The situation surrounding LED light bulbs in the United States is very interesting.

Are there no warranties? In Japan, most LED bulbs now come with a five-year warranty, ranging from major manufacturers like Panasonic to lesser-known brands that clearly do not have their own factories and that people have probably never heard of.

I see some 18W lamps say SOX, some 18W lamps say SOX-E. Not that it really matters, because there is only one lamp of those dimensions and it's corresponding ballast, but I would like to know. To be clear I am not referring to the rarer 18W SOXD-E, just the run-of-the-mill 18W LPS lamp.

I know that SOX-E lamps have generally thinner discharge tubes and thicker ITO coating, but obviously that would have to be the case anyway for a lamp this small to be practical. Does anyone know it's official name?

Edit: also same question for the far rarer 10W SOX lamp

There is a reason why almost nobody self host an email server these days and it's that while it's relatively easy to set up it's pain in the a to maintain. Not only the handling and upkeeping of spam filterings and blacklist a random mail server tends to get black listed with the big players like google and microsoft which are biggest players on the email services these days. Internet used to be full of small and even free email services long time ago but one by one the number seems to go down.

What comes to Discord, I don't think we are going to see any mass migration to anywhere. Todays people put conveniency above privacy.

Cooper seems to have finally discontinued the led ovf and ovh! IMHO they were ugly as sin and I most definitely won't miss them. Hopefully the navion is next.

This is a bad thing. This means that there is less fixture shells we could retool into HID lights. Not that it matters immediately but in 20-30 years this will likely be an issue.

Back on Monday I got a 175w MV shoebox light that I'm currently in the process of repainting and restoring, the place I got it from has a parking lot full of them and the guys working on changing them out gave me one (and seemed to be willing to give me more  )
I might go back and see if I can get some of the floodlights that's there as well along with another one (or 2) of the shoebox lights cause why not 
(I've done a lot of lighting related things recently, just haven't had the time to post about any of it)

Worth checking if they have some in stock in a warehouse, that's one reason why a product no longer made may still be listed

Thanks! Can you tell the date from any of the inscriptions?

This is what can happen at anytime with any centralised platform. A platform that provides its own protocol and closed list of servers which provide the service

This includes Signal too, which has a closed list of servers and they are hosted in AWS (Amazon) and Azure (Microsoft), two companies who do a whole lot to reduce everyone's information security and freedom. (Amazon always, Microsoft sometimes)



Have a look at how plain old email works

There are multiple independent servers providing the same standard service. For you to communicate with me, you don't require me to register to the same server you are in

Each of us is on a serve we chose which meets our personal terms. The servers as standard can find and communicate with each other - The email address itself contains all the needed information



Your email service provider started bothering you with age verification or you are dissatisfied in general ?

Open a new email account somewhere else, drop a message to your whole contact list to update them of the change, and go on with life

You are not asking anyone to change their service providers to suit your change, which is one of the main mechanisms of lock in in any "closed" communication service



Can't find what you want ?

Set up your own server, with as little as hosting and a domain name

Virtual hosting "in the cloud" is subject to dependence on somebody else's servers, but as long as you control the system running inside your virtual space, you set the rules in the service you host, and can implement encryption to your liking. Security may not be perfect on the remote machine, but nobody will openly mess with your encryption to implement age verification

Physical hosting can be done with as little as any old PC or Raspberry Pi at home (for the volume of email you are expected to send and receive personally). Secure it to your liking

Domain you'll have to register and upkeep, nad for anything relible it'll cost (not that much), but there again you get to choose one of thousands of domain name registrars which all provide the same service



XMPP (Jabber) implements the same concept for classic instant messaging

Choose your server, choose your software to connect to it, and keep it open in the background to receive incoming chats



What makes this difference is that this entire infrastructure was designed and set by wide consortium of people aiming to make the internet free and open for all

Vs. whoever owns Discord applying their private rules to a service they privately own, and have all rights to do so, and you have a right to not use it

What bothers me is the ever growing expectation that you do "have" a specific service. Whatsapp and the covid-era video chat apps are by far the biggest offenders here

I see a growing amount of times people who send things to me needing a confirmation that i indeed dont have Whatsapp or asking me to join into it, businesses who decline customer service because it is only available through Whatsapp (or is stated to be available also by phone, but nobody answers it), etc

I'm not a lawyer, but i do think this might possibly be illegal if it can be proven that you cannot get service A (education, customer service, ....) without agreeing to unrelated, unexpected and unreasonable terms of service B (Software EULA). However, i repetedly see it thrown out of the window

I wondered about the colour options as well, would be interesting to see one in the wild. IIRC Wide-Lite also had a F-Series with a shutter for applications required instant on/off.

I believe Signify discontinued all their non LED luminaires sometime around the 2022-2024 time period, which makes sense the plant shut down around then.

I think it is definitely possible to make, see all these modern SHP mercurys, but why do one needs such a lamp? Purpose?

MH chemistry works better, and anyway square/cube law works against smallish lamps.

By the way, my 50W Osrams do not have any heat sparing coatings on the arctube, just a hard vacuum outer bulb.