Off seems to be standby on my TV. Whenever it's off, there's a little red light on the set that says standby. Isn't the only way to stop wasting of that little bit of energy to unplug it entirely? Which is a huge pain in the ass depending on where the plugs are.

Even my new TVs don't have standby.

I'm with Sue. If I can turn it on with a remote, it's on standby, isn't it? Some juice is powering the IR receiver.

I didn't realize it had taken hold in the consumer marketplace. I have never shopped for a new tv seriously, so I haven't noticed.

When I think of "Standby" I think of electronics like cameras and such that can be switched to a "Hot and waiting" mode that powers down the CRT or LCD.

In the old days, TVs had tubes that could be kept warm with an "instant on" feature in up through the 70s. I figured that sort of thing was moot after all-ic tvs came around.

What it looks like they need is a spec for "Standby" that says it can only consume enough energy to keep memory from erasing...or mandate Static Ram, I guess...

they need is a spec for "Standby" that says it can only consume enough energy to keep memory from erasing

Don't forget clocks. And the loss of ability to turn things on with a remote will be annoying.

And the loss of ability to turn things on with a remote will be annoying.

Perhaps that can be kept to a minimum of energy consumption. A device powering up from almost-dead instead of mostly alive would save power, but still provide utility. The response might be a split second slower.

My assumption would be that they are only using as much power to be able to come on and run timers/clocks. But who knows what convenience engineering mandated.

question/poll:

how many playlists do you have on your ipod (and/or itunes)

I'd be able to answer that if iTunes hadn't hosed my entire library last night. Grrrrrrr.

32. Maybe half of those are smart.

15, 7 smart

Intel Dual Core Macs only about 20% faster than the old ones:

Macworld Lab’s tests do show that the new Intel-based iMac is faster than the iMac G5 when running native applications. However, we found that those improvements are generally much less than what Apple claims is a 2x improvement in speed.

Instead, our tests found the new 2.0GHz Core Duo iMac takes rougly 10 to 25 percent less time than the G5 iMac to perform the same native application tasks, albeit with some notable exceptions. (If you'd prefer, that makes the Core Duo iMac 1.1 to 1.3 times as fast.) And we also found that applications that aren’t yet Intel-native—which must run using Apple’s Rosetta code-translation technology—tend to run half as fast as the same applications running natively on the iMac G5.