A TV can just run a RF module constantly, it only draws 10-40mA. If you want a bit more agressive power saving, you can duty cycle the RF module, by listen a few times pr. second. This way you can bring average current consumed while listening for RF commands down into 5uA on average
Within bluetooth space, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) might see some use in remote controls. This protocol variant have a facility to keep end nodes silent except when they are used.
However RF4CE (Now zigbee rf4ce, or zigbee for consumer electronics), a standard built on top of IEEE 802.15.4 currently seems to have a lot more traction in becoming the standard that replaces IR remotes.
Don't worry too much about the energy cost in listen-before-talk or channel hopping. This only happes whenever the remote sends a packet, which will be very sparse in comparison to idle time. The most critical power consumption factor is the idle currents as the components sit in their lowest standby state waiting for the user to press a button.
Usually management will listen to ITs concerns considering them the experts on the matter. More often than not though IT's security policies are actually reducing security: Complex rules on the password complexity actually reduces the number of effective bits in the password and can also make a password very difficult to remember, which prompts the user to write it down. Very short expirations on passwords particularly combined with complex compositioning rules leaves the user unable to learn the password for a long time, increasing the passwords exposure through written notes. Whenever there is a security scare IT generally tightens one or both of these screws, which might actually decrease security. Management as i said usually takes ITs advice in security matters. However security would be better left to people who are experts in human behavior rather than technologists.
Please do explain to me what you mean by "anti-vaccine lobbies." A lobby or lobbyist is a representative of a monied interest. What monied interest out there profits from NOT selling something? Because the anti-vaccine idea is all about not purchasing vaccines. Please tell me who these lobbyists are.
While I don't agree with the notion that only financial interests can be considered lobbyists, in this case we can certainly identify such interests. Notably in Norway a campaign agains the H1N1 vaccine was fronted by individuals that were making money of selling various more or less bogus 'natural' or 'spiritual' remedies against the illness. They clearly have a financial interest in attempting to discredit scientific medicine as it is in direct competition with their offering.
...then I guess we should let music die. Music and other entertainment is not important enough by far to trade away privacy and freedom. I don't care for piracy, but I recognize that only by having complete control of what people communicate and hence their freedom of expression would it be possible to quell piracy. I hope most thinking humans would agree that this is too high a price to preserve the profitability of music.
The current VMware fusion actually supports Dx9 and permitted me to start up team fortress 2, however performance is sufficiently poor that for practical purposes you would need to dual boot to play.
In other news: Sony just announced they are dropping their proprietary format in favor of ePub. (http://ebookstore.sony.com/press-room/) I feel a disturbance in the force...
In norway print media is getting significant goverment subsidies. The consequence is that rather than having media which is a watchdog over goverment, they have become a shill of the leftist 'big-goverment' political parties. (Since these are the parties that will guarantee their continued pipe into taxpayer money)
Every time somone brings up the question of subsidies you can trust that every newspaper will write long editorials why they need to keep getting money.
Particularly aggravating is the fact that a small selection of newspapers are getting preferential treatment (more money than others). These papers just happen to be the papers that used to be the publishing fronts for four leftist political parties. They claim to be independent of cource, but it won't take much reading to realize just how skewed their presentation really is.
So just take a look around and you will quickly find good reasons why not to start subsidizing the press.
Realize that a RF poweramp will only have peak efficiency for some specific limited range of output power settings. If you make a device that is capable of 20dBm output, there is no way the same device will be efficient at 0dBm.
What type of radio which is most energy efficient depends a lot on the application. If you expect to turn on the radio, do a large bulk transfer, then shut off again indefinetly, wifi is great, offering very low energy expenditure pr. bit. If you on the other hand want to have a standby link up to handle occational data transfer of short messages wifi is lousy since the protocol won't let the device idle much (Though later iterations have become better at this). Keep in mind that most radios actually expend more energy listening on a clear channel then it does transmitting or receiving.
In my experience the US immigration officials are a lot more impolite than the japanese ones. In addition (And IMO more significantly) in the US you usually have to stand about 30 minutes in line to get questioned. US immigration got to be the slowest ever.
Goverment hides it inefficiencies in huge budgets, and are rarely above using official secrets laws to bury failed projects further. Living in a country where the goverment is extremely eager to run it's own projects I can safely tell you that the goverment gets extremely little back for it's money. Not to mention that politically run project tend to be used to game the electoral system, with popular projects beeing directed into counties where a representative for the ruling party is at risk.
Private enterprise are accountable to their shareholders who do a much better job at enforcing operational efficiency than voters.
We are already seeing unreliability issues appearing. As trasistors get down to sizes so small they actually only hold a handful of electrons on their gate this problem will magnify significantly. This does not however mean these device can't be used, just that you have to compensate.
We are allready now seeing self correcting or error tolerant circuits that either do their calculations with some redundancy and correct, or detect errors and replay the calculation.
I'd enter a recurring transaction in my on-line bank then click the 'send me a receipt' checkbox.
I havent used paper receipt for years though as the recipient will get an electronic confirmation (or letter if no e-mail is registered) immidiately, and I can allways pull the transaction log from the bank if I need proof.
Taxes can go much higher in norway. In fact they can go above 100%, be very careful if you choose to move here. (I'm paying 80% taxes, and looking into moving out of the country)
Healthcare is only free if you are willing to wait (potentially for years). Treatment queues have increased by 60000 the last 4 years, and the only way out of them is to pay for private care yourself. It's getting risky not to have a health insurance in Norway.
Security is also an issue. While violent crime isn't rampant. Petty crime is, and there are no consequences for the perps.
I would advice against norway, not only on grounds of climate but also on an oppressive taxing system. If you have assets the goverment deems valuable (never mind that you might not want or are able to realize the assets), the goverment will take 1.1% of the assumed value of the assets in tax every year. There are people with tax rates > 100% here. (The number if of cource limited since they either go bankrupt or emigrate before long). On top of the base income tax is among the highest in the world, and while average salaries are high, this only benefits unskilled labor. Salaries for skilled labor are quite low.
Norwegian government has a very limited respect of private property.
Hmm an off-shore installation with huge moving exposed parts and a power generator, nope can't see any maintenance costs in that...
Seriusly, the on-shore windmill farms i've seen seems to have a significant amount of turbines down for maintenance. Off shore turbines will be more complicated to maintain, and likely fail more due to the harsh environment. I suspect initial investment costs will be minor compared to lifetime maintenance. (And said maintenane will have some carbon footprint as well)
In our buisness (30000 employees), we have hundreds of web apps floating around. IT don't have any kind of central management of them as they are developed by specialized functions within the company.
You might consider this silly and all, but the fact is that we are not a software company, and buisness apps will live their own lives outside any kind of release management other than what the developer himself deals with. Hence changing from IE6 will only happen when we absolutely have to.
There is currently a huge uproar over how the 802.11 wants to use 40MHz bandwidth leaving no space for other (arguably more critical) devices like 802.15.4 based sensors and controls.
Interestingly 15.4 can cope much better with filthy 2.4GHz radios as the modulation scheme is designed for robustness rather than speed.
The reason flash memoy don't use such small erase blocks is that the cost of the flash die will go up as the size of the erase block goes down sice the circuitry to enable erase of a block must be replicated more often.
They won't be BT (At least very few will). Google 'rf4ce' this is a network layer protocol built on top of IEEE 802.15.4 that is currently gaining significant acceptance as a replacement for IR remote controls.
"both the number and type of one-cycle instructions within a CPU can be increased until the summary is "all of 'em""
Why spend silicon area on instructions that are rarely used? The performance gains will be neglible. For very complex instructions, making them seem single cycle (No instruction actually executes in a single cycle in deeply pipelined CPUs), you need to deepen the pipeline, which impacts your performance when you must flush the pipe.
Increased orthogonlaity will reduce code density, which either must be offset by ever larger caches and more memory bandwidth. You likely get more throughput by optimizing the instruction set for density rather than orthogonality.
Also it strikes me that most software I see that is actually CPU bound is mostly trivially paralellizable. I am sure the exceptions are numerous, but for the broad market this seems correct.
As for the difficulty of doing parallel development, try recruiting hardware designers. Hardware is all parallel.
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A TV can just run a RF module constantly, it only draws 10-40mA. If you want a bit more agressive power saving, you can duty cycle the RF module, by listen a few times pr. second. This way you can bring average current consumed while listening for RF commands down into 5uA on average
Within bluetooth space, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) might see some use in remote controls. This protocol variant have a facility to keep end nodes silent except when they are used.
However RF4CE (Now zigbee rf4ce, or zigbee for consumer electronics), a standard built on top of IEEE 802.15.4 currently seems to have a lot more traction in becoming the standard that replaces IR remotes.
Don't worry too much about the energy cost in listen-before-talk or channel hopping. This only happes whenever the remote sends a packet, which will be very sparse in comparison to idle time. The most critical power consumption factor is the idle currents as the components sit in their lowest standby state waiting for the user to press a button.
Usually management will listen to ITs concerns considering them the experts on the matter.
More often than not though IT's security policies are actually reducing security:
Complex rules on the password complexity actually reduces the number of effective bits in the password and can also make a password very difficult to remember, which prompts the user to write it down.
Very short expirations on passwords particularly combined with complex compositioning rules leaves the user unable to learn the password for a long time, increasing the passwords exposure through written notes.
Whenever there is a security scare IT generally tightens one or both of these screws, which might actually decrease security. Management as i said usually takes ITs advice in security matters. However security would be better left to people who are experts in human behavior rather than technologists.
Please do explain to me what you mean by "anti-vaccine lobbies." A lobby or lobbyist is a representative of a monied interest. What monied interest out there profits from NOT selling something? Because the anti-vaccine idea is all about not purchasing vaccines. Please tell me who these lobbyists are.
While I don't agree with the notion that only financial interests can be considered lobbyists, in this case we can certainly identify such interests. Notably in Norway a campaign agains the H1N1 vaccine was fronted by individuals that were making money of selling various more or less bogus 'natural' or 'spiritual' remedies against the illness. They clearly have a financial interest in attempting to discredit scientific medicine as it is in direct competition with their offering.
...then I guess we should let music die. Music and other entertainment is not important enough by far to trade away privacy and freedom. I don't care for piracy, but I recognize that only by having complete control of what people communicate and hence their freedom of expression would it be possible to quell piracy. I hope most thinking humans would agree that this is too high a price to preserve the profitability of music.
Well yes and no.
The current VMware fusion actually supports Dx9 and permitted me to start up team fortress 2, however performance is sufficiently poor that for practical purposes you would need to dual boot to play.
I can second that. My macbook pro (pre-unibody) runs windows 7 just fine.
In other news: Sony just announced they are dropping their proprietary format in favor of ePub. (http://ebookstore.sony.com/press-room/)
I feel a disturbance in the force...
In norway print media is getting significant goverment subsidies. The consequence is that rather than having media which is a watchdog over goverment, they have become a shill of the leftist 'big-goverment' political parties. (Since these are the parties that will guarantee their continued pipe into taxpayer money)
Every time somone brings up the question of subsidies you can trust that every newspaper will write long editorials why they need to keep getting money.
Particularly aggravating is the fact that a small selection of newspapers are getting preferential treatment (more money than others). These papers just happen to be the papers that used to be the publishing fronts for four leftist political parties. They claim to be independent of cource, but it won't take much reading to realize just how skewed their presentation really is.
So just take a look around and you will quickly find good reasons why not to start subsidizing the press.
ARM builds even its high-end cores as softcores these days. It is the implementor, not ARM who decides which process node to use.
Realize that a RF poweramp will only have peak efficiency for some specific limited range of output power settings. If you make a device that is capable of 20dBm output, there is no way the same device will be efficient at 0dBm.
What type of radio which is most energy efficient depends a lot on the application. If you expect to turn on the radio, do a large bulk transfer, then shut off again indefinetly, wifi is great, offering very low energy expenditure pr. bit. If you on the other hand want to have a standby link up to handle occational data transfer of short messages wifi is lousy since the protocol won't let the device idle much (Though later iterations have become better at this). Keep in mind that most radios actually expend more energy listening on a clear channel then it does transmitting or receiving.
In my experience the US immigration officials are a lot more impolite than the japanese ones. In addition (And IMO more significantly) in the US you usually have to stand about 30 minutes in line to get questioned. US immigration got to be the slowest ever.
Goverment hides it inefficiencies in huge budgets, and are rarely above using official secrets laws to bury failed projects further.
Living in a country where the goverment is extremely eager to run it's own projects I can safely tell you that the goverment gets extremely little back for it's money. Not to mention that politically run project tend to be used to game the electoral system, with popular projects beeing directed into counties where a representative for the ruling party is at risk.
Private enterprise are accountable to their shareholders who do a much better job at enforcing operational efficiency than voters.
We are already seeing unreliability issues appearing. As trasistors get down to sizes so small they actually only hold a handful of electrons on their gate this problem will magnify significantly. This does not however mean these device can't be used, just that you have to compensate.
We are allready now seeing self correcting or error tolerant circuits that either do their calculations with some redundancy and correct, or detect errors and replay the calculation.
I'd enter a recurring transaction in my on-line bank then click the 'send me a receipt' checkbox.
I havent used paper receipt for years though as the recipient will get an electronic confirmation (or letter if no e-mail is registered) immidiately, and I can allways pull the transaction log from the bank if I need proof.
Taxes can go much higher in norway. In fact they can go above 100%, be very careful if you choose to move here. (I'm paying 80% taxes, and looking into moving out of the country)
Healthcare is only free if you are willing to wait (potentially for years). Treatment queues have increased by 60000 the last 4 years, and the only way out of them is to pay for private care yourself. It's getting risky not to have a health insurance in Norway.
Security is also an issue. While violent crime isn't rampant. Petty crime is, and there are no consequences for the perps.
I would advice against norway, not only on grounds of climate but also on an oppressive taxing system. If you have assets the goverment deems valuable (never mind that you might not want or are able to realize the assets), the goverment will take 1.1% of the assumed value of the assets in tax every year. There are people with tax rates > 100% here. (The number if of cource limited since they either go bankrupt or emigrate before long). On top of the base income tax is among the highest in the world, and while average salaries are high, this only benefits unskilled labor. Salaries for skilled labor are quite low.
Norwegian government has a very limited respect of private property.
Hmm an off-shore installation with huge moving exposed parts and a power generator, nope can't see any maintenance costs in that...
Seriusly, the on-shore windmill farms i've seen seems to have a significant amount of turbines down for maintenance. Off shore turbines will be more complicated to maintain, and likely fail more due to the harsh environment. I suspect initial investment costs will be minor compared to lifetime maintenance. (And said maintenane will have some carbon footprint as well)
Bull.
In our buisness (30000 employees), we have hundreds of web apps floating around. IT don't have any kind of central management of them as they are developed by specialized functions within the company.
You might consider this silly and all, but the fact is that we are not a software company, and buisness apps will live their own lives outside any kind of release management other than what the developer himself deals with. Hence changing from IE6 will only happen when we absolutely have to.
WIfi IS stupid consumer shit. ;-)
There is currently a huge uproar over how the 802.11 wants to use 40MHz bandwidth leaving no space for other (arguably more critical) devices like 802.15.4 based sensors and controls.
Interestingly 15.4 can cope much better with filthy 2.4GHz radios as the modulation scheme is designed for robustness rather than speed.
Get you bandwidth hogging butts out of 2.4GHz.
It increases the cost of the flash dies, or it reduces performance (By interleaving across less dies)
The reason flash memoy don't use such small erase blocks is that the cost of the flash die will go up as the size of the erase block goes down sice the circuitry to enable erase of a block must be replicated more often.
They won't be BT (At least very few will).
Google 'rf4ce' this is a network layer protocol built on top of IEEE 802.15.4 that is currently gaining significant acceptance as a replacement for IR remote controls.
Most general purpose software isn't CPU bound, so who cares if it is hard to parallelize, it won't benefit anyway.
Only CPU bound apps need to be considered for parallelization.
"both the number and type of one-cycle instructions within a CPU can be increased until the summary is "all of 'em""
Why spend silicon area on instructions that are rarely used? The performance gains will be neglible. For very complex instructions, making them seem single cycle (No instruction actually executes in a single cycle in deeply pipelined CPUs), you need to deepen the pipeline, which impacts your performance when you must flush the pipe.
Increased orthogonlaity will reduce code density, which either must be offset by ever larger caches and more memory bandwidth. You likely get more throughput by optimizing the instruction set for density rather than orthogonality.
Also it strikes me that most software I see that is actually CPU bound is mostly trivially paralellizable. I am sure the exceptions are numerous, but for the broad market this seems correct.
As for the difficulty of doing parallel development, try recruiting hardware designers. Hardware is all parallel.