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The reason is of course "saving energy"...

It's my personal "wow"-effect: they try to regulate such unimportant bull**** within 1-2 years, but are not able to regulate the banking system since 2008!?

http://www.nordichardware.com/news/71-graphics/46718-eu-cripples-future-graphics-cards-exclusive-.html

I'm a conspirator but this time I don't think you to be right.
They should ban fpga too, and here they already banned incandescent lamps.

We can't buy them anymore.

It's like shooting yourself in the foot but we Europeans got used to it.

I hope that by here you don't mean the EU but your country only. Because I can still buy incandescent lamps where I live...
But I would actually support a complete ban on them. :)

Well, partially. Only some of them, but its a process that will conclude soon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_light_bulbs#section_1

He probably meant only those above a certain wattage. In my country it is only legal to import/produce/sell those drawing no more than 40W.
But fortunately there is a way around that - light bulbs exceeding 40W (up to and over 100W which cost 30-40 cents) are sold with a label ''not for home use'' (so ''used for heating'' or ''shock-resistant'') and it is not a problem to buy it.

Why would you support a complete ban on them? If people want to buy them, what's wrong with that?

Another way to look at this is that they did not "cripple future graphics cards" but crippled lazy or incompetent engineers and scientists. Competent and hard working folks will come up with ways to do more by using less energy.

It's a complete waste of energy. Better technology already exists, no reason to continue using them.

They still have their place, at least until the cost of competing technology comes down. For instance, CFL's don't work worth a damn at -40C, and I'm not spending $30 for an LED bulb for my porch light.

Keen on deciding about others? This is bitcointalk, not some leftist forum lol

The alternative technology isn't there yet. That's why they have to ban them. By the time the alternative technologies are good enough, they would have been adopted anyway.

True.

And let's not forget that the incandescent bulb light is the most natural one that we can archive artificially.

How do you figure?

I don't know how he figures it, but most people complaint about fluorescent or white light bulbs saying they can't stand them, gives them headaches and so on.

Here's what I have been observing also:

1) CFLs are more expensive to manufacture than incandescents

2) CFLs are therefore considerable more expensive to buy than incandescents.

3) There is therefore a strong downward pressure on price for CFLs

4) Chinese knock out cheap, low quality CFLs

5) Cheap, low quality CFLs fail early, meaning that their claimed cost savings are not reached and their energy and resource TCO suck donkey parts compared to incandescents.

6) Statism does the fail thing once more.

7) Statism apologists scramble to make rationalizations. Cue:

This post makes no sense.

yes. Try to take a picture of a fluorescent bulb with your camera, you will notice that half of it is "off" even if you say it at full brightness trough your eye. The incandescent bulbs are constantly on, emitting the same radiation during the time, while these do not. They are shut down and up very fast.

Oops. Fixed now. Any better?

That might be true for fluorescents, but it's not true of all technologies. A standard incandescent is limited by the fact that no filament material is capable of the ~5800K temperature needed to give the same black body spectrum as the sun. There's a lot more promise of getting a close to white light spectrum with something light LED lights than there is with incandescents.

1) true, i was just justifying the guys that have headaches due to that.
2) sure, i know how they work :)
3) ok, so? what's the radiation of the sun? that's the one we should copy, not set a arbitrary standard and try to achieve that.

You said that incandescent bulb light was the most natural that we can achieve artificially. I'm disagreeing with you, I think we will be able to get closer to the natural solar spectrum with technologies other than incandescent bulbs. It has nothing to do with setting standards.

I may be wrong, i based that statement on an article i readed long ago. As of now, i think that statement to still hold.
Eventually, we will find a better alternative.

Actually, LEDs are quite tricky. A bog standard LED works by an electron moving from one well definied energy state to another, emitting light at a fixed frequency. LEDs are, by default, monochromatic. Producing one that fools the eye into thinking it is white is fairly non-trivial (though obviously accomplished). Getting one that would produce black-body type radiation (at least in the visible range) is more work still.

With that said, I do believe LED or some as-yet-undiscovered technology is the future and that CFLs will be a historical curiosity in time.

Most standard white LEDs use a blue light and a phosphor to simulate white light, though most have a large dip around 500nm and an overabundance of blue. That's just an engineering problem though, and there's no reason a proper color balance can't be implemented through the use of new phosphor or supplementing the gap with smaller targeted dies in an array. A warm white LED with reinforcement around 500nm would actually be pretty close, and much better than even the hottest incandescent.

You know how difficult it was to even get a blue light? the guy won a Nobel prize for getting a blue light on LED. It was widely accepted as impossible, until the guy did it.

Though to be honest, I don't know if we really want to simulate the sun's radiation with artificial light. In a few niche applications maybe but I think cooler light is probably friendlier for most uses, (possibly because it mimics the spectrum of fires?)

Got a source on that? Shuji Nakamura didn't win a Nobel Prize unless I've missed something lately. Also, don't get so defensive. I never said it was necessary to produce a single die with a white spectrum. You can use multiple different dies with different spectrums on one module to tune the color balance you want.

Redder light is generally referred to as warmer, while bluer light is considered cooler. It's kind of backwards.

It took me a while to mentally reverse the frequency order of visible light. After all, infra-red is beyond red and it's hot so therefore more energy and higher frequency, right? Absolutely not :)

When I first heard it this morning in UK on The Inquirer news site,I thought,holy s*** the EU decides it wants to regulate the very components I want to use inside my PC now.Talk about getting into my personal business.What business is it how powerful my PC is to someone other than me (the regulators). If anything,people like me will simply hasten up their plans to migrate to a country outside EU to escape these ridiculous regs.They banned traditional lightbulbs (non-CFL/LED),then they restrict certain supplements and now they're trying to regulate how powerful my GPU is.I mean come on.Whats next? I'm just happy I started to realise (better late than never) how useful freedom can be (esp in Uk where we're all convinced that the more regs,the better.I mean sure we need some regs but not so damn many lol)

Even though I find all this downright bizzare,we can find ways around it,question is will they start checking everything we import into EU too?

The unregulated high-tech computer industry has been amazingly successful. Just imagine how much better things will be now we have the helping hand of government to guide us.

Just remember that stupid regulations are always for some good cause. Proof of the day:
Al Gore’s hundred million dollars
http://www.cfact.org/2012/10/16/al-gores-hundred-million-dollars/ (http://www.cfact.org/2012/10/16/al-gores-hundred-million-dollars/)

For the vast majority of uses you are correct.  I am still not for a total ban.  There are some outlier uses where the incandescent bulb is the best choice.   It is a shame that people will purchase them because of impressions of early or cheap CFL's that are no longer true.  An education campaign would be a better idea then a ban. 

Someone earlier said that CFL's don't work well in the extreme cold.  That is sort of true, but almost all of the quality ones will start in -40.  They can take 5-10 mins to warm up to full brightness in extreme cold.  If you only intermittently use the bulb then go incandescent but that is an extreme outlier use.  Even in that use, if you had the CFL bulb on 24/7 it would use less power then an incandescent on 1/3 of the time and the CFL would be at full brightness as it was always on. 

I find it interesting that nobody has mentioned the toxicity of CFL bulbs, especially when compared to standard incandescent. Who'd have thunk that much mercury would be "green"?

How much mercury is there in a CFL?  Once you answer this question, put that answer in the context of other sources of mercury around you. Coal plants and fish, for example. Correct for the toxicity factor of organomercury vs. elemental mercury. Come back to us.

I do not recommend eating CFL's.  That is enough information for 99% of the population.  

Everyone is missing the most ridiculous part of the article:  The EU wants to cap MEMORY BANDWIDTH, not just power consumption.

I wonder how many people have died because of the invention of the blue LED.

Those things are the worst thing to ever happen to the ergonomics of consumer electronics. Once they were commercially available manufacturers started putting them everywhere and devices inevitably get brought into bedrooms the result is subtle, but real, disruption in sleep which has a non-trivial effect on health.

I think Snopes (as usual) does a fine job of examining the dangers (and relative lack thereof) of CFL bulbs: http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp

Bottom line, they need special disposal procedures, unlike incandescent bulbs.


4-5 milligrams. How much is in an incandescent bulb?

Yes, it's less than living next to a coal plant. Yes, the risk factor of having a CFL bulb is minimal. I have two burning in my bedroom right now, and 5 more in the living room. I'm just suggesting that maybe power consumption isn't the only factor we should be looking at to determine the "green-ness" of a bulb.

I usually agree with snopes but they have let their lawyers alter their good judgement on this one.  They are still making people fear a broken CFL.  A broken CFL has less mercury then a TUNA SANDWICH.  If you break one, clean it up manually not with a vacuum. Open the windows if you can, but do not fear....  If you ate 100% of the mercury in the bulb it is less then that sandwich. 

I was speaking more to this point:


But, yes, the rather involved clean-up procedures are a bit much.

No, they don't.  In fact they EXEMPT cards with high memory bandwidths from this recommendation if they are in a high end system.  

"1.1.3. Category D desktop computers and integrated desktop
computers meeting all of the following technical parameters are
exempt from the requirements specified in points 1.1.1 and
1.1.2:
(a) a minimum of six physical cores in the central processing
unit (CPU); and
(b) discrete GPU(s) providing total frame buffer bandwidths
above 320 GB/s; and
(c) a minimum 16GB of system memory; and
(d) a PSU with a rated output power of at least 1000 W. "

The whole idea of allowing politicians to determine computer specs is just ridiculous on a monumental level.

Curse my decision to go quad core.

Wait, I don't live in the EU. Hopefully we'll dump O-bum-a and be free of such nonsense for another four years at least.


Edit: They do realise that this means that anyone who wants a decent GPU will now go with a power hungry, resource eating monster of a machine, right?

Correct.  Computers change too fast and politicians change too slowly.  Also politicians are not computer experts.  (well actually they are not experts in anything as far as I can tell)

But again, the title of the orginal article is FUD. 

/thread

Wrong.

Go read the proposed regulations (http://www.eup-network.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Computers-Draft-Regulation-subject-to-ISC.PDF).  It's about sleep/idle power draw, power supply efficiency and power factor.

It says nothing about how much the system can draw when it's in active use.

perverse incentives created by the state result in sub optimal behavior of the market.

To be fair, I had a brain fart and typed incandescent when I meant CFLs and ended up making my argument about incandescents vs incandescents.  :-\

Actually the reason for the low quality incandescent bulbs is lower demand, less research into them and everyone knowing there is not much future there.  They are a niche market.  There will be junk ones and good high end ones as well. 

So far incandescents have not been taxed and here the POWER COMPANY is subsidizing CFL's so they can avoid building an expensive power plant.  I got 4 CFL's for $1.99 last week.