Copying nature doesn't mean you do it that way for everything -- but for places where the task is very much the same, it likely will be that evolution will have found the best compromise.
At some point, we'll fully understand how plants mix CO, Sunlight, and Soil to produce carbon then get heated and pressurized into coal and oil. We're closer now than ever, but that doesn't mean we will do it any faster than the millions of years it took nature -- so no instant coal from sunlight on the horizon.
...that where possible, taking a lesson from nature and evolution on how to most efficiently accomplish something is a likely best start. It won't always work, but as we get better and better at understanding biology we are likely to keep returning to the methods honed in competition over millions of years.
Imagine your glowing red hot but not quite burning cable inside a low oxygen cabinet. The equipment isn't working well, some some poor tech is sent to fix it. Said tech opens the cabinet, introducing a lovely fresh mix of 21% oxygen into the cabinet, at which point the superheated pyrolized gasses mix with the oxidizer and you get what we in the fire department like to call...FLASHOVER....it's very bad for the complexion.
I'm a firm believer in this kind of watermarking. Looking down the road, as more and more video distribution moves away from distributed bits of plastic and silicon and moves toward a downloaded for use model, you can see it being easier and easier to watermark an identifier into a data stream at the point of purchase.
With watermarking and an accompanying education campaign, you take a large portion of the casual piracy out of the equation. You make it easier for consumers to buy and use your products, but with a workable way to identify abusers. I seriously doubt that if a single pirated copy of something you download ends up on a pirate network that the lawsuits will follow - the idea that someone could have lost a copy or something will eventually prevail there. It does, however, allow those who put large libraries of things out there to be prosecuted.
Without making this a discussion on what should or should not be allowed under copyright law, so long as there is a copyright law being what it is, the use of watermarking is a much more sane approach compared with DRM. DRM prevents the adoption of these technologies as much as it enables it. It increases the complexity and failure rate of the technology, the hardware requirements of that technology, and the education level required to use the technology well. At the same time, it segments the market you can sell to into groups based on their chosen platform for viewing. All these are reasons why electronic distribution (The OTHER E.D) have been slower to take off than many of us would like.
We need as many of them as possible to stand on park itself, providing extra weight to keep the ground down. We need the equivalent of about 20 metric-Oprahs per acre over the long term. This will cause the magma bubble to recede, and bulge somewhere else. The Bush administration is doing research (on cable tv) to see if that bulge will happen in Iran.
It's not dead, but it is definitely in a vegetative state. The combination of patent morass and "standards" competition as an avenue for profit has left little room for serious long term work.
....personally, applying the logic from my own fields of study to this problem I can state only one conclusion -- the definition of a planet must be so carefully derived as to reach the "proper" end conclusion that it must be classified "pseudoscience". A real taxonomy of heavenly bodies, might look something like this:
Next Level: Mass / Energy (other?) Next Level: Emits Enegery (in net) / Absorbs Energy (in Net) Next Level: Common Matter / Anti-Matter / Dark Matter / Anti-DarkMatter? (is such a thing possible?) Next Level: Orbits Something with Fusion / Orbits Something Without Fusion / No apparent orbit Next Level: Density Next Level: Mass
Meta Data: Temp, Atmosphere, etc, based on similarity to Earth.
...where a magician seemed to make an elephant vanish. No, of course the elephant didn't ACTUALLY vanish, it just "seemed" to. His trick was carefully planned so that from our particular vantage point, the elephant seemed to move faster than light from one place to another. In point of fact, it was not consumed in a fireball as it was converted from mass to energy.
In many companies, EMAIL is the critical app. The market for -=> CORPORATE =- email is almost entirely split between two products (both reviled by/. denizens). Those products, IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange make up the overwhelming majority of mail clients in corporate sites and are themselves split nearly in half (depending on which report you believe).
So, looking at those products, Microsoft's alternative for the Mac is not really even a full participant in their strategy and effectively relegates users to a web browser environment. IBM's Lotus Notes client for Mac has been on again off again and way behind the PC in functionality -- though they're finally catching up and have expressed a complete commitment to it at long last. The reports from those beta testing the newest versions are very positive.
If you believe that the IBM product for Mac is finally rounding the corner, than at best you have less than half the corporate mail seats out there with a workable Mac alternative, meaning the market for possible Mac penetration is cut in half to begin with.
The good news, is that for about half the corporate market, the Mac is now a very viable platform. Add to that the fact that people LIKE the machines, and that Vista is being forced down the throat of a very reluctant IT industry, and I think you do have room for significant market gain for Apple this year.
I'd like to see the license they bought for that. Can that thing pass the "WGA" test? Is it patched to SP2 and have the latest security patches? If not, it's just another spam sending zombie.;-0
Twice a day (at least) the city comes to complete halt with traffic (though it may have eased some now that the new freeways are finally open). Department locations and police substations are place in locations which take into account this gridlock.
The bigger threat would be to establish a pattern were if you place 10 objects and 3 are found first which are nothing that the others are ignored. Well known tactics are to call in false threats to gauge response then do the real thing taking the response into account.
The job is to over respond. Even in my little town. A minimum response to a call that someone is calling in and saying is nothing still has two engine companies, a ladder company, and a heavy rescue unit. That's around two million dollars worth of equipment and ten to twelve men. If you report you actually see or smell smoke (like an outlet that isn't right) you get two more engines, an ambulance, and another ladder from out of town plus a RIT (rapid intervention team) in case a firefighter gets injured or trapped. Why? Because it is so much better to have all that stuff on the way when the first officer gets there, reports that it's really nothing, and sends 99% of it home than it would be to have that first officer on scene discover there was fire in the wall space or behind the stove and now we're dealing with a developing structure fire without enough people to make an effective stop.
I used to climb a little bit. I've been on several hundred feet of exposed cliff face in just a cheap waist and legs harness. When I do even the simplest rope rescue training for the fire department I have to wear a full harness that includes my shoulders, a helmet, and eye protection. Why? The assumption is that we're only there because something has already gone wrong, so it is by definition not a normal situation.
Firefighting -- and I believe police work as well -- is an activity where any kind of complacency is deadly. Decisions have to be made. They have to be made in the absence of complete information. They have to be made quickly. In any situation where I'd have to decide between making you late for work and a 1 in 1000 chance of someone being injured or killed, you may as well call the boss because you're going to be late. I do this all the time with down power lines out here in the rural part of the country. A line is down, then you and I are going to stay 2 times the distance between poles away from the break. Period. Even if I can clearly see that the link from the transformer isn't connected (which amounts to a blown fuse -- usually that's the bang you hear when a transformer stops working) it isn't safe for me to be the one to make that call. On a night of a busy storm, that means I'm sitting out there in the road getting cold and wet for hours, and you're not driving up that street. That's just the way it is.
1. It should have been obvious..... can't make that assumption. Why do you think if your smoke alarm goes off, even though you call and tell the 911 operator that it's just burnt toast it seems like the entire red army shows up? Because people are wrong, people are embarrassed and play down what's going on, people would rather "deal with it themselves" without realizing how fast things get out of control, and because it is much easier to turn around equipment and send it home than to call for more because you're under responding. 10 false alarms in a row doesn't mean that the 11th isn't real. It's a very big danger we face.
2. You take the calls you have. If all of Boston was tied up on something, there would be other companies from other towns in those stations doing "coverage" so that the next call could be answered as well. In my town, we're volunteer firefighters (as in most of the US) but when nearby Portland goes to a 3rd alarm, we take our ladder and heavy rescue and park in a couple of their stations along with crews from other near by towns so that the city is still protected. That's how it works.
How, exactly, would you like any of us to check out such a thing without closing the road? What if, say 99 were fake but one were really a bomb? Worth the risk? What if it blew up and your daughter was on the school bus that was passing underneath? What if I run out of question marks? Is there a/dev/questionmark ?
I've been to a briefing put on by some people from the FBI and ATF, and gotten to look at some of the home made devices they had displayed there. Here's what I can tell you:
1. If you think a bomb has to look like a bomb, you're wrong. They look like absolutely anything - and the junkier it is and more poorly made, the more likely it's real.
2. Apparently, people who make bombs do so because they have little or no actual skill when it comes to electronics, soldering, carpentry, or any other kind of craftsmanship.
Finding some junky looking thing attached to a bridge support would be extremely suspect -- more so if it looked like a 4 year old put it together.
Hell, I was almost embarrassed for the poor idiots that had their craftwork on display. No skills at all. I guess most bomb makers are the equivalent of script kiddies. Some basic knowledge but no skills to speak of.
Fine. We're keeping our lobsters, and when the rest of you are all boiling from global warming because you didn't have the foresight to hire enough pirates, you'll have to stay south because you're puny federal ID cards won't work here.
You may mark this flamebait, but most of the people who responded agree with some or all of what I said. Who's the coward? I'm just a bit critical of Emperor Mills' choice in clothing.
...the use of the word "Workplace" at lotusphere next week by IBM. Portal, sure, will continue to sell (has to go up in sales, it started at 0 not long ago) but total customer penetration (not percent of the tiny market for servers overall, but the actual number of deployed sites who are not ibm partners and beta sites or otherwise sponsored and discounted or funded by the ibm efforts is very very small.
Every customer I ever showed portal to say "Hey, cool, look how it integrates everything together! How much? Really? And the hardware costs what? Um, I think we'll use a web page with some links."
J2EE is a defacto standard for transactions via the net (not the standard, but a standard).
Websphere, however, is just one very expensive and cumbersome way of serving that standard. It's massive, complex, and expensive. The market isn't even a 10th of what it was predicted to be 10 years ago because MOST of what happens on the net ISN'T transactional. Building a website based entirely on J2EE is like building a sand castle one grain of sand at a time. It can be done, and really great things can be built -- but WHY?
IBM bought into analyst predictions in the 90's and went whole hog after the J2EE server marketing, believing that they could own the lion's share of this supposedly huge market.
That market never emerged. J2EE is a standard. Websphere is expensive and massively cumbersome. If you wish to compete against open source with a product based on a standard, you must differentiate on either price or function. You can't compete on price with FREE, so you must compete on features. Do that, and now you're not "standard" any more.
The lack of sales of Websphere lead to "Portal Server" (pre-built j2ee apps to then sell Websphere). It didn't sell. That lead to "workplace". That died a death. You won't even here the "Workplace" being used by IBM sales now.
To bury the failure, IBM accounting peopled decided that "Websphere" was about "messaging" (not email, but application messaging) and moved MQSERIES into the Websphere budget. Thus, you could sell zero websphere servers and never even notice the missing budget within the massive MQ budget.
In my experience, Websphere and all it's derivitive products (portal, workplace, and some really terrible attempts at other tools) have been bloated, unmanageable, and incredibly expensive.
I'm in the middle of writing a fairly complex application in which the UI is ajax based. The calls to the back end are all done via these ajax calls.
At the end of the day, I verify the data I accept from the application before storing it. I don't trust anything coming from the client side. Just because it's ajax and I "think" I'm in control of the application doesn't mean that I am.
Big deal.
You still can send me options as selected if the options aren't in the list I offered you -- because I check. You can't send me invalid data because I check it for validity. That's my responsibility.
You can get me to send you something you don't have access to, because the agents that retrieve the data are running under your authority -- not as a system admin. If you don't have access to them, the data won't exist for you.
Again -- security happens at the back end. The front end is always to be considered hostile.
I have the 100 watt equiv. versions in my garage which is rarely above 40 degrees this time of year (I live in Maine) and is frequently close to freezing. I see a delay similar to what I see with the 40 watt and 60 watt equiv I use in other parts of the house.
There are places they work, and places they don't work.
In my kids' bedrooms -- especially their closets -- they work wonderfully. The kids constantly leave on lights and I get slightly less pissed off about it this way. In places that need a lot of light, the slower startup to full light output can be annoying. In many places with multiple bulbs, I'll use one incandescent bulb and the rest as CF.
The CF "natural light" versions are just as bad as incandescent so called "natural light" bulbs. They may be technically better about spectrum, but aren't the light you expect for the room so they don't meet expectations. That makes convincing your family that CF are a good idea more difficult because you're changing two things at once.
The #1 problem I have is that the equivalent light output bulbs are still slightly larger than the incandescent ones they replace. As a result they don't fit well (or at all) in many fixtures.
Startup times are 1/4 to 1/2 a second in most of mine though it can vary. I don't notice a flicker, and I'm someone who can't use a monitor at 60hz because of the flicker so I tend to be sensitive to such things.
Slashdot Mirror
Copying nature doesn't mean you do it that way for everything -- but for places where the task is very much the same, it likely will be that evolution will have found the best compromise.
At some point, we'll fully understand how plants mix CO, Sunlight, and Soil to produce carbon then get heated and pressurized into coal and oil. We're closer now than ever, but that doesn't mean we will do it any faster than the millions of years it took nature -- so no instant coal from sunlight on the horizon.
...that where possible, taking a lesson from nature and evolution on how to most efficiently accomplish something is a likely best start. It won't always work, but as we get better and better at understanding biology we are likely to keep returning to the methods honed in competition over millions of years.
Imagine your glowing red hot but not quite burning cable inside a low oxygen cabinet. The equipment isn't working well, some some poor tech is sent to fix it. Said tech opens the cabinet, introducing a lovely fresh mix of 21% oxygen into the cabinet, at which point the superheated pyrolized gasses mix with the oxidizer and you get what we in the fire department like to call...FLASHOVER....it's very bad for the complexion.
I'm a firm believer in this kind of watermarking. Looking down the road, as more and more video distribution moves away from distributed bits of plastic and silicon and moves toward a downloaded for use model, you can see it being easier and easier to watermark an identifier into a data stream at the point of purchase.
With watermarking and an accompanying education campaign, you take a large portion of the casual piracy out of the equation. You make it easier for consumers to buy and use your products, but with a workable way to identify abusers. I seriously doubt that if a single pirated copy of something you download ends up on a pirate network that the lawsuits will follow - the idea that someone could have lost a copy or something will eventually prevail there. It does, however, allow those who put large libraries of things out there to be prosecuted.
Without making this a discussion on what should or should not be allowed under copyright law, so long as there is a copyright law being what it is, the use of watermarking is a much more sane approach compared with DRM. DRM prevents the adoption of these technologies as much as it enables it. It increases the complexity and failure rate of the technology, the hardware requirements of that technology, and the education level required to use the technology well. At the same time, it segments the market you can sell to into groups based on their chosen platform for viewing. All these are reasons why electronic distribution (The OTHER E.D) have been slower to take off than many of us would like.
We need as many of them as possible to stand on park itself, providing extra weight to keep the ground down. We need the equivalent of about 20 metric-Oprahs per acre over the long term. This will cause the magma bubble to recede, and bulge somewhere else. The Bush administration is doing research (on cable tv) to see if that bulge will happen in Iran.
It's not dead, but it is definitely in a vegetative state. The combination of patent morass and "standards" competition as an avenue for profit has left little room for serious long term work.
....personally, applying the logic from my own fields of study to this problem I can state only one conclusion -- the definition of a planet must be so carefully derived as to reach the "proper" end conclusion that it must be classified "pseudoscience". A real taxonomy of heavenly bodies, might look something like this:
Next Level: Mass / Energy (other?)
Next Level: Emits Enegery (in net) / Absorbs Energy (in Net)
Next Level: Common Matter / Anti-Matter / Dark Matter / Anti-DarkMatter? (is such a thing possible?)
Next Level: Orbits Something with Fusion / Orbits Something Without Fusion / No apparent orbit
Next Level: Density
Next Level: Mass
Meta Data: Temp, Atmosphere, etc, based on similarity to Earth.
....that Delta V flight.....changing planes in Atlanta was a bitch, they kept changing gates faster and faster until I couldn't keep up!
...where a magician seemed to make an elephant vanish. No, of course the elephant didn't ACTUALLY vanish, it just "seemed" to. His trick was carefully planned so that from our particular vantage point, the elephant seemed to move faster than light from one place to another. In point of fact, it was not consumed in a fireball as it was converted from mass to energy.
Open DNS -- well, one word and one acronym. Maybe just a URL. http://www.opendns.com/
In many companies, EMAIL is the critical app. The market for -=> CORPORATE =- email is almost entirely split between two products (both reviled by /. denizens). Those products, IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange make up the overwhelming majority of mail clients in corporate sites and are themselves split nearly in half (depending on which report you believe).
;-)
So, looking at those products, Microsoft's alternative for the Mac is not really even a full participant in their strategy and effectively relegates users to a web browser environment. IBM's Lotus Notes client for Mac has been on again off again and way behind the PC in functionality -- though they're finally catching up and have expressed a complete commitment to it at long last. The reports from those beta testing the newest versions are very positive.
If you believe that the IBM product for Mac is finally rounding the corner, than at best you have less than half the corporate mail seats out there with a workable Mac alternative, meaning the market for possible Mac penetration is cut in half to begin with.
The good news, is that for about half the corporate market, the Mac is now a very viable platform. Add to that the fact that people LIKE the machines, and that Vista is being forced down the throat of a very reluctant IT industry, and I think you do have room for significant market gain for Apple this year.
Oh, and their commercials are funny.
I'd like to see the license they bought for that. Can that thing pass the "WGA" test? Is it patched to SP2 and have the latest security patches? If not, it's just another spam sending zombie. ;-0
Twice a day (at least) the city comes to complete halt with traffic (though it may have eased some now that the new freeways are finally open). Department locations and police substations are place in locations which take into account this gridlock.
The bigger threat would be to establish a pattern were if you place 10 objects and 3 are found first which are nothing that the others are ignored. Well known tactics are to call in false threats to gauge response then do the real thing taking the response into account.
The job is to over respond. Even in my little town. A minimum response to a call that someone is calling in and saying is nothing still has two engine companies, a ladder company, and a heavy rescue unit. That's around two million dollars worth of equipment and ten to twelve men. If you report you actually see or smell smoke (like an outlet that isn't right) you get two more engines, an ambulance, and another ladder from out of town plus a RIT (rapid intervention team) in case a firefighter gets injured or trapped. Why? Because it is so much better to have all that stuff on the way when the first officer gets there, reports that it's really nothing, and sends 99% of it home than it would be to have that first officer on scene discover there was fire in the wall space or behind the stove and now we're dealing with a developing structure fire without enough people to make an effective stop.
I used to climb a little bit. I've been on several hundred feet of exposed cliff face in just a cheap waist and legs harness. When I do even the simplest rope rescue training for the fire department I have to wear a full harness that includes my shoulders, a helmet, and eye protection. Why? The assumption is that we're only there because something has already gone wrong, so it is by definition not a normal situation.
Firefighting -- and I believe police work as well -- is an activity where any kind of complacency is deadly. Decisions have to be made. They have to be made in the absence of complete information. They have to be made quickly. In any situation where I'd have to decide between making you late for work and a 1 in 1000 chance of someone being injured or killed, you may as well call the boss because you're going to be late. I do this all the time with down power lines out here in the rural part of the country. A line is down, then you and I are going to stay 2 times the distance between poles away from the break. Period. Even if I can clearly see that the link from the transformer isn't connected (which amounts to a blown fuse -- usually that's the bang you hear when a transformer stops working) it isn't safe for me to be the one to make that call. On a night of a busy storm, that means I'm sitting out there in the road getting cold and wet for hours, and you're not driving up that street. That's just the way it is.
1. It should have been obvious..... can't make that assumption. Why do you think if your smoke alarm goes off, even though you call and tell the 911 operator that it's just burnt toast it seems like the entire red army shows up? Because people are wrong, people are embarrassed and play down what's going on, people would rather "deal with it themselves" without realizing how fast things get out of control, and because it is much easier to turn around equipment and send it home than to call for more because you're under responding. 10 false alarms in a row doesn't mean that the 11th isn't real. It's a very big danger we face.
2. You take the calls you have. If all of Boston was tied up on something, there would be other companies from other towns in those stations doing "coverage" so that the next call could be answered as well. In my town, we're volunteer firefighters (as in most of the US) but when nearby Portland goes to a 3rd alarm, we take our ladder and heavy rescue and park in a couple of their stations along with crews from other near by towns so that the city is still protected. That's how it works.
How, exactly, would you like any of us to check out such a thing without closing the road? What if, say 99 were fake but one were really a bomb? Worth the risk? What if it blew up and your daughter was on the school bus that was passing underneath? What if I run out of question marks? Is there a /dev/questionmark ?
I've been to a briefing put on by some people from the FBI and ATF, and gotten to look at some of the home made devices they had displayed there. Here's what I can tell you:
1. If you think a bomb has to look like a bomb, you're wrong. They look like absolutely anything - and the junkier it is and more poorly made, the more likely it's real.
2. Apparently, people who make bombs do so because they have little or no actual skill when it comes to electronics, soldering, carpentry, or any other kind of craftsmanship.
Finding some junky looking thing attached to a bridge support would be extremely suspect -- more so if it looked like a 4 year old put it together.
Hell, I was almost embarrassed for the poor idiots that had their craftwork on display. No skills at all. I guess most bomb makers are the equivalent of script kiddies. Some basic knowledge but no skills to speak of.
Fine. We're keeping our lobsters, and when the rest of you are all boiling from global warming because you didn't have the foresight to hire enough pirates, you'll have to stay south because you're puny federal ID cards won't work here.
bwahahahahahaha
You may mark this flamebait, but most of the people who responded agree with some or all of what I said. Who's the coward? I'm just a bit critical of Emperor Mills' choice in clothing.
...the use of the word "Workplace" at lotusphere next week by IBM. Portal, sure, will continue to sell (has to go up in sales, it started at 0 not long ago) but total customer penetration (not percent of the tiny market for servers overall, but the actual number of deployed sites who are not ibm partners and beta sites or otherwise sponsored and discounted or funded by the ibm efforts is very very small.
Every customer I ever showed portal to say "Hey, cool, look how it integrates everything together! How much? Really? And the hardware costs what? Um, I think we'll use a web page with some links."
J2EE is a defacto standard for transactions via the net (not the standard, but a standard).
Websphere, however, is just one very expensive and cumbersome way of serving that standard. It's massive, complex, and expensive. The market isn't even a 10th of what it was predicted to be 10 years ago because MOST of what happens on the net ISN'T transactional. Building a website based entirely on J2EE is like building a sand castle one grain of sand at a time. It can be done, and really great things can be built -- but WHY?
LOL. Workplace is gone. Even the brand name is now markedly absent. See you next week in Orlando.
IBM bought into analyst predictions in the 90's and went whole hog after the J2EE server marketing, believing that they could own the lion's share of this supposedly huge market.
That market never emerged. J2EE is a standard. Websphere is expensive and massively cumbersome. If you wish to compete against open source with a product based on a standard, you must differentiate on either price or function. You can't compete on price with FREE, so you must compete on features. Do that, and now you're not "standard" any more.
The lack of sales of Websphere lead to "Portal Server" (pre-built j2ee apps to then sell Websphere). It didn't sell. That lead to "workplace". That died a death. You won't even here the "Workplace" being used by IBM sales now.
To bury the failure, IBM accounting peopled decided that "Websphere" was about "messaging" (not email, but application messaging) and moved MQSERIES into the Websphere budget. Thus, you could sell zero websphere servers and never even notice the missing budget within the massive MQ budget.
In my experience, Websphere and all it's derivitive products (portal, workplace, and some really terrible attempts at other tools) have been bloated, unmanageable, and incredibly expensive.
Should be a great fit at Microsoft.
..fix the hole in that. Meantime, I'll need to avoid putting state secrets or credit card information on ajax based forms.
I'm in the middle of writing a fairly complex application in which the UI is ajax based. The calls to the back end are all done via these ajax calls.
At the end of the day, I verify the data I accept from the application before storing it. I don't trust anything coming from the client side. Just because it's ajax and I "think" I'm in control of the application doesn't mean that I am.
Big deal.
You still can send me options as selected if the options aren't in the list I offered you -- because I check. You can't send me invalid data because I check it for validity. That's my responsibility.
You can get me to send you something you don't have access to, because the agents that retrieve the data are running under your authority -- not as a system admin. If you don't have access to them, the data won't exist for you.
Again -- security happens at the back end. The front end is always to be considered hostile.
I have the 100 watt equiv. versions in my garage which is rarely above 40 degrees this time of year (I live in Maine) and is frequently close to freezing. I see a delay similar to what I see with the 40 watt and 60 watt equiv I use in other parts of the house.
There are places they work, and places they don't work.
In my kids' bedrooms -- especially their closets -- they work wonderfully. The kids constantly leave on lights and I get slightly less pissed off about it this way. In places that need a lot of light, the slower startup to full light output can be annoying. In many places with multiple bulbs, I'll use one incandescent bulb and the rest as CF.
The CF "natural light" versions are just as bad as incandescent so called "natural light" bulbs. They may be technically better about spectrum, but aren't the light you expect for the room so they don't meet expectations. That makes convincing your family that CF are a good idea more difficult because you're changing two things at once.
The #1 problem I have is that the equivalent light output bulbs are still slightly larger than the incandescent ones they replace. As a result they don't fit well (or at all) in many fixtures.
Startup times are 1/4 to 1/2 a second in most of mine though it can vary. I don't notice a flicker, and I'm someone who can't use a monitor at 60hz because of the flicker so I tend to be sensitive to such things.