H2 in 100% concentrations will not ignite. A piercing by a bullet, including the spark and escaping gas will not explode. However, that escaping gas mixing with the atmosphere around, and then encountering a spark (from a street light, another car, someone with a cigarette, etc) and you have a massive explosion.
You also have to contend with 2 facts: 1) all hydrogen tanks leak slowly. 2) H2 is lighter than air, and will collect in places where this is no way out (your garrage at home, parking garrage ceiling structures, etc). Over time, when the concetration hits 5%, that's enough for conbustion...
Also, carfire... H2 requires 930 atmospheres of pressure to stay liquid at -50C. At 500C in a car fire, we're talking thousands of atmospheres. it WILL rupture.
Then there are wrecks...
Oh, the patents, those are NEW patents on technbologies that improve the OLD process. There were all issued in 2008.
You must have had either some cheap dimmables, or there was in fact an issue with your fixture.
I have 5 of them in a ceiling fan in the living room, and 4 in the master bedroom. They dim down to about 20% before going off. I do need to pump them to about 50% to get them to come on, but that's no big deal.
My oven does not use a cooling system to keep the bulb cool, it's simply behind some insulated glass. I have NO idea how to change it, and no idea where to find a replacement CFL for it, but apparently the bulb itself is covered under the stove warranty, which is 10 years, so i could care less.
CFLs have trouble starting in extreme cold (below 0), and take a few minutes to warm to full brightness in cold temps, but honestly, it's like a 20w bulb, and it's only on for minutes a day. in a fridge, if it took 2 seconds to light, and 20 to warm up from 50% to 90% brightness, you'd have already closed the door:) People leave oven lights on for hours sometimes (my mother uses the oven light as a kitchen nightlight for example), so it's a bit more important, but even it's a 40w, so the savings ratios are not exactly 400% wile a 60 or 100w equiv. LEDs are more likely to fit this space, but not until they're $3-4 each (not 30-70 like now).
Well, LiIon, not so much, but LiPo are quite safe unless you actually SET one on fire or rupture the casing. Then again, that's also somewhat likely in a car accident, so instead we'd use LiTit batteryies, or better yet the up and coming LiSu. They don;t explode, don't burn, and can charge to 80% in under 10 minutes...
Of course, they're a ways off from enough mass production to actually support us all having cars with them, and we're 30-50 years from having enough electric power, and a completely rebuilt smartgrid that could actually handle the loads, so we need an interum solution:
Here it is: wwew.dotyenergy.com. If you have questions about their RFTS process, I'll be happy to enlighten you.
It uses wind, H2, sequestered CO2, and runs in our current cars. Burning their "WindFuels" (which is actually just gasoline made using wind for the energy and RFTS processing) releases no NEW Co2 into the atmosphere and is 100% renewable. It;s also safe, clean, and proven by 50 years of science. (we were making diesel using this process WAY back in WWII).
I agree completely. A few points though: We can NOT use the same ipeline systems... We either need pipelines capable of sustaining 980 atmostpheres of pressure, or pipelines refrigerated to not more than -241 celcius. and that pipeline would need to move 2.3 times as much H2 as it currently moves gasoline.
This assumes we're piping Liquid H2. If we're piping gaseous H2, and compressing it on-site of storage, or as it goes into taker trucks, then we'd need pipelines with as much as 1,000 times the capacity.
Here's an alternative that uses Wind energy, waste (sequesterd) CO2, and a 50 year proved scientific process to make GASOLINE at $80/bbl. www.dotyenergy.com. That CAN use our current pipelines and gas stations, and our current cars, and THIS gas releases NO NEW CO2 into the air than is alredy there from opther sources.
Unlimited, cheap, gas that can be made here at home, and can't be controlled by massive monopolies.
The math simply isn't there. 2.3L of H2, even using our best portable fuel cells to equal 1L of gasoline. Complicate that with storage costs, refrigeration, transdportation issues (how do you pipeline something that needs to be kept as under -240 celcius or at over 930 ATMOSPHERES of pressure?) and then there's the whole "driving around in a bomb" thing... not to mention dealing with trapped H2 gas in the ceilings of parking garrages, your home garrage, and other places it collects and explodes in. H2 is simply NEVER going to be an acceptible fuel for humans except possibly for running giant scale fuel calls at sites where H2 can be produced and stored on-site.
If the math was better, if we could make and store H2 for say 10% of the costs of using gasoline, then it might be worth the costs and risks to build the rest of the infrastructure, but here's another tidbit: Filling a fuel cell vehicle tank with enough liquid H2 to travel 200 miles TAKES 4-6 HOURS! (unless you're talking running a full refrigeration system in your car, and keeping the feul liquid by temperature instead of by pressure).
Well, we can't keep using gas, can we? Actually, yes... See the research from dotyenergy.com. The problem is we're using gas from OIL. This is CO2 that ISN'T in our atmosphere yet. If we could use CO2 from EXISTING sources (sequesterd CO2), and run that through an RWGS/RFTS process (in use since WWII), we can use wind energy to MAKE fule, clean, cheap, safe, fule that adds no ADDITIONAL Co2 to the atmosphere. This CAN be done for about $60-80/bbl depending on the local market. It can be made right here in your own town, the process is so safe it barely even ping on the EPAs radar (about as polluting as your local corner gas station, except a plant makes anough fuel to support about 10,000 drivers), and we could have it TODAY! (this is all proven science, not pipe dreams).
Doty has figured out how to simply put all the pieces together. Actually, he did that 20 years ago, and then spent the next years figuring out how to make each piece of that puzzle more symbiotic to other pieces, how to make those pieces more effieint, and in the end got 60 World patents issued for the technology.
All they need not is a measly $5m to build a true scale plant (instead of a lab experiment), to actually prove to the world on a large scale that the number do in fact refelct the science we've been using for 50 years... simple.
After that, anyone can buy a fuel plant (150-250m), hook it up to a small wind farm, (175MW or so), and make tens of thousands of gallons of fuel a day. Big Oil can't have a monopoly. We don't have to import fuel. It;s cleaner fuel (no sulfers or other contaminants, since we're starting with only H2, CO2, and H20.
This is a dream process. But, since it;s not a BIO-fuel; since it uses H2, but NOT as a fuel source itself; since it USES wind, but doesn't develop wind energy; since it makes gasoline, not an alternative fuel (actually, it makes ethanol, propanol, methanol, and a bunch of other hydrocarbons, which are seperated and used for multiple industries); since it's not a hybrid car technology; they don't qualify for a single current government program to help fun their first small scale plant. they need investors... (or pressure on the government to give them a grant).
Read their research (you can buy a copy of ALL of it for about $100, not $5,000 like other charge, and it's the COMPLETE process and design made public...).
I am NOT an investor, nor am I copmpensated in any way by Doty or any affiliates... I simply want this technology to see the light of day. They've asked experts to scrutinize it, and noe have found errors. They've got 60+ patents on technological improvements to this OLD and PROVEN process. This IS real, they just need money...
All well and good they can make a car made of paper and spit go that far, the simple facts remain however, if they can do that with compressed liquid H2, they can do nearly the same on refined gasoline.
In fact: "Looking at the overall energy transformation, it would take 9.14 kWh of electricity, = 32.9 MJ of electricity, to produce hydrogen with the same motive energy as 1 litre of gasoline (which has an energy density of about 33.5 MJ/litre). This almost equal requirement for energy is a viable proposition when renewable energy can be generated directly as electricity from renewable sources, as in Iceland, but generating the electricity from fossil fuels would call for the use of about 32.9 / 0.33 = 99.7 MJ of fossil fuel energy, about three times the energy in gasoline, and that would be prohibitive both in consumption of fossil fuels and emissions of carbon dioxide."
The source: http://www.optimumpopulation.org/optjournal/opt.af.hydrogen.journal03oct.pdf is an older article from 2003 (and an eye opening read on a bunch of bunk our govenrments have been dumping money into), but lets say it's clear that advances in electrolysis since then have been non-existant. Actually, the issue isn't so much making the H2, but in making it LIQUID H2. (getting it to -253 celcius, as doing so is actually more efficient than compressing it to 930 atmospheres of pressure to do it at -50 celcius)
Granted, if we could make H2 exclusively from 100% renewable energy (Wind, which is more plentiful, more reliable, and far cheaper currently than solar or i would suggest solar), we might be able to use H2, but then we have several issues. 1) storage (it leaks through even the best tanks made), 2) transport (build me a pipeline that can handle 930atmospheres, i dare you!, you'll need trucks, lots of trucks, and 2.3x the equivalaent storage of gasoline minus bleed losses), 3) danger: you're not driving A BOMB!, 4) redesign all garrages and parking structures (H2 rises, and would collect in the ceilings, and eventually combust causing ground shaking explosions unless we can let it vent completely away), 5) filling time: since liquid H2 can't just "flow" like gas, and since your tank is at 930atm and room temperature, it needs to fill SLOWLY to avoid generating massive amounts of heat during filling, about 8 hours or so for enough H2 to go 200 miles.... 6) again, storage: LOTS of energy is needed to keep large tanks cols (since the bigger the tank, the more difficult to keep massive pressures).
Lets try another way: www.dotyenergy.com. Instead of making H2, then compressing it into liquid, and dealing with all the logistics issues and dangerous problems noted above, we'll leave it as a gas. However, instead of using it as a fuel itself, and dealing with storage and transport, we'll simply pipe it from the electrolysis chamber directly into an RWGS/RFTS engine, with some small amount of water, and a bunch of CO2 waste sequestered from a coal plant. Now, we end up with this formula: H20 + energy = H2 + 02 (we sell the O2 to hospitals). CO2 + energy = CO + O2 (again, sell the O2). H2 + CO + energy = Fuel!
Sound impossible? Well, we were already DOING THIS in WWII to make diesel fuel where we could not bring it to the troops. Doty Energy has augmented the process, redesigned the RWGS process to make it more efficient, and has been issued over 60 patents on processes that greatly improve the energy needed to operate the system. Combining pieces of various proven scientefic processes together opened doors, allowed sybiotic use of energy and waste, and when powered by wind, (especially off-peak wind that the power company is literally GIVING away, and in some markets PAYING people to use) we can essentially make fuel at between $60 and $80 per barrel depending on the market. This is 100% clean, contaminant free fuel in any grade you like (from lubricants and oils, to high powered jet fuel
Unfortunately, aside from a few hallway and stair lights (which are actually only on for monents a day, and the cost isn't justified for the savings), all my lights are recessed or parts of ceiling fans. One exception is an existing high efficiency florescent in the kitchen.
I really don't have anywhere in the house except in the bathrooms, where I could mount a fixture without a major rewiring effort, as there would be no existing wire where I'd put a light...
Also, especially in the master bath, the woman is NOT going to give up the existing lighting. Putting on makeup under florescent light aparently is not acceptable... I put in full spectrum CFLs, and she made me take em right back out. but again, the lights over the mirror are only on for 20-30 minutes a day, the overhead light and the spots that point at the jacuzzi, shower, toilet, and in the closet are all CFL already.
I have a 3 floor house on a slab foundation, so any wiring effort requires major home surgery. There's some conduit in a few places, but it's for structured wiring, not electric. It;s a 2 year old house, 4500sqft, top notch with all the upgrades, except the builder and previous owner went cheap and skimped out on the $8K upgrade to put in a crawlspace, and only wired a few of the rooms for network (though all for cable), and no surround sound. It's going to cost me $1600 in professional installation becasue of the design of the living room to install $60 in HT wiring... (Open floorplans are great, until you want to have them recabled...)
I'm refering to the full spectrum bulb having a feaily even color gammut. It's sill weak in some areas, and overpoewred in others, but it it very different from the cheap florexcents, and honestly, the Philips bulb they used is still a "low budget" bulb, and below the quality of those I use.
The "high Quality" bulbs I get for about $2 more than store bought from an online retailer.
Nice to know about the govt subsidy for home florescent fixtures, and I know the T8 bulbs to be even better for color and efficiency, but I really don;t have places to install them without significant (many fold more than the housing) installation expenses (wiring, new sheetrock, painting, and more) which FAR outweight the balance using simply CFs in existing fixtures.
I'm apparently not very suceptible to CF lighting, though I find I actually complain about cheap lighting more then my friends and family and coworkers, so who knows.
All i can say is cheap light sucks, what I have doesn't. If that's good enough for me, and everyone else i know, then for the few like yourself who object, maybe we'll just heavily tax you for your choice or something...
In a photo lab, or where validating fully acurate color representation is important I'm on your side, but for general home lighting, even some of the cheaper CFs have done me fine (in closets, hallways, etc). I use very high quality CFs in my reading room, computer room, and living room.
I have a few outdoor 150w equiv CFs. They come on in 1-2 sec at about 60% bright in the winter and hit full brightness in less than a minute (with the 90% to 100% taking nearly half that time). You must have bought cheap bulbs, or have older ones without instant bright technology. Some bulbs are using a higher powered capacity to run the bulb "hot" for the first 15 seconds or so, greatly reducing startup time with minimal impact. Then again, 150w+ bulbs are excluded from the ban, and even so, saving 120w for 5 minutes once or twice a day is a negligible effort.
For my driveway though, I use 2x 300w halogen bulbs, not incandescent... Even they take 10-20 seconds to warm up, but that's better than the 6x 150ws I used to use to get the same light...
I have about 20 dimmable CFs. They work great, and have a range from about 20% to 90% of an equavalent CF. I have 60watt 5000K dimmers. They were about $12 a bulb when i got em, they're about $6 now.
If you buy the cheap crap Walmart pushes, you get cheap crap... Look online at one of the many 1000+ bulb stores, check the ratings on each bulb, and it;s FULL stats (temp, range, watts, lumens, etc).
You'll also not that the ban taking effect in 2012 actually only covers 100w and higher incandescents. In 2014 the ban would extend down to 40w bulbs, and all bulbs (including current CFs) need to be 30% more efficient than today. By 2020, all incandescents will be banned completely, and bulbs need to be 70% more efficient.
Currently excluded from the ban are bulbs under 310 lumes and over 2600 lumens (roughly sub 40w and past 150w.) Also exempt are several classes of speciality lights, including APPLIANCE LAMPS, "rough service" bulbs, 3-way bulbs, colored lamps, and plant lights. Further, bulbs that don't fit the traditional home socket are excluded, and in 2014 that only extends to the mini version as well. (candellabra socket). Also of note, office style long tube florecents are also being changed to a new standard bulb type (100% compatible with existing fixtures), that is much more efficient and also offers higher quality light (T8?)
Well, this is a generalization. Allow me to use a few to show you why:
The majority of people with reduced vision are elderly, or approaching it. Elderly generally are cheap, and also generally not up on technology or technical terms. Things like Lumens, Color Temp, etc are mysterious to the majority of them.
Take cheap people with a lack of technical knowledge, send them to Walmart (their store of choice), where 90% of the CFs are low grade and available only in 2700K color temp, and they'll buy the cheapest per-dollar bulbs.
Then ask these people how they like their cheap-ass lighting and you'll find they don't like it. Ask a person used to a pwerformance computer how they like their $399 Dell special, or how someone used to a caddilack likes a Dodge neon and you'll get much the same response. My father was the exact same way, and continaully complained about the CF bulbs his power company gave him free (they gave each coop meber a dozen). He liked the light in my house, and wanted to know what I used. He was shocked to find i used all CFs, aven in the dimming lights and amber dining room lighting. I spent about $2 more per bulb than what he finds commonly available, but over the life of the bulb, it;s still far cheaper than what he thought he needed.
...and the Ford model T gets the equvalent average US fuel economy today... This is compared to Europe where they get nearly double the mileage, and their gas powered cars outperform our best hybrid in both mileage and emissions/mile driven.
You're buying 1) the wrong bulbs: 5000+K color temp bulbs are easily available, the 4000 and lower are blue, the 2700 are yellowish... the 5000 and 6000K lights are quite nice! and 2) 2 for $20 is a rip off! I get 4 for $12-15 depending on the sale at Lowes, and they're the higher quality bulbs too. I can get 12 for $30 online of the cheap "walmart" 2700K CFs... (which is what Sam's carries typically)
only the uninformed consumer realizes that the $0.25 bulb is actually cheaper. Since you'll need 4-6 of them to match the life of the CF, it's more like $1.50 for the bulbs. Also, CFs are available in 4000-6000K (full bright high quality light) for about $3 each in bulk now (lots of about a dozen). 2700K bulbs ("softwhite") can be found in 6 packs in Lowes for $12-15.
Now, take in energy use, and even the $10 super high quality CFs are cheaper than an incandescent bulb at $0.25. the new $5 halogen-inside-traditional-bulb design really isn't anything new, and at only half the energy saving and half again the price, with less than half the lifespan, it's no competitor to the CF, especially since the halogen hybrids actually have sub-par light quality to the older bulbs they replace (unless you like super bright). They also dim poorly...
The reason government is getting involved is mis-information. The public is simply too dumb to do the math on ttheir own, and the incumbant bulb makers are too slow to adjust their strategies and revamt their manufactuing lines since if they made a real impact, given the lifespan of the bulbs, they'd have a real hard time locking in a long term fiscal plan, so they've been mostly unwilling to adjust.
Things like getting people freaked out about "mercury poisoning potelntial" where even if you LICKED THE POWEDER OFF THE FLOOR after breaking a bulb you'd only take on the same amount of murcury you're exposed to working in an office for 6 months, or eating fish once a week during that time frame, or drinking 1000 glasses of tap water... a SAFE level.
... and still use more energy than CF, much more expensive than CF ($5 a bulb), and color quality is slightly degraded from Incandescent, competitive to recent CFs.
Warm up time on CFs is down to ~5-10 seconds, and they starty at about 75% bright, so this is a real non-issue compared to ones 5 years ago. The color temp range is now also available not only at the super cheap (get-what-you-pay-for) 2700K range, but up to and above 6000K as well. In a really cold room (garrage in winter) they might take 30 seconds to warm up.
Cfs are also available in dimable as reasonable prices now too, and come in floodlight, spot, and other varieties up to 300w equiv luminocity.
We're not talking a lot of mercury here, in fact, we're talking about 2 mg. Also, this is NOT liquid mercury (elemental mercury) but a mercury compund, and exposure limits are increased accodringly.
The contamination levels for acceptible CONTINUAL mercury exposure are 0.1MG/m^2. and that's the AIRBORNE contamination levels... As mercury in the form inside a CF is not only a solid powder, but even if it is broken, much of this remains inside the tubes, and is never released. About 0.3gms is typically released from a broken bulb, and most of that is powder on the floor, not in the air. Since a typical room in a home is about 9-15m^2, this is far below acceptible CONTINUAL contamination levels. Yea, opening the window is a good idea to avoid immediate exposure, as it turning off fans in the room (though turning off the AC? the filter may actually catch some of it for you...) However, the powerderd mercury is easy to remove, and only micrograms will remain.
Also, it is considdered SAFE for drinking water to have up to 0.0001mg/liter. That means every 1000 litres of water you drink could have nearly 3 times the mercury released when breaking 1 bulb, and you;re not injecting all the mercury released from that bulb either... The alowable mercury in fish is 10 times higher, meaning every 100 pieces of fish you eat contains that same SAFE dosage again.
Also note from the EPA that using a CF releases DRAMATICALLY less Mercury into the air, since making electricty releases mercury into the air... in fact, the mercury in the bulb is maybe 10% of the total mercury pollution released over that bulbs lifespan. Also, bulbs disposed of in landfills are considdered safe, as all operating landfills are sealed from leaks before we start putting trash in them, and there has never been a confirmed contamination of a water supply from a landfil (water supplys have benn contaminated from leaks, buy only from facilities, spills, trucking, and other DIRECT contamination events, never from storage in a landfill).
manufacturers have also reduced the mercury content dramatically over the last 12-18 months, and it continues not only to fall, but methods of ensuring less is released in a breakage have been introduced.
There is really nothing to fear, unless you plan on licking your floor clean after you break a bulb. (keeping pets away until it;s been properly scrubbed/vacuumed may still be a good idea though).
I agree. The bulbe in my garrage are 150w equiv CFs. I can notice the warm up time, but it's about 15 seconds... on bitter cold days, maybe it's 30 seconds and sometimes they flicker to come on for a couple of seconds. The CFs in my other rooms produce quality light and I don't even notice their spin up time (aside from a half second delay after I throw the switch).
Getting quality light is all about buying the right color spectrum. Cheap bulb, cheap light. The SAME is true of incandescent, accepting that a cheap incandescent is a fraction of the price (up front cost), but can actually cost significantly more over an equivalent life (multiple replacements, plus energy costs).
LEDs still are not there yet (coming strong though). When LED can produce equivalent lumenns in acceptible color ranges for under $5 a bulb (maybe 5 years?) we'll see them starting to replace CF.
The mercury content in CF has also been not only dramatically reduced, but is actually not really a concern. It's not liquid mercury, it's a compund, and contamination is extreemely easy to remove with a simple vaccum. Also, placing them in landfill sis completely safe. There has NEVER been a single proven leak of mercury for any landfill. Though i agree they should be recylcled, same with all glass and all metal, and some plastics (and that's about it!) it's not a major issue.
I'm still working on replacing all my bulbs (there are over 90 in my current home, and another 16 outside, and I've only been there 6 months, give me time...), but I'm completely content buying good quality CFs. Actually, for 1 light, I'm completely happy using a pair of LED lights, even considering the cost, as it's 20 feet off the floor and in a bad spot for a ladder... I'll get to that one only after the current lights blow out...
i had about 40 CFs in my last home. The only sockets that did not have CFs were a few halogents outside, and a few rooms i used dimmers in (which there are now dimmable CFs...)
Push is between a server and an application, except the application is the iPhone notification service, which is allways running. Push (I'll use activesync as an example) does NOT require the server to be aware in any way of the device's availability. It is the DEVICE that maintains an open IP, ready to receive connections, and that's all it is, an IP... Push on the server sends a request to the phone, notification service identifies the incoming request and port and knows which app to hand it over to. A small piece of code from the dev that ties into the notification service, but which is NOT the whole app is then called, processes the request in part, and displays a notification alowing the user to load the app or ignore the request for later. This is a very simple technology... It does not require Apple's central server to have account data, only a central app ON THE DEVICE, which is secure. The app can be CALLED, but does not have to be running as long a SOME app is running, and that's called the notification service.
If yopu place your VPN connection on hold, the secure system on my end will terminate the connection in 15 seconds. Storage a password AT ALL on your device is forbidden, and changing your IP as you hop from tower to tower or wifi to wifi will break the connection and require re-dual authentication. This is a security protocol, and yes, they have workarounds, but they all violate security rules.
For data monitoring, as I said, with an unlimited data plan, the finance team doesn't care about "per app" then simply decide what porttion of the $30 to pay and pay the same fee monthly (mine pays 100% of the $30 and pays per minute for the rest)
There are free battery tools for the iPhone. The default app also backgrounds info about the battery for Apple's support staff (they have some nifty diagnostic stuff. When a LiPo is going bad, it's obvious... I don't need a complicated tool and graph to see it. As for "workloads" again, that reeall only matters to backgrounders, as the iPhone has a very predictable energy use pattern (screen off, screen on, using GPS, using 3D engine). The battery meter is also highly accurate, at least as far as that's actually possible, since if you understand a battery meter, you know it's only a software approxamation of use vs load, and not an actual measure of remaining power, which is impossible to calculate.
The iPhone can multitask, and does multitask. As it becomes a "requirement" to do so for the majority of people, Apple can easily introduce that later. Since it;s onl;y a "requirement" for about 1% of people today, and mostly only because they have bad habits or burned in expectations from other vendors, it;s not a priority for Apple. As you said yourself, there are other phones out there, and allweays will be, and Apple certainly does not expect 100% adoptation. Their STATED goal was 1% the first year...
Um, for remote access, tether you're phone... You'd have to do that anyway as you need to get the data from the phone to YOUR PC, as they're certainly not going to let you connect your phone to their machines if they won't let you connect yourt PC to their network, aven in a DMZ'd guest network (which my DISA and DOD secured network environment DOES allow, just not on wifi). You can be tethered over 3G and STILL TAKE CALLS, receive IMs, even run Safari and surf other pages on the web while tethering is running. i don't see how this is an issue. I've been a network and enterprise systems engineer for 15 years in secure government facilities... There's a workaround for everything (like being prepared for the job and not needing to download the ISO in the first place)
CURRENT GPS drivers on the iPhone run in the foreground. TomTom and Apple announced it DOES actually have a background API, and that TomTom's GPS will work even while on a call, or while running other apps, including continuing voice prompts even while on a call. That API will be made available to all vendors once TomTom's software is out (requires a
Oh no, Verizon doesn't force you to re-up for another 2 years when you pugrade your blackberry... You just have to saccrifice the subsidy ($300), which btw, AT&T also offers the same. Of course, once your contract is expired with Verizon, if you want to switch to a new plan or a lower promotion you still need to sign a new contract anyway. They all do the same thing.
1) some of my comments are for the other assholes, not you. 2) When one business does something unjust, we boycot. When all of them collude on pricing schemes and contracts to lock us in, and we have no alternatives, it's gone too far and the government needs to act (and they are, finally). 3) The only thing I can't do that you mentioned, using a free app, is play a streaming podcast. Apple has been working with the company behind Pandora to tie streaming support into the iPod app, and/or allow their app to background, as it is a highly requested feature, and clearly it;s hard to "accidentally" leave music playing without knowing about it... I can get email and SMS (and all other background) alerts, keep the tracking app in the foreground, and still take a call. Currently, while on a call, GPS would stop logging (TomTom will not, and once it's released, others will have access to the same GPS API). Currently I don't know of a GPS tracking app that provides augio clues to mileage, but I've only tried one of them as it's not hard core personal hobby of mine to ride that way (and the bike I have includes a speedo and distance tracker I paid $20 for, and is real time, so GPS is only useful for logging data to my PC later anyway, and tracking the ROUTES i ride). 4) The coworker in the cube next to me has an andriod, and I spent much time tinkering with it. I found it to be very much a 1.0 release, but with potential, much as I saw the original iPhone release and waited until they had an App store before diving to to purchase one. Though the android has a more multifeatures and milti-task driven OS, managing multiple apps was still a manual process, and many of it featuers (though many, including a couple of tricks the iPhone lacks currently) were at best novelties, or tweaks on other manufacturers designs. I found very little of it truly unique or groundbreaking, and disliked its ways of storing and calling up data. In a couple of revisions, and when the app store reaches critical mass, (and when there's another model, I HATE it's current design and it feels flimsy and cheap, and bulky) I'll look at it again. I am not married to the iPhone, but currently, as of today, I find it superior. When there's something better (In October/november I'll look again when the first phone i bought is off contract) I'll change. 5: MMS is pointless to me. Why pay extra so people can send me unsolicited photo and video messages that are difficult to sync and low in quality or ludicrously compressed. e-mail is free, unlimited, easy to manage and archive, available from miltiple sources PC Mac, and phone alike, and I can send images and videos up to 10MB (actually i send a 32MB video and the iPhone automatically broke it up into pieces and sent it in 4 parts.)
6) I was talking the Macs, not the phone. Allow? How does Apple "allow" Dell, HP, IBM, Acer, Sony to compete/not compete. They all sell hardware containing the same basic components. Apple adds to that bells and whistles the others skip in most of their line (firewire, bluetooth, backlit kbds, webcams, aliminum casing, massive battery life), and they do it at lower price points, and maintain 100% Linux and Windows compatibility as well. Apple doesn't allow the competition access to it's OS, sure, but if Apple's providing lower priced hardware with better specs to start with, do you really think OEMing OS X is going to change that?
I gave Apple a lot of heat with OS 1 and 2 on the iPhone. 3 is still not perfect and I look forward to 4.0. At least I know what's coming, and can hold a device in my hands I'm both not afraid to drop, and not afrail the vendors will drop..
Um, but a Pre, Storm, or ANY OTHER SUBSIDIZED DEVICE FROM ANY PHONE VENDOR, and you're fucked into a 2 year deal. Do NOT blame Apple for the failing of the US government to regulate such practices.
AT&T's plan actually happens to be quite good for me since damned near everyone in the family has an AT&T home phone line (yes i call LANDLINES free), and with unity, I can call them all for free, and in 19 months I have yet to go over 400 plan minutes, and average about 2500 a month in actualy call time. If I switched to Verizon or Sprint, I'd be in one of their $99+ plans easy. I use the $69 iPhone plan and am quite happy with it.
The 3G S battery issues are thus far fluff, with a few reported, unconfirmed cases, including my favorite "it was playing music under my pillow for hours straight." For fucks sake, place a device designed to release heat efficiently in a thermal insulated environment and yes, it's going to get hot... He's licky it uses LiPo, not LiIon, or it lokely would have exploded!
I have had the 3G S for about 10 days. one of them, in 102 degree SC heat i had it on my black dashboard for a 4 hour drive, screen on, running GPS and maps the whole time, and playing music through the headphone jack (FM tranceiver) at 100% volume output, and has connected using Bluetooth to my headset. When i got to my destination, all good and sweaty (AC not working good in car), the phone was simply warm, and was not uncomfortable in any way.
Yesterday I spent 2 hours in the yard, 97 degrees outside, with it in my pocket playing music. It never got hot.
If there is a battery issue, an extremely small sampling of it's 1 million + owners have said a word. Apple is investigating, but you can NOT blame Apple for a 3rd party battery issue, unless of course you also blamed Nokia, Motorolla, Sony, HP, and others for all of their (millions and millions) batteries they recalled in the last 5 years.
I did a lot of reseaarch. I went to all 4 vendors, looked at each of their PDA phones, and honestly, it came down to price and notjhing more. Over 2 years, including the data plan, the iPhone was hundreds cheaper. That was before including the cost of the apps I've bought, ringtones, and other expenses the iPhone did not require (stylus, screen protectors, sync software, etc)
Everyone bitches about backgrounding, but I can't find a use, other than some request from the hacker community, that would tempt me into wanting a background function.
The iPhone is also evolving, fast. They've added dozens of features free,and continue to anounce new and coming features, and are already working on OS 4.
Android is in it's infancy, and device selection is limited, the apps are hardly even present and are expensive, and short of a few gimics, overall it was a big dissapopintment. The Pre's OS is a joke. Even more complicated than navigating the RIM's OS, and again, NO APPS AT ALL, not even a hint of an SDK. WinMobile might make a splash with WinMo 7, but i need a phone now, not in late 2010...
I'm not an apple fan. I have a mac only because I have been exposed to it by customers, and honestly, nothing beats using it for photo and video management, and for the price, it's more PC than I can get from Dell or anyone else. (Spec for Spec, the Pro line is CHEAPER than the competition!) I have an iPhone (now 2) because it is a cheaper device with a more predictable future and cheap apps. using AT&T is actually a benefit for me since my minute plan is the lowest available.
GPS, yet, there may be issues with multiple apps using GPS concurrently in the background. Can any other phone go this (several apps using GPS at the same time? I'm thinking no currently... If that's a neat feature to have, i'd try to get TomTom themselves to integrate it, since their own app can run in the background. it would be easy enough to have your to-do app leave a file descriptor in a location TomTom can access, and notify you through that interface of the proximity. This would also reduce the load on the device since each app no longer needs it's own map system (as GPS use with Goole Maps is strictly limited to an app poping the map with a pin, which is useless for your type of application use of GPS).
For IM, yea, all the mulit-app IM clients do this, they do that on the PCs too... If they can all receive push notices, why not simply just use them all seperately? You don;t do that on your PC as running 4 IM apps concurrently is a resource hog, so the multi-app acts as a central booking agent, but you still need accounts with each service to chat with folks on each service, and since they do NOT have to concurrently run to get notifications, and since they can share a central address book and friends lists anyway, why use a unified app? Habbit? Using 3 or 4 seperate apps means not having to share data with a 3rd party. Apple does not "hold your account open" they simply hold you IP open, and the iPhone aware central servers know how to show you're free busy status without maintaining real time connectivity. Short of holding your IP open, and providing an OS interface for the central dispatch of incoming port requests to the appropriate app, they're not any part of your communication, and you;re not sharing user/password info with a 3rd party.
This was a well thought through system. It's not perfect, and there are a few tiny uses that backgrounding might be able to work through for a less than 1% user base, but are you really going to force an OS change on the entire user base, lower battery life, and complicate the UI, just so that 30,000 users can benefit from an app they could just as easily find a workaround for?
The 3rd party mail client does NOT need to be running, that's the whole point of the iPhone's Push feature. Their servers no nothing other than an app on your device is requesting incoming traffic on a specific port to your device produce a pop-up notification. The app dev codes data into a file on the iPhone that captures some of the incoming data so you can be presented with more than a simple beep. You are not handing over your account credientials. (not for any app I've tried using push yet anyway, and if it;s required by some, I'd say it's bad code on the dev's end, not apple's.
"smart" VPN? You mean saving the password in the device to allow reconnect? This is why symbian is not a DOD approved OS for mobile access. By STIG, you have to manually re-key the password at each connection attempt (many sites require dual authenication).
The iPhone does monitor data use, and can easily be reset monthly. Currently most iPhone vendors offer unlimited use, so it's a non issue. For $30 a month, my finance group just pays the data charge, it's only the minutes they care about auditing. Both are also detailed via AT&T's web site, and can be viewed at any time, background app or not.
Behavioral monitoring? Even my wife, a puter noob, figured out in a few hours that playing 3D games drained the battery in about 5 hours, and she's fugured out that when the bar is half empty she can still talk for about 2 hours, when she gets the 20% warning, she knows to charge soon use use it sparingly (or plug in the battery powered recharger in her purse). I don;t need a friggin graph of how and when i used the battery, my memory is still good enough that I know what drans fast. Since I don't have backgrounding, i don't get bitten by "opps, I left that running" problems which are what are the root of behavioral monitoring apps...
I'm not saying noone wants it, I'm saying far less than 1% have requested it, and the 99% that are left don;t want to HAVE to deal with the complications of backgrounding. It;s simple, leave it be, if you want to hack your phone, you are not a target custoemr for the device, and Apple's OK with that.
Push, again, you do not understand the single IP hosted push notification system. the app DOES NOT NEED TO RUN, it simply needs a config file that sais 1) keep IP open, aka presence/activesync, which already is if you have push e-mail or calendar active, and 2) when traffic incoming on the IP is on a certain port, issue a prompt for the following application. That's it. Apple does not host a server FOR your app, doing a redirect, they simply hold open your IP and allow traffic to come to your device. The single server backgrounder just tells the incoming requests what app they're posting an alert to...
Auto e-mail responder need not even be on the phone, should be on the e-mail server... You'll get the push notice when you're in range, if you didn't get it immediately.
BitTorrent? You don't have a file system. Torrent it to your home PC and play the files over Orb or some other streaming media server/client. No need for you to waste battery downloading files you;re going to move to your PC anyway. VNC into it, get the downloads started, and then log out...
Location adjusters, i like that idea, but again, GPS DOES BACKGROUND on the iPhone, there just are no apps that support it yet... lets see what comes out in 3.1.
Again, the iPhone DOES multitask, just only for very specific apps and reasons. Everything else works fine over the notification engine. I've dealt with Palm, WinMo, and Symbian devices with multitasking. in the end, short of a very select percentage of power users, most people multitask only because they can't be bothered to remember to kill the app, and it gets left running.
Once GPS and safari backgrounding come available (3.1, 3.2) there won't be a thing I can't do with the device you;ve requested that anyone other than devs or hackers (likely less than 0.1%) would care for, and in exchange the other 99% of people would be left with a more complex interface and less battery life. Thanks.
Soft raid? If you looked at the performance impact of that, not to mention the very poor reliability, you'd stop...
Certainly, if your data set is large (lots of video) but of low value (redownload/rip again and your time is of low value itself) then certainly, it might make sense, but still considder that a second hard disk, externally, and rsync run via cron a few times a day, with history enabled, is a better solution and less impact on your I/O.
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H2 in 100% concentrations will not ignite. A piercing by a bullet, including the spark and escaping gas will not explode. However, that escaping gas mixing with the atmosphere around, and then encountering a spark (from a street light, another car, someone with a cigarette, etc) and you have a massive explosion.
You also have to contend with 2 facts: 1) all hydrogen tanks leak slowly. 2) H2 is lighter than air, and will collect in places where this is no way out (your garrage at home, parking garrage ceiling structures, etc). Over time, when the concetration hits 5%, that's enough for conbustion...
Also, carfire... H2 requires 930 atmospheres of pressure to stay liquid at -50C. At 500C in a car fire, we're talking thousands of atmospheres. it WILL rupture.
Then there are wrecks...
Oh, the patents, those are NEW patents on technbologies that improve the OLD process. There were all issued in 2008.
You must have had either some cheap dimmables, or there was in fact an issue with your fixture.
I have 5 of them in a ceiling fan in the living room, and 4 in the master bedroom. They dim down to about 20% before going off. I do need to pump them to about 50% to get them to come on, but that's no big deal.
My oven does not use a cooling system to keep the bulb cool, it's simply behind some insulated glass. I have NO idea how to change it, and no idea where to find a replacement CFL for it, but apparently the bulb itself is covered under the stove warranty, which is 10 years, so i could care less.
CFLs have trouble starting in extreme cold (below 0), and take a few minutes to warm to full brightness in cold temps, but honestly, it's like a 20w bulb, and it's only on for minutes a day. in a fridge, if it took 2 seconds to light, and 20 to warm up from 50% to 90% brightness, you'd have already closed the door :) People leave oven lights on for hours sometimes (my mother uses the oven light as a kitchen nightlight for example), so it's a bit more important, but even it's a 40w, so the savings ratios are not exactly 400% wile a 60 or 100w equiv. LEDs are more likely to fit this space, but not until they're $3-4 each (not 30-70 like now).
Well, LiIon, not so much, but LiPo are quite safe unless you actually SET one on fire or rupture the casing. Then again, that's also somewhat likely in a car accident, so instead we'd use LiTit batteryies, or better yet the up and coming LiSu. They don;t explode, don't burn, and can charge to 80% in under 10 minutes...
Of course, they're a ways off from enough mass production to actually support us all having cars with them, and we're 30-50 years from having enough electric power, and a completely rebuilt smartgrid that could actually handle the loads, so we need an interum solution:
Here it is: wwew.dotyenergy.com. If you have questions about their RFTS process, I'll be happy to enlighten you.
How about an interum solution:
www.dotyenergy.com.
It uses wind, H2, sequestered CO2, and runs in our current cars. Burning their "WindFuels" (which is actually just gasoline made using wind for the energy and RFTS processing) releases no NEW Co2 into the atmosphere and is 100% renewable. It;s also safe, clean, and proven by 50 years of science. (we were making diesel using this process WAY back in WWII).
I agree completely. A few points though: We can NOT use the same ipeline systems... We either need pipelines capable of sustaining 980 atmostpheres of pressure, or pipelines refrigerated to not more than -241 celcius. and that pipeline would need to move 2.3 times as much H2 as it currently moves gasoline.
This assumes we're piping Liquid H2. If we're piping gaseous H2, and compressing it on-site of storage, or as it goes into taker trucks, then we'd need pipelines with as much as 1,000 times the capacity.
Here's an alternative that uses Wind energy, waste (sequesterd) CO2, and a 50 year proved scientific process to make GASOLINE at $80/bbl. www.dotyenergy.com. That CAN use our current pipelines and gas stations, and our current cars, and THIS gas releases NO NEW CO2 into the air than is alredy there from opther sources.
Unlimited, cheap, gas that can be made here at home, and can't be controlled by massive monopolies.
actually, no. Check the math.
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/optjournal/opt.af.hydrogen.journal03oct.pdf
it takes 2.3L of H2 to have the same energy equivalent of 1L of gasoline. ...and that's in a fuel cell, which is more efficient than an ICE burning H2.
Mile per litre only matters when you actually compare it to gaoline power in an equivalent vehicle.
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/optjournal/opt.af.hydrogen.journal03oct.pdf
The math simply isn't there. 2.3L of H2, even using our best portable fuel cells to equal 1L of gasoline. Complicate that with storage costs, refrigeration, transdportation issues (how do you pipeline something that needs to be kept as under -240 celcius or at over 930 ATMOSPHERES of pressure?) and then there's the whole "driving around in a bomb" thing... not to mention dealing with trapped H2 gas in the ceilings of parking garrages, your home garrage, and other places it collects and explodes in. H2 is simply NEVER going to be an acceptible fuel for humans except possibly for running giant scale fuel calls at sites where H2 can be produced and stored on-site.
If the math was better, if we could make and store H2 for say 10% of the costs of using gasoline, then it might be worth the costs and risks to build the rest of the infrastructure, but here's another tidbit: Filling a fuel cell vehicle tank with enough liquid H2 to travel 200 miles TAKES 4-6 HOURS! (unless you're talking running a full refrigeration system in your car, and keeping the feul liquid by temperature instead of by pressure).
Well, we can't keep using gas, can we? Actually, yes... See the research from dotyenergy.com. The problem is we're using gas from OIL. This is CO2 that ISN'T in our atmosphere yet. If we could use CO2 from EXISTING sources (sequesterd CO2), and run that through an RWGS/RFTS process (in use since WWII), we can use wind energy to MAKE fule, clean, cheap, safe, fule that adds no ADDITIONAL Co2 to the atmosphere. This CAN be done for about $60-80/bbl depending on the local market. It can be made right here in your own town, the process is so safe it barely even ping on the EPAs radar (about as polluting as your local corner gas station, except a plant makes anough fuel to support about 10,000 drivers), and we could have it TODAY! (this is all proven science, not pipe dreams).
Doty has figured out how to simply put all the pieces together. Actually, he did that 20 years ago, and then spent the next years figuring out how to make each piece of that puzzle more symbiotic to other pieces, how to make those pieces more effieint, and in the end got 60 World patents issued for the technology.
All they need not is a measly $5m to build a true scale plant (instead of a lab experiment), to actually prove to the world on a large scale that the number do in fact refelct the science we've been using for 50 years... simple.
After that, anyone can buy a fuel plant (150-250m), hook it up to a small wind farm, (175MW or so), and make tens of thousands of gallons of fuel a day. Big Oil can't have a monopoly. We don't have to import fuel. It;s cleaner fuel (no sulfers or other contaminants, since we're starting with only H2, CO2, and H20.
This is a dream process. But, since it;s not a BIO-fuel; since it uses H2, but NOT as a fuel source itself; since it USES wind, but doesn't develop wind energy; since it makes gasoline, not an alternative fuel (actually, it makes ethanol, propanol, methanol, and a bunch of other hydrocarbons, which are seperated and used for multiple industries); since it's not a hybrid car technology; they don't qualify for a single current government program to help fun their first small scale plant. they need investors... (or pressure on the government to give them a grant).
Read their research (you can buy a copy of ALL of it for about $100, not $5,000 like other charge, and it's the COMPLETE process and design made public...).
I am NOT an investor, nor am I copmpensated in any way by Doty or any affiliates... I simply want this technology to see the light of day. They've asked experts to scrutinize it, and noe have found errors. They've got 60+ patents on technological improvements to this OLD and PROVEN process. This IS real, they just need money...
All well and good they can make a car made of paper and spit go that far, the simple facts remain however, if they can do that with compressed liquid H2, they can do nearly the same on refined gasoline.
In fact:
"Looking at the overall energy transformation, it would take 9.14 kWh of
electricity, = 32.9 MJ of electricity, to produce hydrogen with the same motive
energy as 1 litre of gasoline (which has an energy density of about 33.5 MJ/litre).
This almost equal requirement for energy is a viable proposition when renewable
energy can be generated directly as electricity from renewable sources, as in
Iceland, but generating the electricity from fossil fuels would call for the use of
about 32.9 / 0.33 = 99.7 MJ of fossil fuel energy, about three times the energy in
gasoline, and that would be prohibitive both in consumption of fossil fuels and
emissions of carbon dioxide."
The source: http://www.optimumpopulation.org/optjournal/opt.af.hydrogen.journal03oct.pdf is an older article from 2003 (and an eye opening read on a bunch of bunk our govenrments have been dumping money into), but lets say it's clear that advances in electrolysis since then have been non-existant. Actually, the issue isn't so much making the H2, but in making it LIQUID H2. (getting it to -253 celcius, as doing so is actually more efficient than compressing it to 930 atmospheres of pressure to do it at -50 celcius)
Granted, if we could make H2 exclusively from 100% renewable energy (Wind, which is more plentiful, more reliable, and far cheaper currently than solar or i would suggest solar), we might be able to use H2, but then we have several issues. 1) storage (it leaks through even the best tanks made), 2) transport (build me a pipeline that can handle 930atmospheres, i dare you!, you'll need trucks, lots of trucks, and 2.3x the equivalaent storage of gasoline minus bleed losses), 3) danger: you're not driving A BOMB!, 4) redesign all garrages and parking structures (H2 rises, and would collect in the ceilings, and eventually combust causing ground shaking explosions unless we can let it vent completely away), 5) filling time: since liquid H2 can't just "flow" like gas, and since your tank is at 930atm and room temperature, it needs to fill SLOWLY to avoid generating massive amounts of heat during filling, about 8 hours or so for enough H2 to go 200 miles.... 6) again, storage: LOTS of energy is needed to keep large tanks cols (since the bigger the tank, the more difficult to keep massive pressures).
Lets try another way: www.dotyenergy.com.
Instead of making H2, then compressing it into liquid, and dealing with all the logistics issues and dangerous problems noted above, we'll leave it as a gas. However, instead of using it as a fuel itself, and dealing with storage and transport, we'll simply pipe it from the electrolysis chamber directly into an RWGS/RFTS engine, with some small amount of water, and a bunch of CO2 waste sequestered from a coal plant. Now, we end up with this formula: H20 + energy = H2 + 02 (we sell the O2 to hospitals). CO2 + energy = CO + O2 (again, sell the O2). H2 + CO + energy = Fuel!
Sound impossible? Well, we were already DOING THIS in WWII to make diesel fuel where we could not bring it to the troops. Doty Energy has augmented the process, redesigned the RWGS process to make it more efficient, and has been issued over 60 patents on processes that greatly improve the energy needed to operate the system. Combining pieces of various proven scientefic processes together opened doors, allowed sybiotic use of energy and waste, and when powered by wind, (especially off-peak wind that the power company is literally GIVING away, and in some markets PAYING people to use) we can essentially make fuel at between $60 and $80 per barrel depending on the market. This is 100% clean, contaminant free fuel in any grade you like (from lubricants and oils, to high powered jet fuel
Unfortunately, aside from a few hallway and stair lights (which are actually only on for monents a day, and the cost isn't justified for the savings), all my lights are recessed or parts of ceiling fans. One exception is an existing high efficiency florescent in the kitchen.
I really don't have anywhere in the house except in the bathrooms, where I could mount a fixture without a major rewiring effort, as there would be no existing wire where I'd put a light...
Also, especially in the master bath, the woman is NOT going to give up the existing lighting. Putting on makeup under florescent light aparently is not acceptable... I put in full spectrum CFLs, and she made me take em right back out. but again, the lights over the mirror are only on for 20-30 minutes a day, the overhead light and the spots that point at the jacuzzi, shower, toilet, and in the closet are all CFL already.
I have a 3 floor house on a slab foundation, so any wiring effort requires major home surgery. There's some conduit in a few places, but it's for structured wiring, not electric. It;s a 2 year old house, 4500sqft, top notch with all the upgrades, except the builder and previous owner went cheap and skimped out on the $8K upgrade to put in a crawlspace, and only wired a few of the rooms for network (though all for cable), and no surround sound. It's going to cost me $1600 in professional installation becasue of the design of the living room to install $60 in HT wiring... (Open floorplans are great, until you want to have them recabled...)
I'm refering to the full spectrum bulb having a feaily even color gammut. It's sill weak in some areas, and overpoewred in others, but it it very different from the cheap florexcents, and honestly, the Philips bulb they used is still a "low budget" bulb, and below the quality of those I use.
The "high Quality" bulbs I get for about $2 more than store bought from an online retailer.
Nice to know about the govt subsidy for home florescent fixtures, and I know the T8 bulbs to be even better for color and efficiency, but I really don;t have places to install them without significant (many fold more than the housing) installation expenses (wiring, new sheetrock, painting, and more) which FAR outweight the balance using simply CFs in existing fixtures.
I'm apparently not very suceptible to CF lighting, though I find I actually complain about cheap lighting more then my friends and family and coworkers, so who knows.
All i can say is cheap light sucks, what I have doesn't. If that's good enough for me, and everyone else i know, then for the few like yourself who object, maybe we'll just heavily tax you for your choice or something...
Convince myself of full spectrum light quality? Honestly, it's damned hard to tell. Traditional CFs, especially sub 4000K have really awful spectrum maps, with about 6 peaks, and really poor blue and UV output across the board, and also weak in the reds. Full spectrum maps http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://web.ncf.ca/jim/misc/cfl/spectra.jpg&imgrefurl=http://web.ncf.ca/jim/misc/cfl/&usg=__xIT7BhJy3xPGzcum8adjVSsj85Y=&h=357&w=388&sz=12&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=MkaZz_BjLo50ZM:&tbnh=113&tbnw=123&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfluorescent%2Bbulb%2Bspectrum%26hl%3Den%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-us%26um%3D1
don't look that dramatic. Halogens are nearly as poor... The "cheap" incandescents also have issues, and I've found the "reading light" and "true light" versions are equally as expensive as CFs. LED light is REALLY bad...
In a photo lab, or where validating fully acurate color representation is important I'm on your side, but for general home lighting, even some of the cheaper CFs have done me fine (in closets, hallways, etc). I use very high quality CFs in my reading room, computer room, and living room.
I have a few outdoor 150w equiv CFs. They come on in 1-2 sec at about 60% bright in the winter and hit full brightness in less than a minute (with the 90% to 100% taking nearly half that time). You must have bought cheap bulbs, or have older ones without instant bright technology. Some bulbs are using a higher powered capacity to run the bulb "hot" for the first 15 seconds or so, greatly reducing startup time with minimal impact. Then again, 150w+ bulbs are excluded from the ban, and even so, saving 120w for 5 minutes once or twice a day is a negligible effort.
For my driveway though, I use 2x 300w halogen bulbs, not incandescent... Even they take 10-20 seconds to warm up, but that's better than the 6x 150ws I used to use to get the same light...
I have a CF in my oven. it cam ethat way new.
I have about 20 dimmable CFs. They work great, and have a range from about 20% to 90% of an equavalent CF. I have 60watt 5000K dimmers. They were about $12 a bulb when i got em, they're about $6 now.
If you buy the cheap crap Walmart pushes, you get cheap crap... Look online at one of the many 1000+ bulb stores, check the ratings on each bulb, and it;s FULL stats (temp, range, watts, lumens, etc).
You'll also not that the ban taking effect in 2012 actually only covers 100w and higher incandescents. In 2014 the ban would extend down to 40w bulbs, and all bulbs (including current CFs) need to be 30% more efficient than today. By 2020, all incandescents will be banned completely, and bulbs need to be 70% more efficient.
Currently excluded from the ban are bulbs under 310 lumes and over 2600 lumens (roughly sub 40w and past 150w.) Also exempt are several classes of speciality lights, including APPLIANCE LAMPS, "rough service" bulbs, 3-way bulbs, colored lamps, and plant lights. Further, bulbs that don't fit the traditional home socket are excluded, and in 2014 that only extends to the mini version as well. (candellabra socket). Also of note, office style long tube florecents are also being changed to a new standard bulb type (100% compatible with existing fixtures), that is much more efficient and also offers higher quality light (T8?)
Well, this is a generalization. Allow me to use a few to show you why:
The majority of people with reduced vision are elderly, or approaching it. Elderly generally are cheap, and also generally not up on technology or technical terms. Things like Lumens, Color Temp, etc are mysterious to the majority of them.
Take cheap people with a lack of technical knowledge, send them to Walmart (their store of choice), where 90% of the CFs are low grade and available only in 2700K color temp, and they'll buy the cheapest per-dollar bulbs.
Then ask these people how they like their cheap-ass lighting and you'll find they don't like it. Ask a person used to a pwerformance computer how they like their $399 Dell special, or how someone used to a caddilack likes a Dodge neon and you'll get much the same response. My father was the exact same way, and continaully complained about the CF bulbs his power company gave him free (they gave each coop meber a dozen). He liked the light in my house, and wanted to know what I used. He was shocked to find i used all CFs, aven in the dimming lights and amber dining room lighting. I spent about $2 more per bulb than what he finds commonly available, but over the life of the bulb, it;s still far cheaper than what he thought he needed.
...and the Ford model T gets the equvalent average US fuel economy today... This is compared to Europe where they get nearly double the mileage, and their gas powered cars outperform our best hybrid in both mileage and emissions/mile driven.
You're buying 1) the wrong bulbs: 5000+K color temp bulbs are easily available, the 4000 and lower are blue, the 2700 are yellowish... the 5000 and 6000K lights are quite nice! and 2) 2 for $20 is a rip off! I get 4 for $12-15 depending on the sale at Lowes, and they're the higher quality bulbs too. I can get 12 for $30 online of the cheap "walmart" 2700K CFs... (which is what Sam's carries typically)
only the uninformed consumer realizes that the $0.25 bulb is actually cheaper. Since you'll need 4-6 of them to match the life of the CF, it's more like $1.50 for the bulbs. Also, CFs are available in 4000-6000K (full bright high quality light) for about $3 each in bulk now (lots of about a dozen). 2700K bulbs ("softwhite") can be found in 6 packs in Lowes for $12-15.
Now, take in energy use, and even the $10 super high quality CFs are cheaper than an incandescent bulb at $0.25. the new $5 halogen-inside-traditional-bulb design really isn't anything new, and at only half the energy saving and half again the price, with less than half the lifespan, it's no competitor to the CF, especially since the halogen hybrids actually have sub-par light quality to the older bulbs they replace (unless you like super bright). They also dim poorly...
The reason government is getting involved is mis-information. The public is simply too dumb to do the math on ttheir own, and the incumbant bulb makers are too slow to adjust their strategies and revamt their manufactuing lines since if they made a real impact, given the lifespan of the bulbs, they'd have a real hard time locking in a long term fiscal plan, so they've been mostly unwilling to adjust.
Things like getting people freaked out about "mercury poisoning potelntial" where even if you LICKED THE POWEDER OFF THE FLOOR after breaking a bulb you'd only take on the same amount of murcury you're exposed to working in an office for 6 months, or eating fish once a week during that time frame, or drinking 1000 glasses of tap water... a SAFE level.
... and still use more energy than CF, much more expensive than CF ($5 a bulb), and color quality is slightly degraded from Incandescent, competitive to recent CFs.
Warm up time on CFs is down to ~5-10 seconds, and they starty at about 75% bright, so this is a real non-issue compared to ones 5 years ago. The color temp range is now also available not only at the super cheap (get-what-you-pay-for) 2700K range, but up to and above 6000K as well. In a really cold room (garrage in winter) they might take 30 seconds to warm up.
Cfs are also available in dimable as reasonable prices now too, and come in floodlight, spot, and other varieties up to 300w equiv luminocity.
OK, besides the fact this is completely paranoid, the rest of the article was equally interesting and revealing: http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf
We're not talking a lot of mercury here, in fact, we're talking about 2 mg. Also, this is NOT liquid mercury (elemental mercury) but a mercury compund, and exposure limits are increased accodringly.
The contamination levels for acceptible CONTINUAL mercury exposure are 0.1MG/m^2. and that's the AIRBORNE contamination levels... As mercury in the form inside a CF is not only a solid powder, but even if it is broken, much of this remains inside the tubes, and is never released. About 0.3gms is typically released from a broken bulb, and most of that is powder on the floor, not in the air. Since a typical room in a home is about 9-15m^2, this is far below acceptible CONTINUAL contamination levels. Yea, opening the window is a good idea to avoid immediate exposure, as it turning off fans in the room (though turning off the AC? the filter may actually catch some of it for you...) However, the powerderd mercury is easy to remove, and only micrograms will remain.
Also, it is considdered SAFE for drinking water to have up to 0.0001mg/liter. That means every 1000 litres of water you drink could have nearly 3 times the mercury released when breaking 1 bulb, and you;re not injecting all the mercury released from that bulb either... The alowable mercury in fish is 10 times higher, meaning every 100 pieces of fish you eat contains that same SAFE dosage again.
Also note from the EPA that using a CF releases DRAMATICALLY less Mercury into the air, since making electricty releases mercury into the air... in fact, the mercury in the bulb is maybe 10% of the total mercury pollution released over that bulbs lifespan. Also, bulbs disposed of in landfills are considdered safe, as all operating landfills are sealed from leaks before we start putting trash in them, and there has never been a confirmed contamination of a water supply from a landfil (water supplys have benn contaminated from leaks, buy only from facilities, spills, trucking, and other DIRECT contamination events, never from storage in a landfill).
manufacturers have also reduced the mercury content dramatically over the last 12-18 months, and it continues not only to fall, but methods of ensuring less is released in a breakage have been introduced.
There is really nothing to fear, unless you plan on licking your floor clean after you break a bulb. (keeping pets away until it;s been properly scrubbed/vacuumed may still be a good idea though).
I agree. The bulbe in my garrage are 150w equiv CFs. I can notice the warm up time, but it's about 15 seconds... on bitter cold days, maybe it's 30 seconds and sometimes they flicker to come on for a couple of seconds. The CFs in my other rooms produce quality light and I don't even notice their spin up time (aside from a half second delay after I throw the switch).
Getting quality light is all about buying the right color spectrum. Cheap bulb, cheap light. The SAME is true of incandescent, accepting that a cheap incandescent is a fraction of the price (up front cost), but can actually cost significantly more over an equivalent life (multiple replacements, plus energy costs).
LEDs still are not there yet (coming strong though). When LED can produce equivalent lumenns in acceptible color ranges for under $5 a bulb (maybe 5 years?) we'll see them starting to replace CF.
The mercury content in CF has also been not only dramatically reduced, but is actually not really a concern. It's not liquid mercury, it's a compund, and contamination is extreemely easy to remove with a simple vaccum. Also, placing them in landfill sis completely safe. There has NEVER been a single proven leak of mercury for any landfill. Though i agree they should be recylcled, same with all glass and all metal, and some plastics (and that's about it!) it's not a major issue.
I'm still working on replacing all my bulbs (there are over 90 in my current home, and another 16 outside, and I've only been there 6 months, give me time...), but I'm completely content buying good quality CFs. Actually, for 1 light, I'm completely happy using a pair of LED lights, even considering the cost, as it's 20 feet off the floor and in a bad spot for a ladder... I'll get to that one only after the current lights blow out...
i had about 40 CFs in my last home. The only sockets that did not have CFs were a few halogents outside, and a few rooms i used dimmers in (which there are now dimmable CFs...)
Push is between a server and an application, except the application is the iPhone notification service, which is allways running. Push (I'll use activesync as an example) does NOT require the server to be aware in any way of the device's availability. It is the DEVICE that maintains an open IP, ready to receive connections, and that's all it is, an IP... Push on the server sends a request to the phone, notification service identifies the incoming request and port and knows which app to hand it over to. A small piece of code from the dev that ties into the notification service, but which is NOT the whole app is then called, processes the request in part, and displays a notification alowing the user to load the app or ignore the request for later. This is a very simple technology... It does not require Apple's central server to have account data, only a central app ON THE DEVICE, which is secure. The app can be CALLED, but does not have to be running as long a SOME app is running, and that's called the notification service.
If yopu place your VPN connection on hold, the secure system on my end will terminate the connection in 15 seconds. Storage a password AT ALL on your device is forbidden, and changing your IP as you hop from tower to tower or wifi to wifi will break the connection and require re-dual authentication. This is a security protocol, and yes, they have workarounds, but they all violate security rules.
For data monitoring, as I said, with an unlimited data plan, the finance team doesn't care about "per app" then simply decide what porttion of the $30 to pay and pay the same fee monthly (mine pays 100% of the $30 and pays per minute for the rest)
There are free battery tools for the iPhone. The default app also backgrounds info about the battery for Apple's support staff (they have some nifty diagnostic stuff. When a LiPo is going bad, it's obvious... I don't need a complicated tool and graph to see it. As for "workloads" again, that reeall only matters to backgrounders, as the iPhone has a very predictable energy use pattern (screen off, screen on, using GPS, using 3D engine). The battery meter is also highly accurate, at least as far as that's actually possible, since if you understand a battery meter, you know it's only a software approxamation of use vs load, and not an actual measure of remaining power, which is impossible to calculate.
The iPhone can multitask, and does multitask. As it becomes a "requirement" to do so for the majority of people, Apple can easily introduce that later. Since it;s onl;y a "requirement" for about 1% of people today, and mostly only because they have bad habits or burned in expectations from other vendors, it;s not a priority for Apple. As you said yourself, there are other phones out there, and allweays will be, and Apple certainly does not expect 100% adoptation. Their STATED goal was 1% the first year...
Um, for remote access, tether you're phone... You'd have to do that anyway as you need to get the data from the phone to YOUR PC, as they're certainly not going to let you connect your phone to their machines if they won't let you connect yourt PC to their network, aven in a DMZ'd guest network (which my DISA and DOD secured network environment DOES allow, just not on wifi). You can be tethered over 3G and STILL TAKE CALLS, receive IMs, even run Safari and surf other pages on the web while tethering is running. i don't see how this is an issue. I've been a network and enterprise systems engineer for 15 years in secure government facilities... There's a workaround for everything (like being prepared for the job and not needing to download the ISO in the first place)
CURRENT GPS drivers on the iPhone run in the foreground. TomTom and Apple announced it DOES actually have a background API, and that TomTom's GPS will work even while on a call, or while running other apps, including continuing voice prompts even while on a call. That API will be made available to all vendors once TomTom's software is out (requires a
Oh no, Verizon doesn't force you to re-up for another 2 years when you pugrade your blackberry... You just have to saccrifice the subsidy ($300), which btw, AT&T also offers the same. Of course, once your contract is expired with Verizon, if you want to switch to a new plan or a lower promotion you still need to sign a new contract anyway. They all do the same thing.
1) some of my comments are for the other assholes, not you.
2) When one business does something unjust, we boycot. When all of them collude on pricing schemes and contracts to lock us in, and we have no alternatives, it's gone too far and the government needs to act (and they are, finally).
3) The only thing I can't do that you mentioned, using a free app, is play a streaming podcast. Apple has been working with the company behind Pandora to tie streaming support into the iPod app, and/or allow their app to background, as it is a highly requested feature, and clearly it;s hard to "accidentally" leave music playing without knowing about it... I can get email and SMS (and all other background) alerts, keep the tracking app in the foreground, and still take a call. Currently, while on a call, GPS would stop logging (TomTom will not, and once it's released, others will have access to the same GPS API). Currently I don't know of a GPS tracking app that provides augio clues to mileage, but I've only tried one of them as it's not hard core personal hobby of mine to ride that way (and the bike I have includes a speedo and distance tracker I paid $20 for, and is real time, so GPS is only useful for logging data to my PC later anyway, and tracking the ROUTES i ride).
4) The coworker in the cube next to me has an andriod, and I spent much time tinkering with it. I found it to be very much a 1.0 release, but with potential, much as I saw the original iPhone release and waited until they had an App store before diving to to purchase one. Though the android has a more multifeatures and milti-task driven OS, managing multiple apps was still a manual process, and many of it featuers (though many, including a couple of tricks the iPhone lacks currently) were at best novelties, or tweaks on other manufacturers designs. I found very little of it truly unique or groundbreaking, and disliked its ways of storing and calling up data. In a couple of revisions, and when the app store reaches critical mass, (and when there's another model, I HATE it's current design and it feels flimsy and cheap, and bulky) I'll look at it again. I am not married to the iPhone, but currently, as of today, I find it superior. When there's something better (In October/november I'll look again when the first phone i bought is off contract) I'll change.
5: MMS is pointless to me. Why pay extra so people can send me unsolicited photo and video messages that are difficult to sync and low in quality or ludicrously compressed. e-mail is free, unlimited, easy to manage and archive, available from miltiple sources PC Mac, and phone alike, and I can send images and videos up to 10MB (actually i send a 32MB video and the iPhone automatically broke it up into pieces and sent it in 4 parts.)
6) I was talking the Macs, not the phone. Allow? How does Apple "allow" Dell, HP, IBM, Acer, Sony to compete/not compete. They all sell hardware containing the same basic components. Apple adds to that bells and whistles the others skip in most of their line (firewire, bluetooth, backlit kbds, webcams, aliminum casing, massive battery life), and they do it at lower price points, and maintain 100% Linux and Windows compatibility as well. Apple doesn't allow the competition access to it's OS, sure, but if Apple's providing lower priced hardware with better specs to start with, do you really think OEMing OS X is going to change that?
I gave Apple a lot of heat with OS 1 and 2 on the iPhone. 3 is still not perfect and I look forward to 4.0. At least I know what's coming, and can hold a device in my hands I'm both not afraid to drop, and not afrail the vendors will drop..
Um, but a Pre, Storm, or ANY OTHER SUBSIDIZED DEVICE FROM ANY PHONE VENDOR, and you're fucked into a 2 year deal. Do NOT blame Apple for the failing of the US government to regulate such practices.
AT&T's plan actually happens to be quite good for me since damned near everyone in the family has an AT&T home phone line (yes i call LANDLINES free), and with unity, I can call them all for free, and in 19 months I have yet to go over 400 plan minutes, and average about 2500 a month in actualy call time. If I switched to Verizon or Sprint, I'd be in one of their $99+ plans easy. I use the $69 iPhone plan and am quite happy with it.
The 3G S battery issues are thus far fluff, with a few reported, unconfirmed cases, including my favorite "it was playing music under my pillow for hours straight." For fucks sake, place a device designed to release heat efficiently in a thermal insulated environment and yes, it's going to get hot... He's licky it uses LiPo, not LiIon, or it lokely would have exploded!
I have had the 3G S for about 10 days. one of them, in 102 degree SC heat i had it on my black dashboard for a 4 hour drive, screen on, running GPS and maps the whole time, and playing music through the headphone jack (FM tranceiver) at 100% volume output, and has connected using Bluetooth to my headset. When i got to my destination, all good and sweaty (AC not working good in car), the phone was simply warm, and was not uncomfortable in any way.
Yesterday I spent 2 hours in the yard, 97 degrees outside, with it in my pocket playing music. It never got hot.
If there is a battery issue, an extremely small sampling of it's 1 million + owners have said a word. Apple is investigating, but you can NOT blame Apple for a 3rd party battery issue, unless of course you also blamed Nokia, Motorolla, Sony, HP, and others for all of their (millions and millions) batteries they recalled in the last 5 years.
I did a lot of reseaarch. I went to all 4 vendors, looked at each of their PDA phones, and honestly, it came down to price and notjhing more. Over 2 years, including the data plan, the iPhone was hundreds cheaper. That was before including the cost of the apps I've bought, ringtones, and other expenses the iPhone did not require (stylus, screen protectors, sync software, etc)
Everyone bitches about backgrounding, but I can't find a use, other than some request from the hacker community, that would tempt me into wanting a background function.
The iPhone is also evolving, fast. They've added dozens of features free,and continue to anounce new and coming features, and are already working on OS 4.
Android is in it's infancy, and device selection is limited, the apps are hardly even present and are expensive, and short of a few gimics, overall it was a big dissapopintment. The Pre's OS is a joke. Even more complicated than navigating the RIM's OS, and again, NO APPS AT ALL, not even a hint of an SDK. WinMobile might make a splash with WinMo 7, but i need a phone now, not in late 2010...
I'm not an apple fan. I have a mac only because I have been exposed to it by customers, and honestly, nothing beats using it for photo and video management, and for the price, it's more PC than I can get from Dell or anyone else. (Spec for Spec, the Pro line is CHEAPER than the competition!) I have an iPhone (now 2) because it is a cheaper device with a more predictable future and cheap apps. using AT&T is actually a benefit for me since my minute plan is the lowest available.
GPS, yet, there may be issues with multiple apps using GPS concurrently in the background. Can any other phone go this (several apps using GPS at the same time? I'm thinking no currently... If that's a neat feature to have, i'd try to get TomTom themselves to integrate it, since their own app can run in the background. it would be easy enough to have your to-do app leave a file descriptor in a location TomTom can access, and notify you through that interface of the proximity. This would also reduce the load on the device since each app no longer needs it's own map system (as GPS use with Goole Maps is strictly limited to an app poping the map with a pin, which is useless for your type of application use of GPS).
For IM, yea, all the mulit-app IM clients do this, they do that on the PCs too... If they can all receive push notices, why not simply just use them all seperately? You don;t do that on your PC as running 4 IM apps concurrently is a resource hog, so the multi-app acts as a central booking agent, but you still need accounts with each service to chat with folks on each service, and since they do NOT have to concurrently run to get notifications, and since they can share a central address book and friends lists anyway, why use a unified app? Habbit? Using 3 or 4 seperate apps means not having to share data with a 3rd party. Apple does not "hold your account open" they simply hold you IP open, and the iPhone aware central servers know how to show you're free busy status without maintaining real time connectivity. Short of holding your IP open, and providing an OS interface for the central dispatch of incoming port requests to the appropriate app, they're not any part of your communication, and you;re not sharing user/password info with a 3rd party.
This was a well thought through system. It's not perfect, and there are a few tiny uses that backgrounding might be able to work through for a less than 1% user base, but are you really going to force an OS change on the entire user base, lower battery life, and complicate the UI, just so that 30,000 users can benefit from an app they could just as easily find a workaround for?
The 3rd party mail client does NOT need to be running, that's the whole point of the iPhone's Push feature. Their servers no nothing other than an app on your device is requesting incoming traffic on a specific port to your device produce a pop-up notification. The app dev codes data into a file on the iPhone that captures some of the incoming data so you can be presented with more than a simple beep. You are not handing over your account credientials. (not for any app I've tried using push yet anyway, and if it;s required by some, I'd say it's bad code on the dev's end, not apple's.
"smart" VPN? You mean saving the password in the device to allow reconnect? This is why symbian is not a DOD approved OS for mobile access. By STIG, you have to manually re-key the password at each connection attempt (many sites require dual authenication).
The iPhone does monitor data use, and can easily be reset monthly. Currently most iPhone vendors offer unlimited use, so it's a non issue. For $30 a month, my finance group just pays the data charge, it's only the minutes they care about auditing. Both are also detailed via AT&T's web site, and can be viewed at any time, background app or not.
Behavioral monitoring? Even my wife, a puter noob, figured out in a few hours that playing 3D games drained the battery in about 5 hours, and she's fugured out that when the bar is half empty she can still talk for about 2 hours, when she gets the 20% warning, she knows to charge soon use use it sparingly (or plug in the battery powered recharger in her purse). I don;t need a friggin graph of how and when i used the battery, my memory is still good enough that I know what drans fast. Since I don't have backgrounding, i don't get bitten by "opps, I left that running" problems which are what are the root of behavioral monitoring apps...
I'm not saying noone wants it, I'm saying far less than 1% have requested it, and the 99% that are left don;t want to HAVE to deal with the complications of backgrounding. It;s simple, leave it be, if you want to hack your phone, you are not a target custoemr for the device, and Apple's OK with that.
Push, again, you do not understand the single IP hosted push notification system. the app DOES NOT NEED TO RUN, it simply needs a config file that sais 1) keep IP open, aka presence/activesync, which already is if you have push e-mail or calendar active, and 2) when traffic incoming on the IP is on a certain port, issue a prompt for the following application. That's it. Apple does not host a server FOR your app, doing a redirect, they simply hold open your IP and allow traffic to come to your device. The single server backgrounder just tells the incoming requests what app they're posting an alert to...
Auto e-mail responder need not even be on the phone, should be on the e-mail server... You'll get the push notice when you're in range, if you didn't get it immediately.
BitTorrent? You don't have a file system. Torrent it to your home PC and play the files over Orb or some other streaming media server/client. No need for you to waste battery downloading files you;re going to move to your PC anyway. VNC into it, get the downloads started, and then log out...
Location adjusters, i like that idea, but again, GPS DOES BACKGROUND on the iPhone, there just are no apps that support it yet... lets see what comes out in 3.1.
Again, the iPhone DOES multitask, just only for very specific apps and reasons. Everything else works fine over the notification engine. I've dealt with Palm, WinMo, and Symbian devices with multitasking. in the end, short of a very select percentage of power users, most people multitask only because they can't be bothered to remember to kill the app, and it gets left running.
Once GPS and safari backgrounding come available (3.1, 3.2) there won't be a thing I can't do with the device you;ve requested that anyone other than devs or hackers (likely less than 0.1%) would care for, and in exchange the other 99% of people would be left with a more complex interface and less battery life. Thanks.
Soft raid? If you looked at the performance impact of that, not to mention the very poor reliability, you'd stop...
Certainly, if your data set is large (lots of video) but of low value (redownload/rip again and your time is of low value itself) then certainly, it might make sense, but still considder that a second hard disk, externally, and rsync run via cron a few times a day, with history enabled, is a better solution and less impact on your I/O.