Removable battery - another reason why it's a good thing.

[WizardStan]

That hasn't stopped manufacturers first coming up with CFL bulbs and now LED bulbs

I remember back around the mid-late 80s, my parents bought a fluorescent tube bulb. It wasn't as small as the CFLs, and it didn't screw in by itself, it needed a special adapter, but it worked, and apparently saved a lot of money. Eventually it stopped working so well: you'd flip the switch, it would flicker for a few seconds before coming on. This was very annoying when you wanted to come into a room, so it was moved to the basement. As time went on and houses were moved, it started behaving even worse, taking up to 10 seconds before coming on, and sometimes still being very dim.
It's now been 30 years, and that fluorescent bulb is still flickering away in my parents cold cellar. It has probably wracked up close to 40'000 hours of use and I will seriously be a little sad when it finally flickers its last flicker.

 

[Letalis Sonus]

If this continues, we'll be passing our light bulbs down to our children.

Don't worry, the industry will always find a new point of failure. They already switched over to fewer but more powerful LEDs that require a switching power supply - it's easy to design them in an extremely fragile way. I used to have LED bulbs that consisted of a cluster formed by over 70 common white LEDs - one doesn't have to be an engineer to realize that those were directly connected with a simple rectifier, an extremely robust design.

 

[levi]

Yeah, I don't think the first CFL my parents bought (which wasn't exactly compact, being enclosed in a heavy smoked glass of about half a litre, but it did plug directly into the socket at least) ever completely stopped firing, just got so slow that it just got left behind on one move I think. Modern CFLs are built to a price and to a volume, so there's usually something to fail just after the warranty perioud expires. I remember seeing a video of someone comparing an old CFL bulb with a new one, but my youtube-fu fails me now. It's probably cheap capacitors that knock them out in the end.

 

[ible]

i could have made a "headphone jack, another reason why it's a good decision" thread, but decided to post here:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/end-headphone-jacks-rise-drm

 

[Grench]

i could have made a "headphone jack, another reason why it's a good decision" thread, but decided to post here:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/end-headphone-jacks-rise-drm

And here I thought it was bad back when Apple decided to re-wire the 'standard' headphone/headset jack.

 

[Klumpen]

i could have made a "headphone jack, another reason why it's a good decision" thread, but decided to post here:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/end-headphone-jacks-rise-drm

"Apple acting against customer freedom" what else is new?
I thought that's the whole point in buying from Apple. oO

 

[Yoyobuae]

i could have made a "headphone jack, another reason why it's a good decision" thread, but decided to post here:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/end-headphone-jacks-rise-drm

You know what's really silly: Things like this might instead make DRM-free alternatives more attractive.

Offer me high quality DRM-free audio files of music I like and I'll gladly buy. But if there's no option to download it DRM-free then I'll just rip it if possible, or never listen to it. Thankfully ripping audio from streaming websites is rather trivial to do.

 

[rygD]

But then you miss out on all the album artwork and notes and stuff.

 

[levi]

The vast, vast majority of the CDs I've ever bought are stored in the folk's loft, so the only access I have to them is as the tracks I've ripped from them. If I want to look at the front or back cover, I'm best off googling it, but in practice I rarely do.

These days I buy everything I can in DRM-free CD-quality formats, if I can, and if I can't then I might buy the CD.

 

[rygD]

That seems to be what most people do. I still like looking at the artwork and reading everything. That has always been a part of the experience of getting a new album for me (I remember how one photograph that was intended to be included in the artwork was not allowed since it was taken by the parents of the vocalist as a child, and he had no clothes on). Some also do creative things with the CDs, beyond just the artwork they print on them.

 

[levi]

I'd have though most people buy their music in lossy DRMified formats like itunes or amazon music, given the share price of those companies, or just stream it using one of various legal services, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't seem to be able to buy DRM free CD quality copies of tracks from before about 1990, but thankfully sites like bleep.com are happy to sell me the back catalogue of certain artists who popped up around then.

 

[directive0]

But... itunes IS DRM free. It works on my pandora.

 

[rygD]

I meant skipping the CDs and downloading it instead.

 

[FlapJack]

Welcome to the World's oldest, continuously lit light bulb, right here in California (115 years old).

http://www.centennialbulb.org/photos.htm

 

[ible]

continuously lit except for 9 3/4 hours in 2013? doesn't count.

 

[Yoyobuae]

But... itunes IS DRM free. It works on my pandora.

Where's the PND for iTunes then?

 

[directive0]

Where's the PND for iTunes then?

Lol got me. I just use deadbeef!

 

[Silent-Hunter]

continuously lit except for 9 3/4 hours in 2013? doesn't count.

I'm pretty sure Guinness ruled that power outages didn't count against the record, as long as they didn't break the bulb.

 

[levi]

Lol got me. I just use deadbeef!

Ah, I didn't realise you could play iTunes files using open source codecs. What are they, aac files?

There's still the issue of apple 'curating' the files you store in itunes for you, but provided you can pull the files out and still use them that can be mitigated I guess.

 

[ible]

that's why you need backup power supplies for these sorts of things... didn't they know that in advance?