Energy saving anyone?

With the advent of the oil crisis, what is being done for the individual house to reduce power consumption? Everyone knows about the craze of energy saving light bulbs but what about other devices?

I personally have a lot of devices in my television unit and all of them connect to a power outlet. All of them have a power converter to reduce the power to the circuitry on board. One thing I question myself is why there isn't another outlet for standard 12Volts or 5Volts DC instead. This would make it feasible for solar panels and much less power is lost in heat while doing power conversion.

This also includes computers. A UPS has to generate the power of an electrical outlet while 12V DC would be enough to power a machine and even a TFT monitor. A single DC power source in a house of 12V could power a lot of devices and also be able to use other sources of power generation. This would also mean less power company bills.

To install a solar powered system for a house you would need power converters to generate AC power for devices that would then still need to convert down to their own needs before usage. One can only imagine the amount of power lost in heat with all this conversion and we do not need more heat than there is already with the climate change.

So I am pleading the device manufacturers to think about a standard low power DC plug in their devices for alternate power.

To 64-bit or not to 64-bit?

That is the problem! With all the 64-bit computing power existing today, the amount of 32-bit Windows operating systems installed far exceed the amount of 64-bit Windows.

First there is the problem of hardware device driver compatibility. All code that has to run in kernel mode has to be digitally signed because of the Mandatory Driver Signing or else the driver won't install. Then there is the lack of 64-bit applications which I can understand since the 32-bit install base is still huge.

Being a software developer, you always have to think about how to support all operating systems. The 64-bit versions of windows have the so called Windows-32-on-Windows-64 (WOW64) subsystem which can run 32-bit applications on 64-bit windows but there could be serious compatibility issues while supporting and developing for it. At least with WOW64 you can use your 32-bit applications while waiting for your favorite applications to be developed in 64-bit, but at the end of the day you can never know if or when these applications will be done in 64-bit in the first place.

Full 64-bit applications have another problem. Microsoft itself has not converted all of the operating system dynamic link libraries (DLLs) to 64-bit. Could it be that these modules will become obsolete over time? Could this be a decision of Microsoft not to do so? To tell you the truth I don't know and thus I try to work around these technical problems as much as possible. At the end of the day you have to do what the market asks for.

Lack of Fax over IP support (FoIP)

The lack of good Fax over IP (hereinafter referred to as FoIP) with full T.38 support in most countries is very concerning. This is making fax server solutions supporting FoIP mostly useless for low cost faxing.

The most useful need for FoIP is when a company has a number of landlines, especially fixed-rate landlines, that have to remain. In this case a FoIP gateway device (or box) would be used to serve as a gateway and connect the company's network infrastructure directly with the landlines accessible via the FoIP interface. The fax server would then just need to connect to the box's in-built FoIP gateway to send and receive faxes.

The fully featured FaxSkape Fax Server from GoldBolt Software has full support for FoIP making it a viable solution for these types of FoIP gateways.

If the network providers would support the full FoIP T.38 protocol with a good infrastructure, we could have very cheap faxing rates to and from all countries like we already do for Voice over IP.