They have "daylight" color CFLs that I have secretly tested on friends and family for several years now, and when they don't know its a CFL, they think it's an incandescent (hidden by lampshades or other fixtures). I even tried telling some I switched over to CFLs, and they said things like "Oh, yeah... I don't like the color. I thought it looked different" when in reality is was the same daylight CFL bulb before and after.
A lot of this shit is in people's heads, unless you are using the "pure white" bulbs. I use those in the garage and have been experimenting with a little one for bias lighting behind the TV. A lot of the color of lighting is determined by the lampshade as well.
Let me make this clear, if you have CFLs and they have not failed..... YOU ARE ALONE IN THE WORLD!!!!
Well, I've only had a couple failures over the years, and everyone I know has had great success. Your claimed high rate of failure is the thing that's a statistical outlier. I suspect your dimmers might be at fault despite what the bulb manufacturer claims. My experience with dimmers is that they wear out the filament of an incandescent really quickly. The bulbs work, but they begin to noticeably buzz. I got rid of every dimmer that came with my house. Either that or there's something else wrong, assuming you're not exaggerating.
The CFL on my porch is coming up on 14 years. I'm wondering if I should alert the manufacturer and win a prize or something.
Don't like anecdotes? Here's some testing Popular Mechanics did.
CFL consistently outperformed incandescent, and this was double blind testing using light meters. The incandescent bulb had a color temp of 2736K. The MaxLite MicroMax CFL was measured at 2738K. You think you'll notice 2 degrees difference?
As for the mercury, power plants emit mercury, too, especially coal plants. The energy savings of CFLs more than offset their minuscule mercury content. Just don't eat the bulbs.
That being said, I would not outright ban any kind of bulb.
Oh, I know what it means. It's the *usage* I was questioning, much the same way that, yes, there's racism, but "racist" is far too often used to shut down debate by someone without the facts on their side.
Nice response, though. Sympathies about the IE thing.:-)
Some of the target markets for FPGA supercomputing want exactly that, though. They want their C and Matlab to just compile with some tool and download to the FPGA based system. It's a big issue facing an emerging field. Where I work we have stodgy old systems folks set in their ways, but we also have lots of VHDL/Verilog coders, so the two can work together. There are tools to do these conversions, but nothing has approached the turnkey level yet. There's also the question of code efficiency analogous to HTML coded by hand versus HTML generated by a WYSIWYG tool.
Heh heh. People like me who work with FPGAs know that all too well. I designed a board recently with a bunch of Xilinx Virtex-6 parts. We had to get engineering samples we were such early adopters. Some of the larger parts we used in the design hadn't even started fabrication yet. Six months later the board is built and being used, and Xilinx announces the Virtex 7 family.
There is no "commodity hardware" (as I think you are using the term) that can compete with a board full of FPGAs. You want a handful of cores and threads in a microprocessor? A small FPGA can do *thousands* of processes in parallel without working up a sweat. The performance gains here completely justify designing a new board as each FPGA generation comes to market. Some of you folks need to stop putting everything into the perception of a hobbyist putting together a gaming rig for the best price.
There a great chart I saw online about trying to push microprocessors to do the same processing that's trivial when parallelized in an FPGA. Even with projected fabrication improvements and smaller geometries, you wind up with microprocessors at heat levels comparable to rocket exhausts and nuclear reactor cores. And don't forget that FPGAs can use the same fabrication improvements. Also, some FPGAs have microprocessor cores embedded in them should you still have something that needs to be coded that way for whatever reason.
these "smartest guys in the room" aren't so smart sometimes.
No, they just know way more about FPGAs than you. You could Google "FPGA supercomputers", you know. This is an emerging field. I see it at my work where the systems folks are banging their heads against the wall because even superclusters of Linux machines can't give them the performance they need. Simulations are still taking days to run.
I've been advocating FPGA supercomputers where I work for a while, but the problem I hit is that the people I try to sell the idea to are systems guys who absolutely refuse to learn VHDL or Verilog coding. They want tools to turn their C and Matlab code directly into something they can download to the supercomputer. There's lots of work being done on this, but I've yet to see a turnkey solution because people are still building their own supercomputers.
There was a case here in So Cal where the terms "master" and "slave" as used with disk drives was deemed offensive in government office circles. There were actually people putting stickers over the offending words on boxes lest any hypersensitive, useless, addle-brained miseryshit see anything that hurts their pwecious wittle feelings.
I know, geez. I rarely even come to Slashdot anymore. It's turned into Grand Ideological Loon Central. The geekverse has been completely taken over by wannabe revolutionaries with skulls full of horseshit.
Oh, yeah, voters share the blame. Well, voters other than me.:-) I vote no on all bond measures. And no one I've voted for has been in a state office for over a decade. I can't blame them too much when it comes to elected offices, though. When you're given a ballot full of nothing but sociopaths and/or ideology-addled morons, what can they do?
The idiots here voted for a high speed rail that I warned everyone within earshot would be a boondoggle. Guess what? It's a boondoggle.
This is the Slashdot Collective, remember. Any attempt by any entity anywhere to make money is evil and greedy. We should all be out there washing the feet of homeless drug addicts, or something.
Circuit City is a prime example when they fired all the experienced staff and hired no nothing warm bodies. I went in just to test, and asked about the LED based DLP televisions versus ones with the bulbs. Did they sell the bulbs for a decent price? Maybe a discount pack that would last the estimated life of the set? Blanks stares all around.
There was always a certain amount of display items not working, but it really went into the toilet after that. Nothing worked. The one near my house literally had TVs that looked like they were adjusted by blind people who could vaguely feel colors through some synesthesia effect. No surprise at all when they closed up.
Amazon is also excellent for used items now that there seems to be some control in place for shipping costs. I was able to find two hard to find Discworld books via a UK reseller that worked through amazon. You walk into local brick and mortar stores and ask a question, and you get glazed eyes stares like you're a blue alien speaking the Asari language.
And local stores are the only time I have had anyone tell me that the reason they no longer carry item X is because every time they get a new shipment of X it sells out right away. Read that again. I am not making that up, and I have been told that of four independent occasions. All four of those stores are gone now, BTW.
California sorely needs money because the denizens of the statehouse are completely corrupt, and made horrible, unsustainable deals with other governmental entities. They can do it because the world is full of people who would happily opine that ever more money be shoveled into the bottomless pit.
I remember watching one episode and gave up. They were way too stupidly over the top. The "lesson" on the show I saw was not to use offroad vehicles in the oh so fragile desert. They had a kid on a dirt bike initially, but then there was some villain types driving these big smoke spewing vehicle all over the place for... some reason, I guess. WTF? Did they have coal fired boilers or something?
Slashdot Mirror
I actually have two CFL spirals fully visible in one bathroom. I think they look cool. :-)
They have "daylight" color CFLs that I have secretly tested on friends and family for several years now, and when they don't know its a CFL, they think it's an incandescent (hidden by lampshades or other fixtures). I even tried telling some I switched over to CFLs, and they said things like "Oh, yeah... I don't like the color. I thought it looked different" when in reality is was the same daylight CFL bulb before and after.
A lot of this shit is in people's heads, unless you are using the "pure white" bulbs. I use those in the garage and have been experimenting with a little one for bias lighting behind the TV. A lot of the color of lighting is determined by the lampshade as well.
Let me make this clear, if you have CFLs and they have not failed..... YOU ARE ALONE IN THE WORLD!!!!
Well, I've only had a couple failures over the years, and everyone I know has had great success. Your claimed high rate of failure is the thing that's a statistical outlier. I suspect your dimmers might be at fault despite what the bulb manufacturer claims. My experience with dimmers is that they wear out the filament of an incandescent really quickly. The bulbs work, but they begin to noticeably buzz. I got rid of every dimmer that came with my house. Either that or there's something else wrong, assuming you're not exaggerating.
The CFL on my porch is coming up on 14 years. I'm wondering if I should alert the manufacturer and win a prize or something.
Don't like anecdotes? Here's some testing Popular Mechanics did.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/reviews/news/4215199
CFL consistently outperformed incandescent, and this was double blind testing using light meters. The incandescent bulb had a color temp of 2736K. The MaxLite MicroMax CFL was measured at 2738K. You think you'll notice 2 degrees difference?
As for the mercury, power plants emit mercury, too, especially coal plants. The energy savings of CFLs more than offset their minuscule mercury content. Just don't eat the bulbs.
That being said, I would not outright ban any kind of bulb.
Oh, I know what it means. It's the *usage* I was questioning, much the same way that, yes, there's racism, but "racist" is far too often used to shut down debate by someone without the facts on their side.
Nice response, though. Sympathies about the IE thing. :-)
Some of the target markets for FPGA supercomputing want exactly that, though. They want their C and Matlab to just compile with some tool and download to the FPGA based system. It's a big issue facing an emerging field. Where I work we have stodgy old systems folks set in their ways, but we also have lots of VHDL/Verilog coders, so the two can work together. There are tools to do these conversions, but nothing has approached the turnkey level yet. There's also the question of code efficiency analogous to HTML coded by hand versus HTML generated by a WYSIWYG tool.
Heh heh. People like me who work with FPGAs know that all too well. I designed a board recently with a bunch of Xilinx Virtex-6 parts. We had to get engineering samples we were such early adopters. Some of the larger parts we used in the design hadn't even started fabrication yet. Six months later the board is built and being used, and Xilinx announces the Virtex 7 family.
Or maybe you just have no idea what you are talking about.
There is no "commodity hardware" (as I think you are using the term) that can compete with a board full of FPGAs. You want a handful of cores and threads in a microprocessor? A small FPGA can do *thousands* of processes in parallel without working up a sweat. The performance gains here completely justify designing a new board as each FPGA generation comes to market. Some of you folks need to stop putting everything into the perception of a hobbyist putting together a gaming rig for the best price.
There a great chart I saw online about trying to push microprocessors to do the same processing that's trivial when parallelized in an FPGA. Even with projected fabrication improvements and smaller geometries, you wind up with microprocessors at heat levels comparable to rocket exhausts and nuclear reactor cores. And don't forget that FPGAs can use the same fabrication improvements. Also, some FPGAs have microprocessor cores embedded in them should you still have something that needs to be coded that way for whatever reason.
these "smartest guys in the room" aren't so smart sometimes.
No, they just know way more about FPGAs than you. You could Google "FPGA supercomputers", you know. This is an emerging field. I see it at my work where the systems folks are banging their heads against the wall because even superclusters of Linux machines can't give them the performance they need. Simulations are still taking days to run.
I think it was "VHDL = beauty not;"
Of course that generates a compiler error.
I've been advocating FPGA supercomputers where I work for a while, but the problem I hit is that the people I try to sell the idea to are systems guys who absolutely refuse to learn VHDL or Verilog coding. They want tools to turn their C and Matlab code directly into something they can download to the supercomputer. There's lots of work being done on this, but I've yet to see a turnkey solution because people are still building their own supercomputers.
So here you have a very specific problem that required the construction of a custom computer made out of banks of FPGAs. Tell me that's not sexy!
I do the same thing, but for things IN SPACE!
Still not sexy, sorry.
Is "privilege" the new word du jour amongst the terminally ideological these days? Seems to be showing up more and more.
Person 1: Blah blah bullcrap. ... wha?
Person 2: Not really. Blah blah actual facts.
Person 1: You're privileged.
Person 2:
Person 1: Racist!
and so on as civilization collapses and burns.
There was a case here in So Cal where the terms "master" and "slave" as used with disk drives was deemed offensive in government office circles. There were actually people putting stickers over the offending words on boxes lest any hypersensitive, useless, addle-brained miseryshit see anything that hurts their pwecious wittle feelings.
Oh boy, a politicial thread! Let's see what's up!
"Bark bark bark Rethuglicans ams teh evuls! Grrr! Howl! Spit!"
"Bark bark bark Dumbocrats ams teh evuls! Grrr! Howl! Spit!"
News for nerds! Stuff the politicians laugh their asses off about. And remember, they're laughing at you, not with you.
I know, geez. I rarely even come to Slashdot anymore. It's turned into Grand Ideological Loon Central. The geekverse has been completely taken over by wannabe revolutionaries with skulls full of horseshit.
Chocolate has a lot of social purpose
Things only a scientist would say for $500, Alex.
I thought the indie program was to act as an incubator and teach people XBox development. Any profit was to be icing.
Oh, yeah, voters share the blame. Well, voters other than me. :-) I vote no on all bond measures. And no one I've voted for has been in a state office for over a decade. I can't blame them too much when it comes to elected offices, though. When you're given a ballot full of nothing but sociopaths and/or ideology-addled morons, what can they do?
The idiots here voted for a high speed rail that I warned everyone within earshot would be a boondoggle. Guess what? It's a boondoggle.
OK. :)
This is the Slashdot Collective, remember. Any attempt by any entity anywhere to make money is evil and greedy. We should all be out there washing the feet of homeless drug addicts, or something.
Circuit City is a prime example when they fired all the experienced staff and hired no nothing warm bodies. I went in just to test, and asked about the LED based DLP televisions versus ones with the bulbs. Did they sell the bulbs for a decent price? Maybe a discount pack that would last the estimated life of the set? Blanks stares all around.
There was always a certain amount of display items not working, but it really went into the toilet after that. Nothing worked. The one near my house literally had TVs that looked like they were adjusted by blind people who could vaguely feel colors through some synesthesia effect. No surprise at all when they closed up.
Amazon is also excellent for used items now that there seems to be some control in place for shipping costs. I was able to find two hard to find Discworld books via a UK reseller that worked through amazon. You walk into local brick and mortar stores and ask a question, and you get glazed eyes stares like you're a blue alien speaking the Asari language.
And local stores are the only time I have had anyone tell me that the reason they no longer carry item X is because every time they get a new shipment of X it sells out right away. Read that again. I am not making that up, and I have been told that of four independent occasions. All four of those stores are gone now, BTW.
California sorely needs money because the denizens of the statehouse are completely corrupt, and made horrible, unsustainable deals with other governmental entities. They can do it because the world is full of people who would happily opine that ever more money be shoveled into the bottomless pit.
? = pretty much the same.
You're one of those people who thinks one Party is super duper golly gee whiz better than the other, aren't you?
I remember watching one episode and gave up. They were way too stupidly over the top. The "lesson" on the show I saw was not to use offroad vehicles in the oh so fragile desert. They had a kid on a dirt bike initially, but then there was some villain types driving these big smoke spewing vehicle all over the place for... some reason, I guess. WTF? Did they have coal fired boilers or something?
*snore* Did you shake your little fist at the screen when typing that? Don't think I'm the one here who needs to get over anything, sweetheart.