the use of subsidies, you should do so in ways that are effective, not in ways that are ineffective.
Everything breaks. Everything is hard to fix. If you're a glass-half-empty sort of person, anyway. I've lived in three houses with heat pumps, and never had one fail. They are in wide use, and are considered quite reliable. I expect that as the heat pump in the house we live in ages, at some point it will in fact fail. If we're lucky, it'll be in the summer. Otherwise, it'll need a repair. That's life with appliances. Resistive heaters fail too, but because they're individual units you're right that it's less of a problem. They're also cheaper to replace. But the added cost of heating a house in New England with resistive heat is enough to pay for a new heat pump every winter. So the math is pretty easy.
100 watt rough service light bulbs are $1.96/pair at 1000bulbs.com. Brutal.
Stop fucking around trying to prevent the right thing from happening and do something constructive for a change? No, that's probably too much to ask. If the local power delivery system is that crappy, what needs to be done is to fix it. But heaven forfend we actually try to improve anything about our country's infrastructure. That would be communism.
And of course, there's nothing that can be done about this.
Yup. And you can continue to get industrial incandescents for this application even after the ban.
You're better off heating with a heat pump—it's about three times more efficient than resistive heat, which is what you get out of a light bulb. Of course, if all you have is resistive heat, you're right that it makes no difference, but people who live in cold climates typically don't use resistive heat because it's so bloody expensive. We use oil, or gas, or heat pump, or wood, or some combination of these.
Different LEDs have different properties. We have bought numerous different varieties. Some of them dim really well; some of them dim poorly. You get what you pay for. The new Cree bulbs are the best so far. The big thing is that dimming them doesn't make them warmer, which we're used to because that's how incandescents behave. Some lights actually fake the color temperature shift, but that's an expensive extra feature, not standard.
So if you're paying below market rates, you might as well use less efficient light bulbs? Sounds like a classic market failure. CFLs suck—don't waste your money. If you are poor, get halogen or cheap LEDs. If you can afford it, get more expensive LEDs. Volume will bring the price down.
It's also worth noting that LEDs last for at least 50k hours. The failure mode is that they get dimmer, not that they fail completely. Whereas that $1 light bulb will last for about 1000 hours. Maybe more, maybe less, depends on the setting and the individual variations in manufacture. So a $1 light bulb is actually quite a bit more expensive than a good-quality LED light bulb. Don't waste your money on the cheap ones. If you're desperate to continue using incandescent, get halogen bulbs—they produce good light and consume about 70% of the power doing it. But we're using Cree bulbs and loving them. The really cheap ones have lousy color rendering, but the Cree bulbs do really well.
Ha! We had two RK05s and an RM05!
PDP 11/45. We had Basic Plus and TECO. It was pretty dire.
In answer to my question, no, it is not dirt cheap. For any size cache you will get fewer cache misses if your data structures are smaller than if they are larger. Until the cache is so big that everything fits in it, you always win if you can double what you can cram into it.
Memory? What about cache? Is cache dirt cheap?
Very true, but I suspect the reason behind this phenomenon is that people who use Wordpress are looking for something they don't _have_ to program.
"It is because of you, motherfucker, that we are not using LISP."
Win.
It probably doesn't. It probably has to do with Drupal.
I'm so old I used to program a computer with core memory. 64kx16 of core memory. FWIW, Node isn't better than Ruby, but it is in some sense more convenient, in that you only need to be immediately fluent in one programming language. But if I had my druthers, I'd go back to using scheme, just like we used to back in the days of the Old Republic. There's just no point in bragging about the programming language you're using if it's got two different ways of ending a sentence.
To expand, your router is plugged into the Internet. Your packets traverse many unfriendly wires. They might even trombone through Belarus. So if you want real privacy, find a Tor router you know you can trust. Good luck!
HAR!
Yes, it's fortunate that they've gone with a country that doesn't spy on its friends. Säpo would never do anything like that. :)
Anyway, this is more grist for the "NSA bad behavior is bad for business" argument. Sucks for the Boeing employees who miss out on this work, but it's an entirely understandable outcome.
What are you talking about? BIOS-flashing malware is a well-known problem, long pre-dating this discussion. Here's a recent article on the topic: http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerability/bios-bummer-new-malware-can-bypass-bios/240155473
In previous years, people did scoff at the idea of BIOS hacks, but they were fairly common for older BIOSes, even without this special NIST BIOS standard.
Now if you were to propose that the NIST standard was deliberately broken by the NSA, that would be an interesting speculation to pursue, but the point is that BIOS-flashing malware is a very real problem, and has been for a long time.
I'm not saying the NSA never did anything wrong prior to 9/11, but their remit was a lot more restrained. This is not to say that they wouldn't have done more if they'd had the resources, but really Moore's law is what's turned them into the juggernaut they are today.