I am at the point now to where I am happy to see HPS being phased out.  To me the Orange light is not very useful.  I would have rather they kept things MV but when HPS is replaced with 3000-4000K LED, it looks great. 

Smashed up several hundred used and EoL 3000K & 4100k T8s in the dumpster.   
A contractor changed out all the tubes in one building from 3000K to 4100K.  I thought they were going to upgrade to LED, but they decided to go one more round with fluorescents, for which I am glad.  The 4100K look good in this particular church building because it recently got new blue carpeting which reflect the 4100k much better than the old 3000K.  The old 3000K were mostly 2nd and 3rd gen Sylvania Ecologic/Octron & 2nd Gen GE, as well as some 1st gen Philips Altos.  (the Philips were EoL a long time ago but were high up in an area that I could not access) 

They installed the latest gen of T8 4100k from GE which, like Philips and Sylvania latest gen, don't last as long as previous generations, sadly.  It's the manufacturers way of encouraging people to go with more expensive LED, I suppose.  <sigh> Though I do like how bright these 900 series are, and that they are not as dim at cold start up, as the 700 and 800 series were. 

I've personally witnessed a number of T12 and T8 ballast failures.  The T8s were always the electronic.  I've turned on fixtures and POOF- the fuse inside blew.  Heard it.  I've also seen a few that failed when I had them on.  Have had a few Advance T8s and early generation Sylvania T8 ballasts that would smoke and get very hot when they failed. 

As for T-12 Magnetic.. oh man do those things go!  fire hazard.  Those tar burners would get very hot and a few would flash arc when they failed, the others just got super hot and dripped tar out the ends and when I would go to change them, there was heat damage to the fixture from how how they got.  And they smelled HORRIBLE. 

I just disposed of about 400 3000K fluorescent lamps, both T12 and T8.  Offered them for free on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, no takers.  Got a few people messaged me if I had any 3500 or 4100 though.  I am not getting rid of those. 

Adding on to me finding my old computer stuff, I found my two old 160gb hard drives.
Even though one of them still works fine, the other had a broken sata data connector (it was sitting in improper storage long before I got it), I had to balance the cable on what's left of the pins to get it to work.
Unfortunately, it's now making a repeated clicking and screeching sound (only started doing it recently), probably its last few hours of life (it was my main drive) and the other was wiped.


It booted up instantly when I found it (this morning), but now it takes ages to boot up.

Could you upload a picture?

I hope you would enjoy the car show there

I went to the Category:May 2016 Coffee and Chrome in Hapeville, Georgia, USA back then.

Cost being the most decisive factor, I guess. Now, cost aside, what would prevent say a LED edge lit panel to have a rectifier to run it effectively on DC ?

They do effectively run on DC, or on high frequency PWM when dimmable. At the very least the bargain basement LED panels used at my school all run from switching power supplies.

The thing is, if you are a paying customer for the weather service, you will get more reliable access than someone trying to look at it for free, mainly when the server load approaches its limits...

The problem also is, the only way to eliminate flicker is by using rather large (for the power) electrolytic capacitors and these are rather problematic components mainly from reliability perspective. Not that it wouldn't be possible to make them reliable enough, but it costs money and mainly building space within the ballast cavity (which uses to be extremely small with modern LED products), so much it forces the other components to operate in not that favorable conditions, increasing the cost there (to compensate with "better" components) as well.
Skipping this capacitor allows you to achieve significantly better reliability for the same budget, power and efficacy.

Why the cheepeese are skipping it is clear - as it allows to cut cost significantly even without giving up the reliability of the rest, along with compromising on the quality of the rest it really saves a lot.
But with "quality brands" I see the market rather went into eliminating flicker with mediocre reliability, I'm missing the uncompromised reliability with tolerating some flicker - as to me many applications don't benefit that much from true flicker free operation, but do benefit from the reliability.