I bow before this argument in shame and promise to never repeat my earlier assertion.

Now you start talking!
We used to have a close to 40-year-old dish washer ('Constructa'), that still worked perfectly okay. Maybe some don't know the social pressure that Germans can exert? Almost no visitor failed to point out our 'serious shortcoming', our mistake, to 'waste water and energy' like there was no tomorrow. Call it group-think. I measured the consumption, and found that it consumed around 30 liters of water, and 1,7 kWh. Yep, that 's close to 50 cent here. A new, branded, modern, A+++ that we bought cost us a good € 500. With a consumption of close to 25 cent, this gives us a ROI after some 2000+ rounds of dish-washing. And we use it once per week, so it will balance out the investment in another 40 or 50 years. ;-)
Plus, I take bets of considerable amounts that the new one is not going to last that long. Additionally, the cleaning results of the new one are very good, and yet below those of the 40-year-old machine.

No, we haven't given in to the silly social pressure. We have totally voluntarily passed the old one on to our son, who's starting a household.

Of course, but the latter implies an arbitrary effect introduced by the manufacturer to bring down the lifespan. The 1000 h, however, as GP pointed out so insightful, is already - aside from being a cartel - some technical optimum of efficiency versus lifetime. Because reducing the temperature quickly increases the lifespan; while increasing the optical efficiency quickly brings down lifespan. And the temperature is required to produce visible light. Don't forget that red is at the very edge of light being visible to humans. And the 2000K+ is needed to produce that light.

Agree totally, This would be great; plus an instrument to measure its lumen/W at any moment, to prove that the brightness is still above 70%.

Hey, you got your 5 Insightful; now deserve it and share you list of 'good' and 'bad', because I tend to suffer from the same crap LEDs that become dim after less than 1000 hours; and we all want to know!

Lucky you!!

We took over an old house, large house, with likewise well above 50 traditional lightbulbs. I have invested close to €1000 for almost strict replacement of all bulbs. The electricity bill is down to little less than half (good!), the failure rate is very low, but, and this is a huge but, the promised 25000+ hours are fiction. Some have clearly reduced the amount of lumen / lux to between 1/8 and 1/5 of the original brightness. I have recently returned a batch of 8 (I tried a number of brands) to GP, where I fortunately had 2 in the original wrapping, that I took out only to replace 2 bulbs that had gone down to no more than a bright candle; but since it was over time, I hadn't really noticed. Only then did I. And then I collected all 8 from the house, and they all had lost measurably, quite linear with the hours of use. Now comes the serious disappointment: with hours of use between 50 and 800. After 800: about 1/8, measured in the same socket. And, as mentioned, the others had gone down proportionally.

Therefore my suggestion: If you come from CFLs, I agree from own experience, the 'long-lasting' isn't always as lasting as long as promised. Once you enter LED-country, I agree with mother that LEDs tend to not fail. But they tend to be lose brightness much faster than the manufacturers promise. Most LEDs here are much less bad than the GPs mentioned further up, though observed closely, the person eventually living in our house once we are dead, will take over a fscking dark place, lit by some 70 'candles'.

... and you have, alas, already disqualified your remarks, irrespective how good the rest might have been. Because DC is the preferred transport over large distances. Its only downside is that conventional transformers constitute an insurmountable obstacle.

The first, compatibility, is still correct; and will never go away for technical reasons not to be discussed here.
The second, 'higher-ups' are the usual bore. They tend to feel threatened when a. they'd have to confess to a lack of ability, publicly, b. consider themselves to be too important to relearn a little bit. (My boss already yells when the attachment to a mail opened with Outlook fails to pop up on the correct one of his two monitors.)
Third, you missed this one, the last straw is always the fact, that these people can't install their own software any longer. They bring their IrfanView.exe from home, and it doesn't do at all what they think it should do.

I guess, this is has made the sound of 'whoosh' over the mods' heads!
Because, if it was serious, you'd be a fool. Or someone who made some make, make install, etc. many years ago.

Update is much easier, and including all applications, contrary to MS Windows.
You don't have to restart and wait for 1,2,3,...% before you can actually use your system again.
You get all the updates in a single go (especially fresh Windows installs sometime take hours, and 3-4 reboots and reissues of the commands, until no further updates are popping up.

"we Linux folks"? Who?
My experiences are different. usually I'm told 'how nice!', but what's missing is MS Office. 'Missing', of course. sorry. And when one was told by her publisher, that it 'would have to be' TeamViewer (because that's what the publisher knows), it was the - I agree - usual problem.
But I hate to see you calling it 'Desktop experience'!

Reminds me of the old and flogged into a dead state, horse; the old 'Tin Lizzy'. Imagine someone had offered to spraypaint her into a livid green! Everyone would be complaining until today, that 'A Tin Lizzy has to come in any colour, as long as it is black'.

MS Office must be sooo much better than OO/LO (my last 15 years prove it is not), and Teamviewer must be soo much better than, e.g. ssh/sftp (my last 15 years prove it is not). But, I concede, both are what Dick, Tom and Harry have as idea in their simpleton minds, when the topics 'Office Suite' or 'remote access' pop up.

Second this! - When I started in academia, 1980, there were exactly 2 journals in our/my field worth reading. And, yes, they were worth reading; because the articles contained would often summarize the work of complete teams, mostly achieved over years of work. And nobody would be admonished for 'insufficient' publications. On the other hand, had someone at the age of 35 in those days told us, that she'd been 'doing some 135 peer-reviewed journal articles', we would have her failed the job interview. We would have said "that's the least we're interested in".
Few years ago, someone popping up in the interview and saying exactly that was set on a tenure-track professorship.
And today, there are around 70 journals in our/my field. And most articles are lousy enough to wipe one's dirty shoes. But i don't blame the authors. I blame the science community overall not to rebuke the bean counters, the MBAs, the admin people, when those became jealous, and insecure, having to somehow evaluate the 'return' of our work. We ought to have offered them a cold shower instead by pointing out that our work usually does not come in tangible returns. But in intellectual returns; something in the realms that those people were lacking in.

I agree mostly, by the way, to what you say.

Alas, how to distinguish? Wasn't - and isn't still? - Quantum Theory esoteric? I guess, for the general public, for the layperson, it is usually considered as such. Is it for science? I'm sure you'll agree that it is not. Archaeology? Sumerian clay pots? No, I'm no archaeologist. Though I would always raise my hand for the usefulness of continuing unearthing the relics of former, ancient, civilizations. Einstein, anyone?
Or, maybe closer to /., von Neumann. What has he contributed? Years of teaching quantum science in the golden days of Berlin, before the Nazis came in, doing some math, doing some work in cryptography, in computer science. He wouldn't have made it, probably, in the pale copy that science has become in our days. Wittgenstein, he's even worse. In so-called modern terms, at least. One basic book, few articles. He'd be on the dole!

Though we might agree here, I am afraid, we might not on its interpretation. What is 'return'? Something with an equivalent value in US$? Regular publications? Books? In a post-materialist society one tends to overlook non-tangible returns. In my current position, I have no teaching allocation, any yet I volunteer and enjoy it some hours per week, since it is possible within my duties for the relatively generous salary that the tax payer affords for me. Which is, by the way, surely more valuable in my case than forcing me to publish yet another article of no scientific relevance based on currently meager results.
Meaning, that I'm doing the best that I can, returning the most that I can, without necessarily tangible returns. And when I have material to publish, I'll do so. Which brings us back to trust. The public is entitled to 'something in return', but in order to get results that are beyond staple diet, the public must trust us, that we don't pilfer away their money in jewelry, furniture, nor in efforts to prove creationism.
I am afraid, there is more money available for the latter than for the analysis of dying spoken languages, by the way.

Dear-o-dear-o-dear ...
Billions. Billions.
Not millions, no, not millions. And 4000-6000 years are right out of question.

This may sound strange, but it is a lack of trust.
In the old days, which were not always good, a brilliant scientist/academician/professor would be granted tax payers' monies to pursue her dreams in science, at least as far as basic funding was concerned; that is not including expensive apparatuses.
But then we, in the academic world, allowed the bean counters to take over. And they started to ask for ROI, at least in the number of patents, marketability, etc. Additionally, short funding terms made it into our world. 2 years, 3 years. Where I work, the latter is already the exemption. Therefore, as written by Lefkowitz, yes, we have to have results before we can ask for funding. Not only because the sponsors want to be on the safe side (of getting a return), but also not to embarrass ourselves by not being able to come up with what was envisaged. In the place were I used to be, the latter would give you a blacklisting.

Or, the other way round, if the public is not willing to trust us, but wants us to produce off-the-shelf academic results (numbers of publications included; publications that might take away from our genuine research time), that's what the public gets.

I only wished that the public was cognizant of this interdependence.
 

No astroturfing, please! ;-)

For me the free wine is doing just fine. sudo apt-get install wine; that is. For MS Office 2007, at least. And who needs newer?