East Coast outage?

Fri Aug 15 03:13:53 UTC 2003

Speaking on Deep Background, the Press Secretary whispered:
> 
> 
> Am I the only one who is surprised that here we are now - over 7 years 
> later - and the electric grid industry still hasn't found/implemented a 
> design fix for this problem?  

Guess what... Real Time is Hard. Real Time when dealing with
amounts of energy sufficient to move mountains, with dv/dt in
milliseconds, is even harder.

Spread it out over a grid that measures fractions of a wavelength,
it gets harder still. Then run parts at 105-110% and it gets
really hard.

Now, play Prisoner's Dilemma with it.... and watch the sparks.

I'm no power engineer but I do not envy them. Can YOU build an
equal size TCP/IP network with the added requirement that you
never drop any more than say one or 2 bits/hour? And if you do,
you cold boot it all again?

-- 
A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz at nrk.com
& no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX
Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433