Bell Labs Says Networks Can Be 1000 Times More Energy Efficient 156
judgecorp writes "Bell Labs believes that data networks can be more efficient and has launched a consortium which aims to develop technology that uses only a thousandth of current network energy requirements by 2015. The Green Touch initiative is going to focus in particular on wireless, seeking to reduce wasted energy in signal broadcasts. Cynics might say Alcatel-Lucent is using its research division to distract attention from its troubles — the Financial Times described it as 'a poster child for much that is wrong in the telecoms equipment industry' — but Bell Labs still commands respect and support, and the goal it has set is an interesting one."
1000 times less energy (Score:2)
And how much lower is the bandwidth going to be?
Considering the push towards 4g and faster...
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Yeah, how about use the same energy and make it 1000 times faster.
One does wonder. (Score:5, Interesting)
Just how much power is being used for Cell transmissions? What about Wifi?
Think about it. Our appliances are getting more efficient all the time but how much power are our gadgets sucking up.
WiFi, Game Consoles, DVD players, Home networks, Home NAS servers, cable boxes, and TVs.
Way back when when you went to bed you turned off our TV and it was actually off.
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How much? Really people get bent over SUVs but how many of those Prius owners have two or more big HDTVs, multiple game consoles, routers, PCs, DVRs, Home NAS servers, and goodness knows what else sucking down watts 24/7 often doing nothing at all?
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...but how many of those Prius owners have two or more big HDTVs, multiple game consoles, routers, PCs, DVRs, Home NAS servers, and goodness knows what else sucking down watts 24/7 often doing nothing at all?
Extremes aren't numerous. Generalizations always suck.
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How extreme is it for a household to have more than one HDTV? And odds are all of them are more than 32"s
How extreme is it to have at least one and probably two game consoles?
How extreme is it to have a router and or a Home NAS? I see those at the local BestBuy and WalMart everyday.
DVRs?
DVD players?
CableBoxes?
Cellphone chargers, iPod chargers?
How many people turn them off when not in use with a power strip?
Sorry it isn't that extreme of a gadget situation. Take a look at your own surroundings and think abou
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Very when only Prius owners have all this.
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Not at all. But a lot of GREEN folks are at the same time really into tech and really like to bash people that drive SUVs. I do not own an SUV or even a pickup truck. I really want a pickup truck but frankly only the Ford Ranger is close to what I think of as a small truck and I don't need a big truck. Just point out that waste is everywhere and having a house full of power sucking tech but a small car isn't all that green.
BTW I too have to many gadgets sucking power. I started to buy power strips to power
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So you and SUV owners, unlike GREEN folks, are taking steps to reduce your power consumption?
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Just that one should look at yourself before looking down at others. As I said I know I have more work to do saving power. My next project is going to be a resource shed. I am going to build a garden shed that will house cisterns for rainwater collection for my garden and a solar panel to charge my cordless tools. I am not criticizing people that choose to own a prius but those that think that act makes them better than others.
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Okay, so the guys that make an expensive decision to reduce their emissions aren't actually doing anything better than SUV owners because their electric power use, which hasn't yet been established as 'distinct from SUV owners', is unchanged.
My next project is going to be a resource shed. I am going to build a garden shed that will house cisterns for rainwater collection for my garden and a solar panel to charge my cordless tools. I am not criticizing people that choose to own a prius but those that think that act makes them better than others.
You're doing all that, but you're still fouling up the air with a gas guzzler?
No, this isn't an attack. I'm illustrating how your own view applies to you. You're doing exactly what you're complaining about other people doing. Worse, you've invented behaviours for a
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Okay.
Reality check.
How much better for the environment are all your garden sheds, solar panels, cordless tool batteries and homegrown vegetables going to be?
Oh, and you WERE critizizing Prius-owners. You can admit you were wrong, you can continue critizing Prius-owners, but you can't deny the words you've written.
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So since when is a Mazda3 a gas guzzler? "What I drive and car pool with my wife to work in." I was commenting on the snotty attitude that many of the green folks have and the waste of energy in gadgets.
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You commented on it by using a comparison that actually justified their snottiness, then you went and did the exact same thing you were complaining about them doing. FAIL.
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I know zero families that have more than one in each of those categories (except perhaps chargers). In fact, I know zero families that even have one of each of those categories.
Obviously, the dozen or so families I know well enough aren't a typical average; they're mostly above-average income and working in technology related fields.
Nonetheless, I think you are being just a tad extreme. Besides, so I sense a hint of jealousy at the people that can afford a Prius?
Re:One does wonder. (Score:5, Interesting)
I highly recommend this to everyone who has to pay an electricity bill: Unplug your appliances.
I have saved over 60% of my electrical bill by following the simple process of unplugging everything when its not in use. The only 3 things that remains plugged in are the Fridge, Stove, and the alarm clock. The Television, sound system, game consoles, all that is on a power bar so its easy to just unplug the power bar. The laptop, computer, microwave, toaster, all that stuff can be left unplugged when I'm not using them. I even do it for the washer and dryer. It is only inconvencing yourself like 3 seconds max, and after a while you get used to it.
I heard someone once say that your electronic devices still use 80% of their power consumption if plugged in, even while not in use. I think that number might be bogus, but I do believe that they still use power, even when not used.
Point is, you can save alot of money by unplugging.
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For $26, you can measure the power of each device on and off and figure out who the actual power hogs are:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882715001 [newegg.com]
Then at least you'll save wear-and-tear on your plugs for devices that are really off when turned off. (Like your washer and dryer, for example. I would be surprised if they draw power when off.)
Re:One does wonder. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now in these days of soft power buttons, nothing is ever really disabled. But rejoice! EPA Energy Star (TM) devices only use a minimum amount of power when in standby mode. Uhuh.
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Not on any of my computers... they all have buttons in front, though to shut them down without, say, shutting down through Windows you need to hold the button several seconds (and Windows and Linux don't really like that much, so better to use shutdown). One of my boxes does have a power supply switch, as well, which is useful because the computer leeches power if it isn't switched off at the power supply (like ethernet).
As for data network efficiency, they could stop using ATM for data packets over fiber,
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I think you missed his point.
I believe he was referring to the old-school AT-style PC cases, which either had a large switch on the side of the computer near the back, or a remotely-located power switch (typically on the front). Unlike the front-panel switches these days (which don't actually turn anything all the way off), these things would turn off the 110/220V coming in from the power cord.
The switches typically did require some meaningful force to operate. When you turn off an AT computer, it is REAL
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Don't computers only use a watt or two to sleep?
200+ when booting?
Waking from hibernate would then be worth over 2-hours of sleep (vs waking from sleep), and waking from shutdown even longer.
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Are you using some sort of programmable, logic-controlled toaster? I've never seen one that wasn't electro-mechanical. I highly doubt that your toaster, your clothes dryer, or your washing machine use a single watt when you're not actually running them.
Also: there are power strips/supplies with switches on them, so that you don't have to fuss over the wear and tear of actually unplugging things.
Re:One does wonder. (Score:4, Funny)
Are you using some sort of programmable, logic-controlled toaster? I've never seen one that wasn't electro-mechanical. I highly doubt that your toaster, your clothes dryer, or your washing machine use a single watt when you're not actually running them.
Luddite. MY toaster is web 2.0-enabled, runs ajax, ruby-on-rails, jboss, .NET, updates my twitter feed & facebook status (I'm making toast!) and then pushes an rss feed to my iphone when the toast is ready.
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No, he's a loser. My toaster is in low earth orbit.
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Is it cooler than the CNC Toaster [evilmadscientist.com], or even than this toast printer [dailyradar.com]?
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Are you using some sort of programmable, logic-controlled toaster?
Sure. Why not? [kcbx.net]
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Not only enough commas, but a bonus! A completely wrong, extra apostrophe! I hereby assign you to an afternoon of reading "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" by Lynne Truss.
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True but how much power do all the cell towers use? I am not anti tech but the explosion of tech we have has got to be running up our power bills.
I bet the my home as a child probably used about the same amount of power as my home does today.
I fear our gadgets have wiped out our gains in efficiency and insulation.
Re:One does wonder. (Score:4, Interesting)
True but how much power do all the cell towers use? I am not anti tech but the explosion of tech we have has got to be running up our power bills.
Thats a very amusing question, because a typical setup of 3G equipment draws about 3 KW, yet you're asking how much the tower itself draws, which is of course zero. The equipment draw at a site varies based on auxiliary gear, power level, multiple sites on multiple towers, multiple antennas on multiple gear, etc. Suffice it to say a cell site draws enough power to keep warm in the winter, but its not much compared to a steel mill or a retail establishment. The local power company is generally unimpressed in urban and suburban areas, although in rural areas the towers tend to be in the middle of nowhere resulting in some logistical difficulty, although the power required is no major thing. Local power companies do not install new substations just for a cellsite, for example, on the other hand when colocating in a building they will require a dedicated circuit or two, maybe a tiny subpanel, probably a separately billing power meter.
On the other hand, the FAA requires substantial tower lighting, you're looking at about 1.5 KW of lighting on a big tower. See link to a typical supplier, note that light requires TWO 700 watt bulbs, pretty impressive. Then again a couple hundred watt light bulb is probably what you'd need to light up a couple hundred feet of street, it just makes sense.
So, yes you could reduce the power used by the equipment. From 3KW to 3W to fit the pie in the sky 1:1000 ratio, probably not. Even if you could magically reduce the equipment power draw to zero, by using magic pixie dust and space alien technology, tower lighting requirements alone mean you'll never be able to reduce the total site power draw below about %33 of what is currently used.
http://www.gordtelecom.com/Tower%20Lighting.htm [gordtelecom.com]
and thats before you get into discussions about aluminum towers, what with aluminum being "liquid electricity".
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Well I was talking about a cell site. I would guess that there are a lot more cell sites than steel mills. So in round numbers you are talking about 4.5KW for the tower plus FAA lighting.
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note that light requires TWO 700 watt bulbs, pretty impressive.
So, replace the 700 Watt bulbs with 2 brighter, 60-watt Mercury Vapor lights. MV lights don't like to "blink" so put a rotating shield around them. Voila! Better performance at 1/10 the running cost....
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You mean like LED tower lighting like this thing [flightlight.com]?
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It's called standby power. A recent report found on average 13% of home energy use is used by devices in a low power state (i.e. "off"). Some devices use power to watch for remote control signals, to maintain a clock, or to download info (i.e. tv downloads new schedules). Some of it is just wasted in the transformer. Unplugging is a good option, usually by keeping things plugged into a power bar- easier than unplugging and plugging back into a socket. I also look for Energy Star rated appliances, as I
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I find that hard to believe. A few months ago I went from appliance to appliance with one of those Kill-a-watt devices measuring electricity consumption over a 24 hour period. Usage was insignificant for devices in standby mode, this included my PS3, television and other electronics. And by insignificant I mean a couple of dollars a year for everything in total and this is at roughly 22 cents per kWh in my area.
Where I found heavy usage was from appliances used on a regular basis. The dryer, water heater (w
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If you live someplace where hanging your clothes out to dry is reasonable (warm, sunny, little chance of rain), that's really not a "sacrifice" - it's a better way to dry your clothes! Less wear, less shrinkage, and less energy usage.
Maybe a little more work,
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I'd rather pester the manufacturers or the government to make sure standyby power is decent. What are we - living in the stone age?
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A cell phone is like a refridgerator (figuratively, not literally). It's sole purpose is to be passively doing its job (recieve incoming calls) all the time. I turn it off when I'm in the movie theatre. Otherwise, I expect it to ring.
I do however, unplug it like I do the rest of my electronics :P
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My refridgerator is like the internet. You see, it has these series of tubes...
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Get yourself a kill a watt meter [amazon.com] and find out. My Athlon64 computer with 7200 RPM 500 GB hard drive idles at 40 W. The TV, when off, still pulls 5 W! Now I just plug everything but the computer to a common surge protector and flip it's switch when I'm not watching TV or playing console games
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I am talking mainly about wasted power. The Standby power that your HDTV uses is a good example. Sure a DVR needs to be "on" all the time but if you could power it all down and say use a tiny microcontoller running of say a super cap to deal with the timer and the IR receiver you could save some power. Yes it would take a few miutes to power up after got home from work but you could build in a smart system to know that you tend to turn on the TV at say 6:30 and have the micro move from cold standby to warm
Speaking of Wireless (Score:2)
There was an article a while back about a phone battery that is able to recharge itself by intercepting the various radio / wifi waves in its Antenna to generate a current. (Still in development, still not efficient)
I'm not sure if they mean "Energy Wasted in signal broadcast" means they want to reduce the whole broadcast in every direction as far as you can idea - or if there is some other process they plan on using to reduce the energy usage. In any event, I don't think the issue is with too many radiowav
Speaking of crystal radios (Score:4, Informative)
The first radio receivers [wikipedia.org], about a hundred years ago, needed no batteries, they got all the power they needed from the antenna.
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Re:Speaking of crystal radios (Score:4, Informative)
The first radio receivers, about a hundred years ago, needed no batteries, they got all the power they needed from the antenna.
That's true, and you can still build one with a few feet of wire, a ten-cent diode and a set of headphones. It will still work, too, although not very well. You must remember that 100 years ago, there wasn't the plethora of transmitters that currently exist so a receiver did not have to be particularly selective. A simple set as described will generally be overwhelmed by a local station and that's all you'll receive.
Oh, yeah--no FM either.
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Check some of the links on the post that called me to task for saying that you can't receive FM on a crystal radio. Turns out you can.
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It's much more selective in short waves. I grew up during the Cold War and transmissions in 25 meters were staggered due to time zones, long distance short waves only propagate at night.
First was the Moscow Central Radio, then came the BBC from London, and later at night the Voice of America. I got to hear three different versions of every battle in Vietnam.
All in my radio using a galena crystal that I p
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Are you sure about this? I have a pair of Sennheiser 280s, and at home, if they're plugged in but I'm not playing any sound through them, they actually pick up Star 94 through the wire, an obnoxious FM station here in Atlanta that, apparently, plays nothing but "Party in the USA" and "Tonight's Gonna Be A Good Night" over and over and over and over which makes it really annoying when I'm trying to work on music production, which involves wearing the headphones without always playi
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Ugh.
That's got to be frustrating.
It's got little to do with the headphones. They can't do that on their own.
The demodulation is happening inside of whatever device you're using as a headphone amp, or perhaps further back in the audio chain.
All the headphones provide some inductance to a circuit, which then decides that it's an FM radio, perhaps even using the headphone wire as a convenient antenna.
It's a poor design, whatever it is -- it shouldn't do that. You could try replacing it, or supplementing it w
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That was the perhaps most indecipherable thing ever posted to Slashdot. But it looks like you're right, I was wrong--it is possible to detect FM signals with a crystal radio. I stand corrected.
Oh, and by the way, you're about as big an asshole as the guy on solomonsmusic.net.
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I'm absolutely no expert, but weren't many of those stations pumping 50,000 watts (with some short lived experiments with 250-500 kilowatts) through their antennas?
http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/amq.html [fcc.gov]
The standard daytime power level for the big ones is 50 KW, medium-ish stations run around 10 KW, and the smallest stations during the night might barely go 100 watts.
Want high power, try old fashioned UHF TV superstations around a megawatt.
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There was an article a while back about a phone battery that is able to recharge itself by intercepting the various radio / wifi waves in its Antenna to generate a current. (Still in development, still not efficient)
... and if you use that "wireless recharging battery" with a phone (or some other device with wifi) you can both USE your wifi and recharge your battery!
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RCA has one at CES [ohgizmo.com].
Consortium? (Score:2)
And, briefly setting aside the notion that energy consumption of our networks is an actual problem, why do we need to reinvent today's communication networks? What's really wrong with them?
Begin ipv
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OMG IPv6 Is bad cuz it uses more bits so more electricity has to flow through the wire which is not very green!!!!!
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Isn't it real easy ? (Score:2)
If we're using too much power now, that means that we're not getting our bandwidth's worth - right ?
Alcatel OEMs Aruba Networks wireless access points (Score:2)
1000 times (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:1000 times (Score:5, Funny)
I assume they are using Base 10.
Re:1000 times (Score:4, Funny)
I assume they are using Base 10.
Hey, actually maybe they use base 2. They got the hint from the harddrive marketing guys.
Re:1000 times (Score:5, Funny)
That's what he said.
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I have read your comment like 5 times today and I couldn't figure out why that would be modded funny.
I -JUST- got it. Very clever.
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Is that number just pulled out of their ass? Is there a base for it?
There's a 93.56% chance that is correct.
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Is that number just pulled out of their ass? Is there a base for it?
Looks like base-10. Although, it could just as likely be base-2
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Actually it could be base-n, where n >= 2.
Not the facts you're looking for (Score:4, Insightful)
Emphasis mine. There's a lot more crap in there that I didn't bother copying and pasting.
This "announcement" reads a lot like a snake-oil advertisement. This consortium will likely produce only one thing: An efficient mechanism for extracting money from investors (government or otherwise).
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>This "announcement" reads a lot like a snake-oil advertisement.
Why is this snake oil? Look at modern CPUs and all their power saving functions like speedstep. They make complete sense and save quite a bit of energy.
Now look at your typical ethernet switch. Each port eats up like 5+ watts. Yes, watts, not mW. So you're looking at quite a bit of power usage here to maintain a network connection for 100mbps or 1gbps and to maintain the spec of 100 meters. Well, most computers rarely need that full band
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and considering that we're in the middle of energy crisis (not enough uranium to switch to all nuclear and not enough oil for cheap prices)
What? We'll have to pay slightly more for energy some point in the near future? Crisis!
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Oil is a non-renewable resource and will peak and only become more and more expensive. Considering this is projected to happen in my lifetime I would say, that yes, this is a crisis. Cutting back, sane power settings, and renewables are really the only place to go from here until someone gets fusion going cheaply.
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Considering this is projected to happen in my lifetime I would say, that yes, this is a crisis. Cutting back, sane power settings, and renewables are really the only place to go from here until someone gets fusion going cheaply.
There's always uranium. Plenty of reserves. It's just nobody is willing to mine them while various countries are dumping on the market.
Loss of Efficiency? (Score:2)
Unfortunately, any energy efficiency gains were immediately wiped out upon launching a consortium "which aims to develop technology". I'm guessing this will be mired in various committees and be over-engineered to the point their design for networks will use twice the energy now and cost four times as much as they do now.
That efficiency will allow us... (Score:2)
... to grow the network eliminating the benefits of energy efficiency by allowing us to expand the network and consume more energy!
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But we'll be getting more from that energy, so it's still a win.
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1 million! (Score:2)
I say networks can be 1 MILLION times more energy efficient. Beat that, Bell Labs.
More important net green effect is education (Score:3, Insightful)
In the global human energy use game, the network energy use is close to noise level,
and can be probably thought of as offset by the efficiencies the net brings to other
business activities (like removing the need to fly to conferences, eliminating personal
sales calls, coordinating supply-demand chains to reduce waste and idling production
lines, allowing rapid global dissemination of technical and process best practices etc.)
Perhaps its most important effect on energy use and environment will be that it
provides a more efficient forum for discussion and dissemination of knowledge about
environmental problems and solutions. Ambitious Google Earth visualisation projects
and civilisation-strategy games which allow more and more people to be able to get their
head around some of these large-scale, long-term issues that are hard to grok if
you are not a math/science nerd. That and all the free public lectures on advanced
topics, and of course the vast knowledge base of wikipedia, which can allow rapid
but fairly precise communication and debate about important environmental and
technology choice issues (e.g. are electric cars cool? practical? affordable? effective
at reducing climate change? why or why not? How do I insulate my house properly in
a cold but humid climate? etc.)
Knowledge sharing and the rapid spreading of radical new cultural and technological
memes and attitudes. That is the most important effect that the net will have on
energy use and contribution to global warming or its solution.
The electrically efficient net is a nice-to-have, but pales in comparison to these
other factors.
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.
Yes, but the real effect of reducing this is longer battery life for mobile devices. Don't write it off just because it isn't replacing every streetlight with an array of LEDs, it still sounds useful.
Sigh, (Score:2)
RCA Airnergy (Score:2)
Make it green (Score:2)
Wasted wireless energy (Score:2)
No more PHP sending XML for AJAX (Score:2)
No more PHP sending XML for AJAX.
Assembly sending BER encoded ASN.1 for browsers written in Forth.
Get crackin'.
India has done it (Score:2)
A smart person sat down and ***designed*** a new system.
Stop hacking onto the US/NSA rustbelt revenue stream and start thinking.
http://www.vnl.in/technology/cleantech/ [www.vnl.in]
http://www.vnl.in/productsheets/worldgsm_village_site.pdf [www.vnl.in]
There's still a Bell Labs? (Score:2)
Then again, AT&T is not the same AT&T that was around before Judge Greene broke it up in 1984 [wikipedia.org], so I hope it hasn't become some kind of "no Bell Labs left behind" that provides jobs for underachieving American Dilbertized engineers...
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One example would be a Nortel OC-192 shelf from a decade ago. You can now replace the entire rack-sized unit consuming almost 3,000 watts with a few cards consuming maybe 200 watts in a smaller chassis.
Equipment is getting more dense and more power-efficient regardless of what Bell Labs does.
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http://www.fleshlight.com/ [fleshlight.com]
Maybe these guys can come up with something for you.
Nice to hear from you Bjorn (Score:2)
It is truly pathetic how these gas-guzzlin' deniers are grasping at straws to maintain
their totally untenable position.
On the one hand: 800 Scientist contributors + 2500 scientific reviewers work went into the latest IPCC
assessment report.
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/IPCCflyer_lr.pdf [ucsusa.org]
On the other hand: A few stolen personal emails by a few scientists in Britain had some ambiguously interpretable language, that could have been talking about trickery or how to format some summary
data,