[GTALUG] Dirty Power and Wi Fi Far field effect

[Walter Dnes]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 06:57:49AM -0400, Russell Reiter wrote
> 
> Hydro is working all over the city to rectify some of the more serious
> load balancing issues generated by considerabble over optisim in the
> effective technology of the day the grid was built. I guess this is
> to stimulate investor confidence before selling the whole dog and
> pony show to someone else.

  Two issues... more people and more power usage per person.  My war
story.  I used to work at the Environment Canada building on Dufferin
just south of Steeles before I retired.  The building went up around
1969/1970, and was planned in the 1960's, to meet 1960's needs, with
"sufficient spare capacity" ha ha ha.  The building had been designed to
support an IBM clone mainframe.  As part of the plan some scientists and
their CS support staff and some other staff had real honest-to-goodness
"green screen" Volker Craig dumb terminals.

  I arrived there almost exactly 30 years ago, in March of 1985.  At
that time "the PC Revolution" was just getting underway.  I remember my
management agonizing about whether they should get me an IBM PC with a 5
*MEGABYTE* add-on drive, or an IBM PC-XT with a built-in 10 *MEGABYTE*
hard drive.  They eventually got the PC-XT.  Fast forward a few years,
and you're looking at several hundred people, each with a desktop
computer, plus a monstrous monitor.  And they all needed power.

  Needless to say, the building was running rather close to power
capacity.  It took a a couple of years to get the building upgraded, and
I assume that Toronto Hydro had to upgrade equipment on their end.  I
don't remember any blackouts due to that issue, but I got the impression
from management that we were running close to the edge for a couple of
years.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes at waltdnes.org>