[time-nuts] 60hz west coast electric grid gone berserk

Chris Albertson albertson.chris at gmail.com
Sun Sep 11 01:19:11 UTC 2011


On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 10:09 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:
>
> albertson.chris at gmail.com said:
>> You really don't even need software as the Linux PPS project ships a test
>> program that logs the time stamps.
>
> That (tries to) print a line for each pulse.  At 60 Hz, that's a lot of
> printing.  It might work reasonably well if you include an external divide by
> 60 or 100 or 1000 or some handy number in that range.
>

What? Lets assume 80 characters per line at 60Hz that word to a
whopping 4800 bytes per second.  For a modern desktop computer moving
even a million bytes per second is trivial.  Even 10 times that much
is easy.  In the 1/60th second between cycles a simple desktop
computer can execute well over a hundred million instructions.

60Hz is nothing compared to using a computer in a recording studio.
Even here at home I'll have 6 tracks of audio sampled at 96,000
samples per second and the computer puts in all file and keeps the
displays up to date and doing a dozen or so DSP tasks on the audio
streams.  Still the CPU meters are no even close to half way.   The
computer is just a mid-range iMac.

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California



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