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94 - the European EMTP-ATP Users Group Web site

1. what 500C user has tried to print the colored curves on the screen WordPerfect must have drivers for HP color printers and one would hope that screen color would become paper color Who can shed more light on the current status of color hardcopy of ATP plots BPA can not since color printers are not available here In public E mail dated July gth Prof Prikler was able to answer the question for MS rather than WordPerfect He wrote Yes colour hardcopy of ATP plots is possible Redirect the HP GL output and import these as a picture into Word for Windows Windows support lots of colour printers so it is very easy to prepare colour ATP paper plots or colour overhead slides It is also possible to insert PCX files captured by Pizazz into Word for Windows as a picture However the size of a colour PCX file is very large compared with HP GL And one more difference the resolution A PCX picture is a screen image so the resolution is limited by the screen An HP GL file is vector graphic so the only limit is the resolution of the printer 339 is the everyday low price fora 500C as advertised by OfficeMax formerly Bizmart on page A12 of June 30 issue of The Oregonian Compare with the 500 mentioned in the January 1993 newsletter Added specifications in the latest advertising include 300 dpi resolution in black and color Supports DOS and Windows software Prints 3 pages per minute The color and black
2. Sweden and Taiwan MODELS author Laurent Dub was added to faculty at the last minute This represented an unadvertised fringe benefit a 2 hour lecture Sunday morning by someone who had all the answers to any questions about the newer control system modeling of ATP This was a big change Two years ago Seattle MODELS was just mentioned in passing One year ago Vancouver MODELS was allowed about 15 minutes Dr Kurt Fehrle This year the newer and more powerful MODELS received more time and attention than the older TACS Since power electronics sometimes involves complicated controls the emphasis probably makes more sense for this course than for the general power systems course in Florida Disk copying was done for only 16 persons according to Dr Liu s records 6 who received only ATPDRAW 2 disks and 10 more who also received Salford EMTP 3 disks For those having a sixth disk the 1012 Kbyte archive ALLWP5 ZIP of newsletters between September of 1988 and April of 1994 except July 1989 which was missing were copied BPA s Austin notebook computer see preceding issue was used for all of this Battery discharge while using an external power connection was not a problem as it had been in Seattle two years earlier In fact not much charging was noted No longer would power supplies seem to be underpowered Another trick would seem to be stopping the disk when not in use At times during a TPPLOT demonstration an unex
3. Corp a year old subsidiary formed to make inexpensive personal computers to be sold directly to customers This is the first of 4 short paragraphs in a short story entitled IBM shuts down subsidiary created for direct marking which appeared on page D1 of the July 29th issue of The Oregonian So what was IBM s problem The third paragraph states The unit was conceived as IBM s answer to low priced competitors But it started up after brand name PC makers in 1992 began accepting lower profit margins a change that resulted in pricing that matched the off brand rivals Apple Computer continues to lose PC market share in the USA According to a report on page 24 of the May 30 issue of PC Week magazine first quarter shipments by Apple were only 10 4 of the total behind leading Compaq Computer at 12 4 IBM was third with 10 1 Remember when Big Blue owned this market 100 MHz 486s already are available from numerous vendors in the form of PCs based on Intel s new DX4 processor Some analysts believe these latest offerings provide meaningful competition for Pentium In a detailed evaluation on page 117 of its May 231d issue PC Week magazine wrote the following if well designed and aggressively priced they could spell trouble for 60 MHz and 66 MHz Pentium machines That is the top of the 486 line overlaps the bottom of the Pentium line A detailed review can be found in the cover story of the July issue of Computer Sh
4. a minute per page and also is reasonably accurate maybe 98 correct on average Most trouble was repetitive with double ls Il often being wrongly read This would seem to be a problem with proportionally spaced fonts they are more difficult for OCR to handle For example the first occurrence of Gainesville in the January 1989 issue was reported as Gaines v i 1 le An early occurrence of will was reported as w i u Etc Even though underlining was not used the scanner sometimes seemed to think it was So a lot of hand editing was required JAN89 ZIP is the compressed disk file for a WordPerfect approximation to the actual January 1989 issue of the newsletter The original was produced printed and mailed by Thomas Grebe then with Virginia Power in Richmond USA Until JAN89 WP5 was finished during the weekend of July gth and 10 no computer stored copy had been available to known ATP contacts So your Editor went to work on scanner output and some 8 to 10 hours of work later he had a final approximation that in format resembles Portland published issues 1990 through the present Editor Grebe s clip art was omitted and the original 3 columns were converted to the newer standard of 2 The Word Perfect approximation does not use newspaper style continuations on later pages either Free Ghostscript Shows PostScript Ghostscript by Aladdin Enterprises is shareware that allows PostScript to be displayed on comp
5. a university FAX might better compete with E mail using BFT which stands for Binary File Transfer This idea can be found in Richard Dalton s Managing Technology column in the June 27 issue of Information Week magazine BFT allows fax machines to send and receive binary encoded files Your machine however will have to be retrofitted to handle BFT and as you might guess there are two competing standards Microsoft s and everyone else s Why not abandon FAX Resolution is said to be surprisingly low a fax is essentially a transmitted bit mapped image typically 203 by 98 pixels which can be improved to 203 by 196 if you re willing to increase transmission time and cost Who is winning About 25 million machines are now in use There are five to six times as many personal computers as fax machines Yet only about 15 million PC users have electronic mail Short courses on Internet are being sold to the business community via newspapers Page B4 of the July 7 issue of The Oregonian is otherwise covered with closing stock prices on the NYSE and NASDAQ stock exchanges But 1 3 of the page has been sold to The Delta Group Inc which advertises INTERNET the business information superhighway Included is a picture of guest speaker Mark Gibbs author of Navigating the Internet a book said to be worth 29 95 For 369 the one day August 16 offering at some hotel promises to detail What serv
6. at the university Your Editor recalls two rounds of sustained applause for Hoidalen s masterful demonstration of ATPDRAW during two hours early Saturday evening For someone who really knows what he is doing and is quick with the keyboard and the mouse ATPDRAW can be made to do very impressive things Included were automatic coupling to Salford EMTP and TPPLOT But how much of the success of this great demonstration came from Hoidalen as opposed to ATPDRAW itself At the end of the show Prof Riaz asked this difficult question privately The question is appropriate and the answer is not obvious New Ametani CABLE PARAMETERS Prof Akihiro Ametani of Doshisha University in Kyoto Japan spent all but 3 days of the period July 25 through August 13 in Portland working on cable related problems at BPA This was announced as follows on July 3 in News of the Fargo list server as follows remainder of this paragraph Details are interesting in that they differ from any previous visit During the earlier years 1976 1977 etc Prof Ametani was paid by BPA for his work really time spent on EMTP and this included travel to Portland In later years e g 1993 Prof Ametani visited as any tourist would completely at his own expense This year BPA s James Hall the man who arranged BPA funding for ATPDRAW has broken new EMTP ground once again by arranging a novel mixture that allows both BPA and Prof Ametani to make con
7. be seen the grim face of DEC CEO Palmer The accompanying text reads Digital s Last Chance Facing another huge loss the firm readies a turnaround plan Will it be radical enough Inside can be found the summary conclusion There s a consensus that Digital has sunk as low as it can go that it must show upward momentum very soon Otherwise the company risks becoming another Data General or worse another Prime or Wang says Terry Shannon an analyst at Iluminata Yes as this writer has been saying for years the money of time shared computers just does not exist any longer That is the good news for consumers if not time shared computer manufacturers PERUSE is the name of shareware by PC Magazine that was obtained from Robert A Schultz of New York Power Auton NYPA in White Plains In E mail dated April 15 he wrote J am attaching a HOT screen scroll utility I downloaded today from PC magazine BBS At last pseudo Apollo text scrolling for the masses This program was described in Meredith s April 12 PC Magazine issue I think you ll really like it Yes developers in Portland did like it particularly because the price zero and size small were right A third reason to prefer PERUSE to the 17 SCROLLIT by Bromfield Software see the January 1993 newsletter is that PERUSE never seems to be confused by Salford EMTP output as SCROLLIT sometimes was So the latest NYPA discovery was added to the GIV
8. directly to LUNIT6 Slowly such direct output is being replaced by indirect output of either TFLUSH or OUTSIX The latter is temporary only until all text is moved to KILLCODE MUP outside the UTPF remember multilinguality Kwang yi Ger Dr Tsu huei Liu s daughter is the person who rapidly and competently transferred the text including all equations and Greek letters of Prof Ametani s hand written user manual to WordPerfect 5 1 storage This was done during the first two weeks of Prof Ametani s stay in Portland The figures remain to be computerized however Current thinking is that Prof Ametani s printed figures could be scanned and the resulting bitmapped files could be connected to the WP5 1 document at least initially JMARTI Instability with Cables CABLE CONSTANTS use within JMARTI SETUP has been evaluated by Ivano Bonfanti of CESI in Milano Italy Quoting from private E mail dated May 25th he reported about operation on other pieces of that GIS Gas Insulated Substation After installation I immediately tried a new case applied to another of the many cable pieces I have to model this time a 290 m bimodal cable Step responses and power frequency behavior are excellent Also I disseminated the new feature in CESI to the interested people there was a lot of excitement on the subject Trouble with stability soon was reported however Pasting from the public report in E mail News dated June 22
9. he is grateful to have lost forever all personal contact with Mr Argenal of Calgary Alberta Canada Altered Can Am Distribution Policy LICENSE ZIP contains in WordPerfect format the 6 page form letter that is used as a combined licensing and order form by the Can Am user group Fundamental changes are about to be made as this issue goes to press Dr Kai hwa Ger who is Dr Tsu huei Liu s husband has taken over the job of distributing the most commonly requested ATP materials printed ATP Rule Book Salford EMTP and TPPLOT etc He also should be handling ATP licensing After nearly 7 years your Editor long ago has tired of this work and has been actively seeking a replacement for the past year or so He is grateful to Dr Ger for the offer of relief which is happily accepted 50 is the new price for each copy order as many as you want of the printed Rule Book and 10 is the price for each standard 3 disk Salford EMTP and TPPLOT update including 2 ATPDRAW disks at no extra cost ATPDRAW by itself will be 5 For years distribution has been handled as a money losing hobby by your Editor Finally it is long overdue prices are being raised to cover all material costs Labor still is not being compensated as any normal business would so the change is viewed as an interim temporary solution only The best address to be used for all correspondence associated with the new distribution service is 3179 Oak Tree Cou
10. ink cartridges are prices at 30 and 23 respectively Multimedia PCs and CD ROM Multi media PCs are being looked at seriously as an avenue for possible ATP education This was summarized in a paragraph of E mail News dated June 26th from which most of the remainder of this paragraph was drawn The Halderman Diaries Inside the Nixon White House is a new CD compact disk from Sony that has sparked a lot of interest among persons who are politically and or historically inclined Priced at 41 it is a second one of the 9 featured products of ComputAbility in the July Computer Shopper magazine No the politics are not of interest here but the production techniques certainly are as a model for self learning teach yourself ATP Quoting from page 515 This multi media edition contains 700 still images many of which come from the personal scrapbooks kept by Mrs Halderman as well as 45 minutes of video pulled from 30 hours of film shot by Halderman during his time at the White House Ina long monologue about his exposure to the product radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh said the work is well done and very interesting Unlike a regular book using the computer the reader never should be lost According to Dr Limbaugh if some name might be unfamiliar a click of the mouse on it will provide instant explanation Multimedia Books with Byte is the headline of the dominant story on the front page of the Arts and Books sect
11. plentiful The changes had to do with undefined inputs of a block within a feedback loop Laurent Dub did look at some of these TACS changes last year and his reaction was to recommend the use of MODELS instead Why Because newer MODELS provides more control over how and when processing is done There is no right answer for the cases of interest Lack of simultaneous nonlinear solution means that approximation is needed and this is not unique I e those resourceful Japanese experimenters may have improved performance for their problem but at the same time worsened the result for someone else Because of the uncertainty and Mr Dub s recommendation MODELS your Editor chose to do nothing with the changes thus far Mr Dub s work for BPA on ATP finally has come to an end After paying the bill submitted August sth remaining BPA funds total 13 Mr Dub will still be working on MODELS at BPA expense but Transient Stability rather than ATP will provide the framework Color ATP Plotting on Paper Color printers seem to have been largely ignored since the summary of Gabor Furst s use of Pizazz with his H P DeskJet 500C see the final page of the October 1992 newsletter Well the subject was raised again in News of the Fargo list server dated July 7 Prof Laszlo Prikler of the university in Budapest Hungary confirmed full resolution color hard copy in his response This writer had asked About WordPerfect use
12. 0d Dr Ivano Bonfanti is having trouble using certain JMARTI SETUP branch cards that he derives for the different sections of cable that make up the GIS Gas Insulated Substation he is studying The first indication of trouble came in private E mail dated June 9 which reported Among the many models I had to do there was a long cable about 600 m long split in 2 equal pieces with sheaths grounded at the extremes and open in the middle i e grounded open open grounded To model the cable I then used the JMARTI SETUP CABLE CONSTANTS option and connected the 2 pieces in series and connected the sheaths as desired On the obtained JMARTI models I made step responses extended to 8 10 travel times and steady state Both looked fine in the sense that the steady state current was right and the travelling waves were damped Happy with this I inserted the cables in the system and ran the simulations To my surprise the voltage transients appearing from the results were negatively damped in the sense that the oscillations instead of decreasing in amplitude with time were increasing The best frequency dependence experts in the world have been thinking about the problem and contemplating alternatives Those who subscribe to the Fargo list server first received information on the subject from Dr Mustafa Kizilcay of Lahmeyer International in Germany Dated July 29th this 12 Kbyte analysis clearly demonstrates variability of the dia
13. 500 and 4 000 corporate documents are now snatched off the Internet daily The Internet link was a coup Cheap public access for investors job hunters researchers and political activists Some believe the link sets an important precedent for how government information is priced and sold to the public in the digital age For this as for so many other things these days being computer literate is the key of course Needless to say those who shun computers are not impressed But detractors say the Internet isn t easy to use at first and doesn t always locate documents it still costs money and requires a basic investment into computer equipment that many Americans can t afford BENCHINF ZIP in plains ftp directory atp bnchmark was announced by Prof Bruce Mork of Michigan Tech in list server mail dated May 19 This is a contribution from Prof Corwin Alexander of Oregon State University in Corvallis It is said to be an indexed listing of the benchmark files The only problem would seem to be age developers in Portland keep changing details CompuServe was dropped by Gabor Furst before he could report on its FTP service see story in the middle of column 2 on page 6 of the preceding issue This is the good news as reported from the Fargo list server on May 17h That Mindlink address to which Mr Furst has switched is gfurst mindlink be ca His reasons were clear enough Mindlink seems to be working fine I have even manag
14. Can Am EMTP News Voice of the Canadian American EMTP User Group Publishers and Mailers Kwang yi and Kwang chien Ger 3179 Oak Tree Court West Linn Oregon 97068 United States of America Table of Contents Salford Compiler and DOS Extender 1 Improvements to Salford TPPLOT 3 News from Outside USA and Canada 3 More about Electronic Mail E mail 4 Altered Can Am Distribution Policy 7 Optical Scanners Read Printed Text 8 Free Ghostscript Shows PostScript 8 Replacement European User Group 9 BPA EMTP Theory Book in WP 5 1 10 ATP Rule Book using WordPerfect 11 A Reinvented BPA will do what 11 E mail in Portland BPA and Agora 12 News about Laurent Dub s MODELS 12 Color ATP Plotting on Paper 12 Multi media PCs and CD ROM 13 Hoidalen Completes ATPDRAW 13 Mohan Course San Francisco July 23 24 14 New Ametani CABLE PARAMETERS 15 JMARTI Instability with Cables 17 Miscellaneous Intel PC Information 17 Miscellaneous Small Items 20 Salford Compiler and DOS Extender SET CTRLBK NOTRAP should be in the MS DOS file AUTOEXEC BAT if the interactive user wants to interrupt Salford EMTP execution using Ctrl Break prior to the first complete batch execution such as RUN BAT This is an extension to the story about errorlevel see column 1 on page 2 of the preceding issue The need was first announced in E mail News Authorized by Co chairmen Dr W Scott Meyer Editor Dr Tsu huei Liu E mail atp agora rain com Vo
15. DC 27 and DC 28 the existing CABLE CONSTANTS test cases There are 3 classes The first six of ten additions to DC 27 were CASEI which are for overhead lines rather than cables The remaining 4 are CASE3 which involve cables in a pipe Finally the 8 cases of cables without a pipe are CASE2 and all of these were appended to DC 28 Use of the new code with JMARTI SETUP can be found as a new third subcase of DCN 6 It is the 2 phase 600 meter configuration of CESI s Dr Ivano Bonfanti see separate story that is illustrated For this case of instability there seemed to be no difference between old and new code I e both were unstable As for SEMLYEN SETUP no connection has been established thus far mid August Is there a need The fixed dimensions of Prof Ametani s code have not yet been eliminated in favor of variable dimensioning The change would be mechanical but is involved so has not yet been undertaken For the record many arrays are dimensioned 12 12 so this seems to be the limit 12 conductors For nearly all practical initial testing this should be adequate it is reasoned All library functions associated with complex variables have been placed in line for the new code It is important to state for the record that this was never done for the old CABLE CONSTANTS code The use of INTRINSIC to declare functions was only for real variables and functions previously So if fast computers were unusually slo
16. E2 disk of Salford EMTP distribution as shown by DOS DIR PERUSE ZIP 33792 04 15 94 3 17a Yet as explained in public E mail of the Fargo list server dated April 19th PERUSE is not perfect for use by your Editor For one thing there seems to be a conflict with the Ctrl F3 function of shareware PCWrite for file inclusion this inadvertently triggers PERUSE as if the Scroll key had been pressed thereby necessitating an extraneous extra Esc before the PCWrite prompt for a file name is seen A second problem would seem to be lack of a way to write from the PERUSE memory to a disk file This was mentioned in public E mail dated April 17 to which no one responded with a solution To conclude PERUSE allows the user to look at screen history but it does not yet offer a way to copy a chunk of it to disk for other uses This is an important and useful function of Vernon Buerg s shareware LIST the Alt M Alt B and Alt D sequence In any case PERUSE works very well Details are provided in the accompanying DOC file To initiate it using 1 Mbyte of extended memory simply send PERUSE X1024 Novell will acquire Wordperfect Corporation as well as Borland International Inc s Quatro Pro spreadsheet This surprising news was read on page 13 of the May issue of Computer Bits magazine which described the development as possibly the computer industry deal of the decade The duo vows to create a new class of software applications for a ti
17. ES summer meeting Unfortunately this was a year early That beautiful Delta Pacific Resort and Conference Center just mailed advertising about recent improvements In a June 17 letter to recent guests management explains about its newly refurbished 460 room hotel and the addition of our fabulous 225 indoor waterslide It was a nice place Too bad neither your Editor nor Dr Tsu huei Liu ever found the time to use any of the special facilities In retrospect Prof Mohan s choices of the cheaper Radisson hotels in Seattle 1992 and San Francisco 1994 were more practical Gayle Collins of the University of York in England would seem to have asked the most interesting question at the short course A MATLAB user she is happy to be able to postprocess PL4 files using PL42MAT by Raffaele Salutari of 3E Ingegneria srl in Pisa Italy see story on page 8 of preceding issue However she wants more She wants to incorporate MATLAB into ATP simulation the same way TACS or MODELS presently is It was Laurent Dub who first believed that this might be possible He showed that MATLAB does allow connection to external programs at least for some multitasking operating systems e g for the Apple Macintosh of Carson Taylor at BPA So what about MS Windows Can the Salford FTN77 x86 compiler be used possibly with ClearWin When Ms Collins returns to York she will attempt to answer these questions by a personal visit to Salford Software
18. I could get was 530kB That s just not enough for ATPDRAW Rather than altering the configuration files I rebooted and started up OS 2 With the same devices available that is the sound card and CD ROM I had 611kB free more could be available I just used the default configuration ATPDRAW ran just fine One caveat ATPDRAW only works in full screen mode If you try ATPDRAW ina window OS 2 suspends it until you switch back to full screen mode Mohan Course San Francisco July 23 24 Prof Ned Mohan of the University of Minnesota gave his portable EMTP short course immediately prior to the 1994 IEEE PES Summer Meeting in San Francisco The attendance list that accompanied the class notebook contained 48 names and addresses making this the biggest single EMTP short course ever Beyond the obvious quality popular content and popularity of San Francisco to what does Prof Mohan credit his success Hard work In the preceding issue it was stated that Prof Mohan began early and advertised hard But your Editor did not understand how hard at the course Prof Mohan indicated mailing to some 15K addresses Foreign registration too would seem to have reached record highs even on a percentage basis Of 21 total only 4 came from Canada a popular source in years past Totals for other countries follow 4 from Japan 3 from England 2 each from Mexico and Spain and finally 1 each from Australia France Korea South Africa
19. MIT BASE CASE Yet versions older than August of 1993 were not affected by the error which accompanied the delay of TACS and MODELS initialization until after manually specified initial conditions had been read see mention in the October 1993 newsletter STATISTICS simulations involving nonlinear elements in 2 or more subnetworks would die prior to June 9 if other than the final subnetwork had the most nonlinear elements Buddy Crill of Power Engineers in Hailey Idaho USA sent this writer a Monte Carlo data case that failed in table dumping New trouble from an old bug was found to be responsible In the January newsletter can be found the sentence The second subcase of DC 7 pointed to the need for a second correction in SOLVLN use of REAL S CCHAR for INTEGER 4 KSING Well the name is SOLVNL and DC 7 was not very demanding since it did not have 2 or more subnetworks with nonlinearities As explained in News of the Fargo list server on June 14 Mr Crill received quick attention because he was able to send his data to Portland by E mail he found a colleague who used CompuServe Missing LISTSIZE DAT no longer will result in an error termination at the start of execution The idea for better treatment came from Randy Suhrbier who supports different DEC VMS versions in different places For him extra file LISTSIZE DAT was a nuisance since he typically would use the limiting BPA dimensions anyway no shortage of RAM or di
20. ORNL we can purchase only Energy Star computers unless a special exemption is received Until recently there were no Energy Star Pentiums so people were either buying Energy Star 486 not good or not buying not good either Oh the suffering that goes on at ORNL it is hard for your Editor who has never even seen a Pentium to show much sympathy The 486 microprocessor itself just how cheap is it these days FAX advertising from Supercom a Portland area computer store was received at BPA on July 7t and this shows Cyrix 80486DX33 DX40 and DX2 50 chips priced at 140 162 and 179 respectively So the answer is plenty cheap Today it would be industrial strength stupid Bruce Williams speak to buy a crippled SX in light of these DX prices As for 386s they seem to have gone the way of the dinosaur Miscellaneous Small Items Job descriptions that mention EMTP no longer are uncommon One can be found on page 65 of the May issue of JEEE Spectrum This begins Grad Student Ph D Assistantships and possible assistant engineer or postdoctoral positions open for only highly experienced engineers in power quality expert systems and EMTP This was submitted by Prof Alex Domijan a colleague of Prof Dennis Carroll at the University of Florida in Gainesville USA STATISTICS simulations involving TACS or MODELS generally were in error prior to May 21 if the base case simulation was not omitted using the request O
21. PDRAW by Hans Kristian Hoidalen see separate story also is available from Frankfurt Fearing a flood hundreds of requests the Can Am user group generally has refused to distribute ATPDRAW and its WordPerfect documentation The set requires two high density disks and the same postage 75 as the 3 disk Salford EMTP But North Americans who can not perform FTP transfers of Internet now can order from Germany August 6t a complimentary copy of the printed documentation was received by Air Mail in a large padded envelope The plastic covered 4 ring binder nicely protects the DIN A4 pages thereby preventing damage to the edges of the pages Content was clearly marked by a colored printed label that has been slipped into the clear plastic pocket on the edge The printing reads ATPDRAW User and Reference Manual Bonneville Power Administration The Congress Center in Hannover Germany is to be the site of the formative first meeting of the new European EMTP user group Originally this had been scheduled for late September But then it was delayed until November 7 and gth as explained by Dr Kizilcay in public E mail dated July 25t The main reason for this postponement is my appointment to become a professor for electrical power systems at the Fachhochschule Osnabrueck that was received from the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony at the end of June It is likely that my change from Lahmeyer to FH Osnabrueck would ta
22. ad more easily if file contents were put in motion by scrolling sideways within MS DOS EDIT Author Hoidalen then confirmed that such bitmapped Post Script comes from the built in hard copy capability of GIGS So we are stuck with the waste low accuracy and large storage for a while Except for gray shading use is essentially monochrome for which only a single bit of each byte is used This is 75 waste and explains most of the extra factor of 4 or 5 in the compression ratio I e an ordinary unformatted monochrome bitmap would be much less wasteful Bit mapped graphics the preceding paragraph can not be avoided it would seem Author Hoidalen confirmed at the short course in San Francisco that he knows of no alternative today Although GIGS offers alternatives to PostScript all are believed to be bit mapped e g PCX files A consequence of the EPS use is that the average popular publishing software will not display the figures on computer screens There are alternatives however and two of these should be discussed in the next issue where there should be more room OS 2 Version 2 1 seems to be a superior platform for running ATPDRAW This information came from Glenn Wrate a graduate student of Prof Bruce Mork at Michigan Tech in Houghton Michigan In E mail dated July 2224 he wrote I was having trouble getting ATPDRAW to run on a machine with CD ROM sound card and virus scan TSRs The most free lower memory
23. ated July 17t value unity to suppress the PostScript output did not work prior to correction on July 14 Users of older versions are advised to avoid the change Improvements to Salford TPPLOT Power and energy signals of the output vector now are identified in PL4 files This followed a request from BPA s Randy Suhrbier as explained in more detail in the final story of this issue To see how Salford TPPLOT uses the information consider the following illustration from the first subcase of DC 4 There is a single power at the end of branch voltages and the corresponding energy at the start of branch currents Type 4 entries node voltages 5 ASW10 6 BSW10 7 CSW10 Type 8 entries branch voltages duas HHH HHH TA 3 ENDA A10 4 Bl BSW1 Type 9 entries branch currents 8 Bl BSW1 9 GENB Bl LOr chee An asterisk star immediately before a variable number indicates power or energy This will always be seen for C like files the preferred alternative For the FORMATTED or UNFORMATTED alternatives such marking will be seen if and only if TIMESPAN precedes the CHOICE command of which output has just been illustrated In plotting both power and energy on the same graph users are reminded of the need for scaling e g the AUTO button within the CURVE window X Y PLOT was improved on August 12th when the need to respecify variables was removed Previously the following warning message was seen upon the return to tex
24. attachments of all kinds so there may be some useful capability there which Schultz does not yet have on his BBS The node I am connected to mary seems to have ten thousand user ids in the same parent directory I am in So this is a big operation Our local paper said something about them having a 50 thousand applications backlog being handled at 1500 per month by a staff of one I hope the lines do not get so congested that I can not get through So far so good I had to wait only 5 minutes to get on this time Only in New York only in New York In Taiwan Salford EMTP became available by FTP transfers of Internet Using public E mail of the Fargo list server Prof Nanming Chen of National Taiwan Institute of Technology announced this service on May 2 First we had Martin Jones in Nottingham who offered such service within the United Kingdom Next came Laszlo Prikler in Budapest Hungary offering service on the continent Now Prof Chen in Taipei The revolution is ongoing and obviously it has ramifications for printed paper as well as computer programs Question how much longer should newsletters such as the present one continue to be printed in quantity on paper and mailed using stamps and envelopes Do not bet on free paper forever Korea first contacted your Editor by E mail on May gth when an inquiry concerning TACS in DCG EPRI EMTP was received from Prof Chul Hwan Kim of Sung Kyun Kwan University in Suwon The add
25. e Plans of competitors Lotus IBM H P and WordPerfect Novell also are mentioned How big is the E mail market There are 40 million electronic mail boxes according to International Data Corp And that s expected to double over the next three to four years Northern States Power NSP in Minneapolis Minnesota USA has E mail for messages if not for FTP file transfer The first such communication was received in Portland from address usnspqzp ibmmail com on July 220d This was sent by Glenn Wrate a graduate student of Prof Bruce Mork at Michigan Tech in Houghton Michigan who has been working at NSP this summer Asked for a summary of the system Mr Wrate submitted the following in a second message later the same day Internet mail is accessible to IBM Mainframe users via IBMMAIL Individuals that use PROFS ELF IE Office Vision etc for internal IBM mainframe mail can send and receive mail over the Internet if their organization allows it All they need do is send a note to IBMMAIL REGISTER In a few minutes an automated response with an IBMMAIL account name will be received This account name for example mine is USNSPQZP and ibmmail com combine to form your Internet address Any Internet user can now send you mail I believe it costs your organization 50 cents for each piece of mail received P Sending mail to someone on Internet is more complicated There are two possibilities set up a permanent account or add
26. e than using some neutral currency such as the ECU The ECU is to money as Esperanto is to language it is foreign to everybody at the street level Plastic would seem to avoid all problems associated with foreign checks see previous News Furthermore the currency conversion to DM seems to be performed at a rate that is the most favorable for the consumer or so travel experts advise American tourists Note that the 3 or 5 charge that VISA might add for a 100 purchase in the USA would be small compared with the fee for a foreign check 10 to 20 Even more important would be the convenience credit cards would allow the consumer to avoid a trip to his bank It also would allow purchase by E mail or telephone including FAX without any further identification To conclude Dr Kizilcay s hope to allow credit cards seems to be extremely attractive and if details really can be managed this would be yet another first for ATP users In public E mail of the Fargo list server dated July oth Dr Kizilcay provided details for 3 possible credit cards The service fees are VISA 4 7 plus VAT 15 5 4 of the total American Express 4 5 plus VAT 15 5 18 Eurocard 3 9 plus VAT 15 4 49 So I will try to get the acceptance by VISA and Am Expr The rate of Eurocard was attractive but as for Master Card one year of business history is required Dr Kizilcay explained So he hopes to begin with just two AT
27. ecent sheet of advertising from these people shows a 12 msec Conner drive 545 Mbytes for 460 If this is not big enough try the 9 msec 1 Gbyte behemoth for 815 Intel may reduce Pentium chip price is the headline of a Bloomberg Business News story on page D12 of The Oregonian dated 18 The story begins Intel Corp seeking to keep rivals at bay is expected to cut prices of its top of the line Pentium chips as much as 25 percent for the second half Some analysts said the cuts could be even deeper as much as 45 percent Intel on average shaves 5 percent off old products prices and 8 percent to 9 percent off newer ones each quarter Pentium price cuts have been bigger as competition has heated up The PowerPC partners also have the financial muscle to go against Pentium and the PowerPC sells for about a third the price of Pentium On chip emulation in RISC processors presents clear X86 alternative is the title of a summary that spans the bottom of pages 22 and 23 of the June 29th issue of PC Week magazine This is associated with the larger story about PowerPC The Tower of Power PC Untapped potential in search of a killer application Well if software emulation of Intel has not been an effective weapon in the struggle of RISC makers why not switch from software to hardware On chip emulation is much faster than software based methods because the logic for translating X86 instructions is etched into the CPU i
28. ed to do some FTP s So I am quite satisfied The Mindlink charges are between 130 and 200 Canadian depending on the option you choose Even ignoring FTP I will be saving about C200 a year Not bad By Agora standards US 60 year which would be about C 85 Mindlink looks expensive But by CompuServe standards it probably is cheap America On Line AOL is a major competitor of CompuServe in the USA As explained in public E mail of the Fargo list server dated June 5 mail from this service originated with Thomas E Field of Nashville Electric Service in Tennessee USA who then was usin address lt Genesing aol com gt In E mail dated June 2 Mr Field confirmed that AOL like CompuServe does not offer FTP But he was thinking of ways to circumvent the limitation as with BITFTP He wrote Although there isno FTP there may be a way around it as your Jan 94 newsletter stated I have to find another node that has FTP which can use the attach option from an EMAIL message The IEEE may have such an option at ftp ieee org The person to contact is with the U of Minn at gopher boombox micro umn edu Does any reader know anything about these latter two addresses Yes that umn edu is shared by Prof Ned Mohan in Minneapolis this is the same place About AOL the joke among Internet users is that the O stands for off rather than on because lack of FTP means that AOL users are off line with the rest of the world Intern
29. equest word that is used to transfer to the all new cable constants program from Prof Ametani The request is made at the top of CABLE CONSTANTS as the following illustrates BEGIN NEW DATA CASE CABLE CONSTANTS CABLE PARAMETERS lt lt Etc geometry gt gt BLANK card ending frequency cards BLANK card ends cable constants BEGIN NEW DATA CASE BLANK Much of the data of CABLE PARAMETERS is the same as the data of CABLE CONSTANTS but there are important differences So there are separate user instructions pages for the ATP Rule Book Arbitrary i e non circular cross sectional shape of a conductor is one important extension that is available in Prof Ametani s new CABLE PARAMETERS code Theory for this can be found in Electrical Engineering in Japan Vol 111 No 2 1992 Ametani and Fuse are authors of Approximate method for calculating the impedance of multiconductors with cross sections of arbitrary shapes A second extension is continuous transposition which has been called snaking Finally there is user supplied shunt conductance A practical illustration that demands this third and final new feature is the railroad signaling of Stuart M Kay see the April 1993 issue Data applicable to the London Underground was supplied by Mr M Kay and was worked with by Prof Ametani during his stay in Portland Standard test cases CASE DAT of the new code have been appended to
30. et e mail sells boxer shorts is the title of a story on page d13 of the May gth issue of The Oregonian The subtitle reads San Francisco s Joe Boxer Inc a maker of underwear figures out a new way of reaching the twentysomethings Included is a picture with the caption This new Joe Boxer billboard ad in downtown San Francisco offers an e mail address instead of a phone number So why E mail address joeboxer jboxer com rather than the usual telephone number Supposedly E mail opens up one on one communication Rather than calling an 800 number and getting an operator who just has some information they get the Joe Boxer culture really wacky and really real according to a Joe Boxer spokesman There are 20 million people on the Internet We ll definitely be seeing more of this according to one Internet provider In Joe Boxer s case it seems that 5 to 20 messages arrive a day and each gets an individual response About underwear This is revolutionary Saudi Arabia first was heard from by E mail on July 12h when Ismail Hamza of EWR in Makkah sent a message from Compuserve address 71232 2731 Mr Hamza was interested in various disk files In his response your Editor advised did you have no other choice than CompuServe Universities generally have real Internet and hence FTP This probably would be the easiest way for you to gain access to ATPDRAW and many other files of the plains server seek the cooperation of
31. g it from the WP file As illustrated in list server mail dated June md anyone then can see the bit mapped nature Within the User Manual file USER_MAN WP Dr Liu chose Fig Box 4 with name menu23s eps as an example Consider the left edge of a dozen contiguous lines each about 240 characters wide 8866611ffffffffffffffffffffff000000000000000000ff0000000 8866611fffFO00000fFFfFFfFFFfFFfFFFFOOfFFFFFfFOOQOfFFfFfFfFOOfFf0000000 8866611fffFFFOOFFFfFfFfFfFfFfFffFffFfFFOOFFOOOFOOFFOOFFFfFOfFf0000000 8866611fffFFfFOOFfFFfFfFfFffFfFffFffFfFfFOOfFfFOOO0000FFOOFFfFOfFf0000000 8866611fffFFFOOFFFFfFfFfFfFfFffFffFfFFOOFFOOOO00O0FFOFFFfFOfFf0000000 8866611fffFFOOFFFOOO0O00O0FFFFFFOOFFFFFOOOFFOfFOFfFOfFf0000000 8866611fffFfFOOfFfFFfFfFfFfFfFfffFffFfFfFOOO0000fFFOOFFfFOfFOFfFOfFf0000000 8866611ffffFfFOOFFFOOOO00O0FFFFFFOO00000fFFOFFFFOFfFOfFf0000000 8866611fffFFfFOOFfFfFfFfFfFfFfFfFffFffFfFfFOOfFOOO0OFFOFFFOOFfFOfFf0000000 8866611ffFfFFFOOFFFfFfFfFfFfFfFffFfFfFfFFOOFFOOFFOOFFFOOFfFOfFf0000000 8866611fffFO00000fFFfFFfFFFfFFfFFfFFOOOFFFFOO0OFFFfFfFOOFfFf0000000 8866611ffffffffffffffffffffff000000000000000000ff0000000 Yes this says I 50 Most of this is either black 0 or white f when printed on white paper The intermediate values of 8 and 6 on the left edge would seem to be gray shading of the left edge of the menu This is near the top of a small menu that has the title Nonlinear Resistor imbedded in the heading border Yes that too could be re
32. gonalizing transformation matrix T as a function of frequency and the fact that the representation is wrong near zero frequency required for stability it would seem Then on July 22 came the unexpected and radically different 7 Kbytes from Robert Meredith of NYPA in White Plains This begins with the following paragraph At the New York Power Authority I have been able to build EMTP models of cable systems which inherently model wave propagation in the conductive and or magnetic materials of the cable and earth The methods are akin to finite elements techniques and may be used efficiently when there is sufficient symmetry While I am not prepared to discuss these methods by E mail at this time I can discuss the physical processes which need to be modeled and the errors of the Marti approach My expertise is not in the mathematics but in comprehension of the physical effects Finally there is Prof Akihiro Ametani of Doshisha University in Kyoto Japan who is visiting Laurent Dub and Taku Noda the latter his former student on the Oregon Coast as this paragraph is being keyed on August gth All three have ideas although they have not yet been shared with the Fargo list server public E mail So this paragraph ends as it began The CESI problem of instability is in good hands More information should be available soon Miscellaneous Intel PC Information Chicago is the code name of the next major release of MS Windows which e
33. hat same day by air from BPA s Mail Room to its 9 primary contacts The disk file MODELSRB ZIP is 171 Kbytes in size Shortly thereafter copies were sent by FTP to both Houghton Prof Bruce Mork for placement on the plains FTP server and Nottingham Martin Jones A one day course in MODELS was taught by author Dub to more than 40 ATP users on April 18t This was at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby outside Copenhagen the day before the general meeting see preceding issue Large attendance is noteworthy because the course was voluntary and cost extra 700 DKk or a little more than 100 Mr Dub supplied the following summary Topics included using MODELS to describe the operation of control and electrical components in a circuit using the three levels of initialization supported by MODELS using different time steps in different submodels of a data case using self adjusting variable time steps in a model using a model as a multi branch nonlinear circuit element with the new type 94 black box nonlinear element of ATP and using MODELS s standard data input output interface as a connection between ATP and user supplied Fortran and C programs The October 1993 newsletter mentioned a subject that never was completed Very sophisticated changes to TACS have been made in Japan Prof Ametani brought them But they are not simple corrections See next issue Itis worth clarifying this now that space is more
34. he responses follow generally a few days later Prodigy though will soon change to live celebrity chats with room for up to 3 000 people at once Right as long as customers are willing to pay Prodigy will continue connecting the lines But who would want to be in a discussion involving 3000 persons Even a group of half a dozen sometimes is difficult to control News reports of the Fargo list server were discontinued following Roger Argenal s final diatribe dated July 19th Your Editor tired of the arguing and decided it distracted too much from the real goal ATP development Prof Bruce Mork obviously was bothered by the exchange e g his articulate private E mail dated July 7 but seemed to do nothing publicly No other subscriber responded At any typical public meeting the person in control e g a meeting chairman would simply prohibit such emotional exchanges and could eject anyone who persisted A list server without such controls seems to be of limited usefulness Anyway this was the conclusion of your Editor who never enjoyed very much the burden of writing news twice a week anyway So this load has now been left for others to carry Your Editor has decided not to waste more of his own time by further sharing any forum with the Roger Argenals of the world Your Editor decided at the last minute not to mail his response to Mr Argenal s final vitriolic outburst Your Editor decided simply to count his blessings
35. hical assembly of ATP data Funded by BPA Mr Hoidalen worked on ATPDRAW at EFI in Trondheim Norway between June of 1993 and May of 1994 see story in the July 1993 newsletter Mr Hoidalen visited BPA the week before the IEEE PES Summer Power Meeting and gave a 2 day presentation to interested employees July 19 and 29th This was followed by Mr Hoidalen s larger but shorter 2 hour presentation in San Francisco see separate story about Prof Ned Mohan s course User documentation became available from the plains FTP server as announced by Prof Bruce Mork in public E mail of the Fargo list server dated May igth In compressed form as ZIP files these WordPerfect manuals are not difficult to store or transmit There are 3 files with two the Reference Manual and the User Manual being of general interest to users REF_MAN ZIP 462984 05 19 94 10 00a USER_MAN ZIP 225484 05 19 94 10 05a Usage requires decompression however and readers are warned that this operation is hazardous to free space on the disk Unheard of compression ratios of around 20 to 1 are involved This comes from the graphics of course Bitmapped PostScript is the cause of the enormous file size This first was predicted by Stephen Boroczky of Pacific Power in Sydney Australia in public E mail of the Fargo list server dated May 1S Tt then was confirmed at BPA by Dr Tsu huei Liu who managed to make one of the figures visible by extractin
36. ices exist What business benefits are offered The most promising business opportunities In addition to the book one receives free access software What a deal maybe free coffee and donuts too Southern California Edison Company SCE in Rosemead first sent E mail to your Editor on May 19t when a note from Jim McCabe arrived Unlike mention in the October 1993 issue this May message did not come from CompuServe Instead it came directly from the company which now has FTP capability Address mccabejc sce com is being used by Mr McCabe Power Technologies Inc PTI of Schenectady New York first sent E mail to Agora on May 17 Pasting to avoid error this came from ta short pti us com which is the address used by Tom Short Regular naming has the family name and a period preceded by the first two initials So Mr Short indicates Dr Gary C Thomann s address should be gce thomann Good deal another important E mail gap has been filled Can neighboring General Electric be far behind EMTP involved contacts there continue to struggle to gain E mail access to the outside world In recent months your Editor has talked to both Anne Bozarth and Dr Daniel Baker about the problem Others in the complex certainly do have and use Internet addresses In fact your Editor sent a file to one of them on June 2384 This was for BPA s Gerald Lee who was involved with the procurement of some capacitor bank His informa
37. ion J of The Sunday Oregonian dated July 17th The subtitle continues CD ROMs are leaping onto the information superhighway But so far their destination is unknown After some interesting but nontechnical introduction the author Paul Pintarich explains that CD ROM has become a full blown adjunct to the book publishing industry And in the past two years CD ROMs on a variety of subjects have been finding their way into bookstores A color picture of a computer screen with windows icons and color illustrate the use One small window is entitled Margin Note 1 About this the author writes Interactive ability allows readers to write margin notes into the story text Notes may be kept removed or changed at will Another window that seems to be entitled Annotation Editor has a number of display areas buttons and a color picture of some man About this the author writes Through the use of windows a story can be enhanced visually by using a movie option So much for the illustration How big is the market Approximately 2 000 CD ROM titles are in publication The Northwest s largest book wholesaler Pacific Pipeline in Kent near Seattle Washington has a current inventory of 175 CD ROMs Ordinary floppy disks are being used for a less radical change to the publishing industry expanded books These are books published on floppy disks They contain full unaltered texts of original hardcover editions but with a ve
38. ke place with the beginning of the new academic year at the end of September Also other ATP users who want to participate in the meeting have responded that the November date is more convenient for them BPA EMTP Theory Book in WP 5 1 The 700 page EMTP Theory Book of BPA is being converted to WordPerfect 5 1 storage from the crummy old paper copy that was submitted by Prof Hermann W Dommel of the University of British Columbia located in Vancouver B C Canada in 1987 More information should be provided in the next October newsletter Work has been started by Kwang yi Ger Dr Tsu huei Liu s daughter who recently finished her second year as a student of journalism at the University of Washington in Seattle USA Ms Ger is a good writer and she knows WordPerfect Initially the content of all figures will be ignored If any reader has ideas about how best to handle graphics of BPA s Theory Book he is encouraged to share his understanding with the Can Am user group Current thinking is that initially all figures might be scanned to produce bitmaps To avoid making this added burden mandatory the files should be kept external Later one at atime some of these then might be replaced by vector storage For those readers who may have forgotten or may never have known Prof Dommel signed a contract with BPA around the end of August 1981 Among other things cable research by Luis Marti this contract provided paymen
39. l 94 3 July 1994 of the Fargo list server on June 2oth If one uses batch files the assignment will be made automatically e g see end of RUN BAT So the problem is exceptional and was not seen for many weeks here in Portland The problem will occur immediately after booting a computer before the first batch execution ends Then without NOTRAP Salford EMTP will hang in response to Ctrl Break it has been found Version 2 71 of Salford DBOS x86 seems to have solved incompatibility problems of TPPLOT in recent months The first such report came on May 27 in public E mail from Ashok Parsotam of Southpower in Christ church New Zealand Mr Parsotam wrote I tried running ATP6 vintage TPPLOT the version with which I was experiencing difficulties with DBOS 2 71 As Dr Mork suggested the TPPLOT worked fine Your Editor summarized the situation as follows in E mail News 2 days later This has to be a model termination of a call for help It is interesting that DC 18 graphics were correct which proved the graphics themselves were compatible Somehow TPPLOT with its windows mouse and other extensions is more demanding In retrospect Prof Bruce Mork offering the right guess upgrade DBOS to Ver 2 71 was not unusual Previously we had advised others of the importance for 2 71 for networking also Prof Mork s advice Now we know for some computers it has even more basic advantages TPPLOT works Did anyone e
40. me when all applications will be network applications Well maybe Energy Star is the name for green PCs see the July 1993 newsletter at Oak Ridge National Laboratory ORNL in Tennessee USA This was explained by Walter Dykas in public E mail of the Fargo list server dated May 27th I mentioned Energy Star a while back This is a U S government DOE Department of Energy initiative that essentially puts power management functions into desktop computers Besides lower power consumption for chips some Energy Star implementations after a time delay shut down peripherals Energy Star is done in various ways that are still evolving One method uses a power management board and a device driver in the config sys Currently there are ways to disable this but things will only get more complicated for the personal computer user and system manager One of my fears is starting a simulation to run over a weekend coming back Monday and finding out the PC went to sleep an hour after I left As your Editor observed in response it is entirely possible for Monte Carlo STATISTICS simulations to run minutes or even hours without accessing the disk This is because there normally is no PL4 file and the LIS file might not be updated for several energizations because of buffering of variable LU6VRT in the STARTUP file Energy Star is not voluntary needless to say Mr Dykas wrote about procurement complications too At
41. movex relmovey translate relrotatedeg rotate 501 Removing this line by adding in column I restored the correct orientation If Ghostscript is going to be used to examine ATP plots should the GRAPHICS file carry a new parameter to control such addition or omission No it probably would be better if Ghostscript could do the rotation can it If so how Apple Macintosh too has Ghostscript Because graphics of Macintosh ATP are otherwise undeveloped this takes on added ATP importance The interested Mac user is referred to page 616 of the July issue of Computer Shopper magazine The following has been taken from a short story entitled Mac Ghostscript by Jeffrey Sullivan This is one of two offerings under the title Freebies of the Month Mr Sullivan writes Today Mac users no longer have to choose between second cousin QuickDraw_ printers or expensive PostScript support The Free Software Foundation has released a freeware PostScript interpreter Although Adobe may gnash its corporate teeth the prospect of a freely available PostScript rasterizer has many entry level folks grinning What MacGS does is provide a stand alone PostScript interpreter that reads PostScript or Encapsulated Postscript EPS files and renders the image they represent MacGS lets you either save the image or a section of it as a PICT file GIF PBM portable bitmap or PPM portable pixmap or print it to a non PostScript printer Yes this so
42. ns nodak edu The 52 page MODELS chapter of the Rule Book was mailed by BPA to the same 9 contacts on August 5th More about Electronic Mail E mail JAN89 ZIP is the compressed disk file for a WordPerfect approximation to the actual January 1989 issue of the newsletter About its creation see the separate story about optical scanners Availability of JAN89 from the plains server was announced by Prof Bruce Mork in list server mail dated July 14 Since then all other issues have been converted and made available These begin with SEP88 note the unusual first month and cover every quarter since then Both subscription to and desubscription from the Fargo list server has posed a challenge for some in recent months so readers will be reminded once again File EMAIL ZIP on the GIVE2 disk of Salford EMTP distribution provides the answers see Prof Bruce Mork s pioneering article in OCT91 DOC Microsoft Mail Server Debuts Product will address new uses of E mail is the headline of a story that covers most of page 15 of the July 4 issue of INFORMATION WEEK magazine Is this more FUDding According to the story on June 21 Microsoft introduced its next generation messaging product the Microsoft Exchange Server The Windows NT based messaging server surpasses the features and functionality of the current Microsoft Mail system More than 60 independent software vendors have announced plans to build products for Exchang
43. of the Fargo list server requested the following on May 20th Has any PLATOMAT user been Slowed by the conversion of larger PL4 files If so now would be the time to speak up Thus far there has been no response however so the Salford C compiler has not yet been applied to Mr Salutari s program But this still could be done are any newsletter readers concerned Final thought is PL4TOMAT available on the plains FTP server If not it should be send to Prof Mork
44. ooking smoke and mirrors see column 2 on page 12 of the preceding issue may not have been invented in Portland The name that is repeated many times is Gardner who has been awarded six contracts totaling 1 1 million to lead a seminal management retreat evaluate the abilities and attitudes of more than three hundred members of BPA staff and help craft both the marketing plan unveiled in February and the business plan due out in June While the legality of Gardner s work for BPA has not yet been challenged there would seem to be big trouble in California Some of the consultant s work for SoCal Edison which recommended him ran afoul of Edison s internal audits and is currently under investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission for billing irregularities As this writer has observed before a lot of this reinvention nonsense seems to be unrelated to either engineering or financial science Now it is learned that for once Washington a major supplier can not be blamed for much of the smoke or even the mirrors This is the surprising thing Spilling water to help salmon continues even though the practice might actually do more harm than good This is the lead story in the May 30th issue of Clearing Up It begins NMFS officials apparently ordered a rollback of the controversial spill program at week s end as suspicions mounted that the Fish Passage Center was cooking the books on gas bubble disease monit
45. opper which is entitled 100 MHz Should you buy a DX4 What does the name mean Not what one might think Author Bruce Brown explains while the DX4 name implies speed quadrupling the Intel DX4 actually multiplies the speed of internal CPU Processes 2 2 5 or 3 times depending on the specific model Two versions of the CPU were available at introduction a 75MHz version that communicates externally at 25 MHz anda 100 MHz chip that can work with either a 50 MHz or 33 MHz system bus Meanwhile DEC continues to bleed This is a continuation of the paragraph with the same opening sentence in the preceding issue Digital Equipment planning more layone is the headline of a story on page B1 of the May 7 issue of The Oregonian What is the latest excuse Readers can be sure that the situation is really serious when neither the economy nor particular events e g restructuring costs are being blamed This time survival of the company provides the justification President and CEO Robert Palmer told employees that failure to act promptly will result in greater loss of employment In fact the entire enterprise could be at risk According to the New York Times News Service story by Glenn Rifkin DEC now has 92K full and part time employees and has just announced plans to cut at least 20 000 more employees in an effort to reduce costs and return to profitability On the cover of the July qth issue of Information Week magazine will
46. oring FPC summaries showed zero problems but raw data tables indicated nitrogen was found in 100 percent of some tested fish NMFS also appeared ready at the urging of regional scientists to get a second opinion from a group of experts to decide whether the controversial passage program is turning into a fish kill One source was investigating whether criminal penalties might follow from ordering spill that kills listed fish By way of clarification NMFS is understood to be the National Marine Fisheries Service and cooking the books is slang that means false accounting or bookkeeping think of LEC as explained in the July 1993 newsletter So until the law the Endangered Species Act is modified the environmental wackos seem to remain in control Region needs no help from policy hit men in the White House is the title of an editorial by Cyrus No on page 4 of the June oth issue of Clearing Up There is mounting evidence that the politically correct water spilling was not merely bureaucratic stupidity instead it seems to have been ordered by staff of President Bill Clinton himself Saving us from ourselves are Will Stelle of the White House Office on Environmental Policy and David Cottingham a former OEPer now counselor Mr No concludes that regional politicians are worried about their own futures because of the debacle Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield used our calculations on spill cost benefit with a lower total cost
47. pected pause of 2 or 3 seconds was experienced presumably as the disk restarted With a lot of RAM and disk caching the disk is not needed much of the time Can Am floppy disks were provided for just one person this year Prof Yim Wha Yeong of Kwangwoon University in Seoul He agreed to pass the set of five 3 5 inch disks after using them himself to Tae Won Kwon of KEPCO for distribution to other Koreans The 16 copies of the preceding paragraph were the property of the recipients This is another sign of the changing times students are expected to bring their own disks if they want the latest copies of ATP materials Mexico was the destination of the one printed Rule Book that was carried to the course This was the country most in need it was reasoned So M C Ramon I Vila Vivaldo of Instituto de Investigaciones Electricas was given the copy for which he promised to send a check for 25 later not yet received as of August 29th Dr Tsu huei Liu and your Editor ended the regularly scheduled presentation with an hour of overview based on transparencies as in preceding years Unlike preceding years installation of Salford EMTP disks was not illustrated Then following an intermission of some 15 minutes a demonstration of TPPLOT and any other subjects of interest began This ran until about 20 30 for the half dozen or so diehards who lasted to the end Vancouver British Columbia Canada was the site of the 1993 IEEE P
48. proposed distribution of ATP and its Rule Book within England Great Britain is big enough and has enough ATP interested persons to make local distribution worthwhile in spite of availability from a larger better stocked more ATP products center in Germany Remember no ATP monopolies are being granted and any two ATP licensed users are encouraged to share materials Certainly cost related distribution as proposed qualifies Yes Ms Collins mentions only materials and postage but she is advised to add a minimum of 10 or 20 to cover possible losses and partially compensate for the pain It is hard to believe anyone would complain and if they do let them submit their own proposal with significantly lower prices For licensing Ms Collins now uses her own separate BRITFORM which is a modification of EUROFORM used by Dr Kizilcay Like Dr Kizilcay Ms Collins has been authorized to validate the licenses on behalf of the Can Am user group Original copies of the licenses then are mailed back to Portland periodically and names and addresses are shared with Dr Kizilcay To conclude ATP interested parties within the U K are fortunate to have this second alternative A printed copy of the April newsletter was mailed by BPA to each of its primary EMTP contacts 9 including Dr Kizilcay s distribution center in Germany on May jgth the same day APR94 ZIP was sent by FTP to Prof Bruce Mork for placement on the plains server plai
49. reatest is the section heading that begins page 591 of the July issue of Computer Shopper magazine The 2 page story by Barry Brenesal begins on page 590 and is entitled Dueling DOSs The story about Novell begins There s been no significant improvement in operating systems to match Novell DOS 7 0 since MS DOS 5 and before it since MS DOS 3 Instead of building on current MS DOS code as IBM has Novell bought and substantially enhanced DRP s DR DOS 6 The results differ substantially from IBM and Microsoft usually in Novell s favor Many standard DOS commands for instance are dramatically enhanced in Novell DOS 7 0 Its DISKCOPY can retain an image of your current floppy disk as a file for later transfer to another disk HISTORY the command line editor maintains a list of commands entered inside applications unlike DOSKEY in MS DOS 6 and PC DOS 6 Two copies of the operating system installed on separate computers are able to share everything files printers and CD ROM drives without additional software Though networking is the most visible difference between Novell DOS 7 0 and the competition it s of little practical advantage if you don t network On the other hand Novell DOS 7 0 s DOS Protected Mode Services DPMS API benefits everybody Needing dynamic disk compression e g STACKER to free disk space on both BPA computers Dr Tsu huei Liu and your Editor asked Laura Young BPA s local comp
50. ress is chkim yurim skku ac kr Of course your Editor pointed out to Prof Kim that deficiencies of the EMTP version licensed by EPRI were not shared by ATP For example perhaps DCG EPRI EMTP did not allow GO TO and DO statements at the end of the past decade Prof Kim cited such new capability in Version 3 0 But ATP certainly did using Laurent Dub s MODELS So ATP needs no such minor enhancements to TACS it was explained KEPCO the Korean Electric Power Company heads the Korean ATP user group so this should be the most important site for E mail access on the peninsula Well on June 19t chulhyu lee sent a message to your Editor from address lt Ich hanbit kepcorce re kr gt It read This is just to test my e mail function first I ll be able to communicate with you by e mail if possible Please let me know that you received this message Of course your Editor responded immediately but has received nothing more from kepcorc re kr pub bamork incoming is a new subdirectory in Houghton for files that are to be sent by FTP to Prof Bruce Mork of Michigan Tech In E mail dated April 5th he wrote Files or information that is to end up on the plains ftp site can be sent to me by anonymous ftp at ftp ee mtu edu Please do not contribute files without first getting approval After you receive approval the file may be transferred at your convenience Typically I will then unarchive the file scan it for possible viruse
51. ress the message on the fly To set up a permanent account send the following lines to IBMMAIL INTERNET internet register atp emtp vm1 nodak edu end I used this method to setup account 11117505 for the ATP list server atp emtp vml1 nodak edu To use the on the fly method the following lines are used to begin the message again sent to IBMMAIL INTERNET internet to atp AGORA RDROP COM report end The report line is not necessary but it gives you a report that tells if IBMMAIL received the information correctly I have not seen anything official on this so I do not know if this second method will set up a permanent account This first method definitely does Also FTP is not available Internet brings corporate data to new audience is the headline of an Associated Press story by Rob Wells on page F1 of the July 3rd issue of The Oregonian The information in question is what by law American companies must report to government regulators Wall Street firms corporate lawyers and others pay an estimated 250 million a year to be wired into this information gathered by the Securities and Exchange Commission Earlier this year a wider public got its first chance for an easier look at a main source of this data the commission s Edgar system An experimental link was made between Edgar and the Internet Malamud who runs the computer system that handles the Internet link to the SEC data said between 3
52. rfectly But the rest might as well be garbage Who knows of special logic for engineering or mathematics At BPA H P software Gallery Plus 5 0 that came with the hardware was used and this clearly is not suitable for the Theory Book It is obvious that something has to be changed As the process is made more accurate it should be made faster too the one Theory Book page required some 10 minutes which is impractically long How about character recognition of FAX During a telephone conversation April 1 1992 MODELS author Laurent Dub informed your Editor that he had software for which such claims are made The following night your Editor printed a page of text using the default font on our LaserJet series II printer He then sent this to Mr Dub s computer via BPA s separate FAX machine Two tries were required since the first transmission failed to terminate properly the alarm light turned on for some unknown reason The second copy was received normally according to Mr Dub but it required some 15 minutes to process and the recognition was very low maybe 5 But since then Mr Dub has reported that other FAX are much more recognizable requiring only minor clean up hand editing To conclude the success of OCR with FAX seems variable and unpredictable During June of 1994 BPA s Dr Tsu huei Liu and your Editor reconsidered the same old H P scanner Using newsletter text the process is much faster less than
53. rning message of DBOS see the January 1993 issue has been solved by Prof Laszlo Prikler of the university in Budapest Hungary In public E mail of the Fargo list server dated April 28th he wrote The medicine comes Remove DELETE or RENAME the DBOS INF file from your DBOS directory and the message disappears I do not know what should really be in that file but nonexistence of the DBOS INF file pains neither DBOS nor me This seems to be good advice for persons such as Prof Prikler who do not use the Salford compiler But at BPA the INF file must be retained In E mail News dated May 29th your Editor reported the following Prof Laszlo Prikler s now famous medicine removal of DBOS INF is not recommended for those who have the Salford FORTRAN compiler too Using Dr Tsu huei Liu s computer here at BPA this writer was shocked to learn that renaming DBOS INF seemed to convert a regular version of the compiler into some demonstration or student version That is there was immediate trouble compiling almost any EMTP subroutine because of some overflow the error message begins Demonstration limit exceeded So the INF file does have meaning and this seems to be associated somehow with use of the compiler If NOPOST of STARTUP is zero rather than unity batch mode vector graphics CALCOMP PLOT use of ATP will result in PostScript output ATPPOST 001 etc As explained in public E mail of the Fargo list server d
54. rsatility allowing a number of functions including pictures sound author s annotations and end notes To conclude such CD ROM products are great But how complicated and expensive is the production and the reproduction to make copies for others Has any reader done such production himself Can CD ROM production reasonably be done in the home How much more than a conventional VCR video recorder for television a Camcorder the associated home movie camera and 3K multimedia PC would be required Recall your Editor s observations that were initiated by an inquiry from Dr Sayeed Ghani of the University of Northumbria in England see the July 1993 newsletter The subject of ATP education has not been forgotten Multimedia upgrade kits for conventional PCs seem inexpensive enough This will be illustrated by recent advertising from Computer Club a computer store in suburban Lake Oswego The cheapest offering is 199 which is described as follows Philips CD ROM drive Sound Blaster compatible Sound card w CD audio Audioware software Speakers Microphone Microsoft Bookshelf The most expensive offering has a price of 349 What more does one receive Well Double speed CD Rom drive Power amplified speakers and Sft 10 Pack 10 different CDs seem to provide added value Who is using such equipment Hoidalen Completes ATPDRAW Hans Kristian Hoidalen is the author of ATPDRAW a program that allows grap
55. rt West Linn Oregon 97068 There is no change in the bank account checks still should be made payable to Tsu huei Liu More later Optical Scanners Read Printed Text An optical scanner is a device that allows computers to convert printed text into a corresponding computer stored text file At least this is the theory or the hope when used in character as opposed to bit mapped mode Initially any printing is converted to a bit map Then a computer program tries to convert the raw pixels to characters To this second phase the acronym OCR optical character recognition is frequently applied After an unfavorable initial consideration early in 1992 next paragraph scanning and OCR finally has been used successfully to recover some old EMTP related text for which disk files had been lost This is important progress For years an H P ScanJet Plus had been connected to a 20 MHz 386 based computer that was located about 50 feet from your Editor s office at BPA After hearing favorable reports of use by others your Editor finally decided to ask Walter Powell to demonstrate operation This was on January 24th 1992 For years developers at BPA had interest in a disk file of the EMTP Theory Book So a typical page which one has long since been forgotten that included a figure a significant equation Greek letters and sub or super scripts was selected as a test Not surprisingly ordinary English language text was recognized pe
56. s TACS or MODELS or rotating machinery Type 59 S M or U M in that the first name of the naming pair has no special significance So any plotting program needs more help and this now follows possible comments of the PL4 file see BEGIN PL4 COMMENTS in the July 1993 issue For all 3 basic PL4 file types the beginning is marked by a character string that begins 013NPOWER It should come as no surprise that the random access_ C like files again demonstrate their superiority over the other two sequential alternatives in that a plotting program can access the new information directly For C like files experimentally reading through the signals to find the end is not required To learn what has been done for Salford TPPLOT see the second story of this issue A second thought is about the value of special plotting programs such as Salford TPPLOT Yes separate general commercial alternatives such as MATLAB can be used But the distinction between time and frequency or the identification of power and energy is not obvious for these non ATP programs To conclude the plotting might be better in some ways but the convenience of EMTP related intelligence is nonexistent in general commercial products Raffaele Salutari of 3E Ingegneria srl in Pisa Italy is the person who created PL42MAT as explained in a story of the preceding issue About the conversion of large files 400 Kbytes no one has reported any trouble Public E mail
57. s rezip it and then transfer it to the plains site Your Editor used this new facility for the first time on May 18 to send the April newsletter to Prof Mork Following a successful open ftp ee mtu edu command anonymous must be sent as the user name it was found Jakarta Indonesia has CompuServe as demonstrated by Dr Mustafa Kizilcay of Lahmeyer International in Frankfurt Germany This was explained in public E mail of the Fargo list server on June 1S The story is interesting Received by Agora E mail dated May 17 had subject Greetings from Brunei via Jakarta Dr Kizilcay wrote J have succeeded to establish a CompuServe link to Jakarta Indonesia through my cheap modem made in Taiwan I left the expensive Lahmeyer modem at home since it is very sensitive to telephone exchange apparatus Of course this writer answered immediately to 100117 2536 within CompuServe and Dr Kizilcay later reported that the message was received there immediately Like FTP or Telnet CompuServe s mail delivery would seem to be a real time operation Compu Serve has no way of knowing where in the world Dr Kizilcay next will be picking up his mail think about it About modems Dr Kizilcay had been disappointed in Copenhagen see preceding issue he was unable to dial out to CompuServe from his hotel room So for this later trip he used a different modem More expensive and sophisticated is not necessarily better when it comes to tra
58. similar 18 second speed by telephone Readers are reminded that all Pentiums are not created equal As for some of the faster ones Mark Hinrichs of Los Alamos National Laboratory LANL already has a 90 MHz model from Gateway according to E mail dated July 26th In his reply the following day your Editor asked Mr Hinrichs to let us know if you do significantly better than the 15 2 seconds of Robert Schultz Novell DOS 7 is the latest operating system to be approved for Salford EMTP use by Harald Wehrend of the University of Hannover in Germany In public E mail of the Fargo list server Mr Wehrend wrote the following on May 3th Novell DOS version 7 is the continuation of DR DOS 6 0 with some very interesting additional features Here in Germany one can find prices of about 70 00 DM for Novell DOS As I understand the technique of Novell DOS 7 the main advantage is the DOS Protected Mode Service DPMS that makes it possible to highload programs like DISKCACHING UNDELETE DISKMAP and STACKER above I MB Within my usage for about 3 months now I have found it to compatible with ATP DESQview X and MS Windows as I use those programs For the effect of Novell DOS s dynamic disk compression on bitmapped PostScript see the separate story about ATPDRAW by Hoidalen With the disks of both ATP development computers at BPA now full the space saving aspect of DOS 7 is a dominant advantage Novell DOS 7 0 the latest and g
59. sit to BPA by the two of them on July 14 that Mr Noda proposed a solution for Prof Murai and others Prof Murai also responded with his own idea Both experts agree that the problem can be solved Look for details in the next issue News from Outside USA and Canada The dominant EMTP news from overseas has to be reorganization of the European EMTP user group see later separate story to replace the former LEC Leuven EMTP Center in Belgium World wide distribution of ATP materials already is a reality and the first user group meee now is scheduled for Hannover Germany November 7 and gth The United Kingdom U K now has another source for the more common ATP supplies Gayle Collins at the University of York in England This all began on May 11 when Ms Collins sent private E mail to your Editor from lt gfc ohm york ac uk gt She wrote J have recently set up an account here at the university for the purpose of distribution of atp materials This account is solely to recoup the cost of materials and postage I have found that in this country a lot of the companies are not on internet and want both the old rulebook and what has been translated of the new plus the atp disks In public E mail the following day your Editor endorsed the idea as follows This is old business dating to times long before Copenhagen and probably before the end of LEC There is no reason Dr Kizilcay s project should interrupt plans for
60. sk with his computers obviously Yes the program knows its limiting dimensions so these can be used if no LISTSIZE DAT can be found This change entered the UTPF July 1st Included is a new one line warning message that might be written to LUNIT6 at the start of execution Note Vardim input LISTSIZE DAT could not be connected Use maximum sizes C End of INCLUDE is the beginning of the ATP created comment card that marks of end of data that accompanies any particular INCLUDE usage Prior to correction on June 24t the following file name which identified the disk file was garbage typically a number such as 30 The error first was called to your Editor s attention by BPA s Robert Hasibar Following correction the two card images immediately preceding the blank card ending source cards of DC 58 correctly appear as IC End of SINCLUDE File name DC58INC3 DAT IC End of SINCLUDE File name dc58inc2 dat BLANK card ending source cards Power and energy signals of the output vector were identified for plotting purposes over the 4 of July weekend This was in response to a request from BPA s Randy Suhrbier who correctly observed that without such a change a plotting program such as his for DEC VMS computers has no way of informing the user which variables are not what they seem to be voltages and currents He is right of course Power and energy are fundamentally different from variables of control system
61. t at the University of Nottingham in England singlehandedly converted LEC s disk files of the ATP Rule Book to WordPerfect format The present writing is a continuation of the same story in the previous issue Chapter XXIII which is for CABLE CONSTANTS was completely overhauled by BPA s Dr Tsu huei Liu Availability of the reworked files was announced by Mr Jones in public E mail of the Fargo list server dated June 3 One structural change was the splitting of LEC figures that unified in a single disk file two or three 80 column card images stacked vertically With the desire to use both metric A4 paper and North American paper 11 inches tall it was impossible to position the larger figures so someone would not waste substantial space at the bottom of some pages By splitting the figures explained in public E mail dated May 31 such wasted space was minimized On the other hand disk file size particularly uncompressed increased Chapter XXI which is for LINE CONSTANTS was completely overhauled by BPA s Dr Tsu huei Liu But difficulty changing the graphics has delayed availability The same is true of JMARTI SETUP A Reinvented BPA Will Do What BPA has been helped in the development of its competitiveness project by a pricey Salt Lake City based marketing consultant according to the opening paragraph of a long story on pages 13 and 14 of the May 20d issue of Clearing Up It would seem that those professional l
62. t mode following an X Y plot Warning Re specify plot variables now using or NAME whether or not X Y PLOT is sent to end X Y This could have been avoided by the use of rather than NAME This continues to be seen if the user has selected his variables using NAME But there will be no such message if is used instead either through the keyboard or the mouse clicking on the entries of the CHOICE output The program saves the old command line if any and will re execute it automatically upon the return to text mode The user will not see the command itself but he will see its effect the table that documents which variables were selected X Y PLOT usage is illustrated by a new disk file XYPLOT execute by XYPLOT For this example the new variable table appears as follows Request Type Curve Name 1 Name 2 1 4 1 NODE2 2 4 2 NODEI Japanese laser printers sold within Japan generally seem to be incompatible with full resolution alternatives of Salford TPPLOT The problem first was explained to others in News of the Fargo list server dated July Je Quoting from News dated July 17th Prof Yoshihiro Murai of Gifu University in Japan has trouble producing laser quality plots on his Epson LP 1500 laser printer Well the lack of H P Laserjet Series II compatibility has been confirmed by another Japanese user of the LP 1500 Taku Noda who presently is studying with Laurent Dub on the Oregon coast It was during a vi
63. t of about 100K to Prof Dommel for delivery of the book within 4 years Well the 4 years passed but the Theory Book named Reference Manual only for purposes of the contract was not ready This was around the end of August 1985 So without penalty BPA allowed Prof Dommel another entire year This time the manuscript was submitted However it was not yet usable because it included many pieces of intellectual property that belonged to others and for which the professor had not obtained permission to use This explains paragraph 3 of the official BPA form letter by Drs Liu and Meyer dated June 10 1987 Since the early fall of 1986 when BPA received the manuscript from the contractor there has been an effort to obtain permission for BPA to publish all portions of the book that were copyrighted by others This has been completed to the satisfaction of the BPA contracting officer who just recently gave his approval for BPA to print this work and to distribute copies to others Back to the first paragraph The perceptive reader might already have asked himself convert from paper to WordPerfect Did Prof Dommel never supply BPA with a computer stored e g magnetically stored copy of the text That is correct only a paper copy was supplied by Prof Dommel who claimed that his disk files somehow had been lost So the keying by Kwang yi Ger continues in West Linn ATP Rule Book using WordPerfect Martin Jones a doctoral studen
64. tafa Kizilcay in public E mail of the Fargo list server dated June 13 This historic communication began with the following outline Topics ATP EMTP Order Form Currency for payments Licensing agreement EUROFORM ZIP ATP EMTP Fall Meeting The order form and licensing agreement are available as WordPerfect files in directory pub atp license of the plains FTP server as announced by Prof Bruce Mork in list server mail dated June 17 Also in that new directory is an updated copy of Can Am licensing which is disk file LICENSE ZIP About currency it should surprise no one that German marks i e deutschmarks abbreviated DM are required Dollars were mentioned 3 months ago for ease of comprehension by American readers and others in the world who were unfamiliar with German currency Credit cards might later provide a more convenient means of payment however as was discussed in public E mail of the Fargo list server dated June 19 Your Editor wrote the following remainder of this paragraph the matter is complicated and is still under study It was learned that in Frankfurt each credit card is handled by a different bank Dr Kizilcay s hope was to allow 4 cards VISA Mastercard American Express and Eurocard Consider one enormous advantage of plastic credit cards rather than paper checks the conversion from foreign currencies to German marks DM would be done automatically This seems far more attractiv
65. that brings the returning fish investment down to 925 926 per fish this estimate in a letter to Oregon Gov Barbara Roberts The potential for another White House crisis is very high Sooner or later national media will tie the White House to 925 926 fish and another Clinton White House scandal will be in the making Yes a million dollars for each fish saved does seem a little expensive This from the same persons who want to take over the nation s now private and voluntary health care system It s good experience is being gained by practicing on fish first Retirement of your Editor from BPA was scheduled for the last day allowed September gnd However with approval of all concerned departure has been delayed by six months Look for details in the next issue E mail in Portland BPA and Agora RAINet Inc an RGnet affiliate network is the way the Internet access that is used by Agora describes itself in advertising that was noted on page 27 of the July issue of Computer Bits magazine Internet TCP IP Join the Internet Access the World s Information Super Highway 56K Frame Relay 56K leased lines 14 4K dedicated lines SLIP PPP dial in Service at Competitive Rates Internet IP Service for Oregon and SW Washington The phone number is 503 227 5665 and the E mail address is sales rain net BPA acquired Internet for what reason Reports of those who attended that May 24t presentation at BPA see
66. the beginning of page 13 of preceding issue are amazing For months your Editor and other advocates had concluded that Internet might eventually be coming to BPA because our arguments in its favor had been persuasive I e it had been assumed that the computer establishment at BPA finally appreciated its value Or if not that at least BPA computer politicians understood the importance to those engineers who had demanded it Apparently not The explanation given at the May 24th meeting was that the connection to Internet had been forced on BPA by Washington I e finally Internet has been mandated government regulation by a higher power The winding rutted dirt road that now connects BPA computers to the rest of the world is going to be paved to become an information superhighway in spite of the best efforts of BPA computer planners to prevent such progress What irony Each U S government agency seems to have its own problem with stupid computer bureaucracies After hearing this story about BPA Internet what reader can sympathize with the Energy Star plight of Walter Dykas at ORNL see later mention That young man simply does not know how well off he really is News about Laurent Dub s MODELS The 52 page MODELS chapter of the Rule Book revised by author Laurent Dub was received by BPA in both printed and WordPerfect form on August sth Single sided printed copies were made on white paper and these should have been mailed t
67. tion was in the form of an MS Word for Windows document After first PKZIPping and then UUENCODEing the file was sent to G E address dmichelluc fel sch ge com without difficulty Robert Meredith of New York Power Authority in White Plains USA has been experimenting with E mail of his own separate from that of colleague Robert Schultz The first message was received by Agora on July 11 from address lt meredir mary iia org gt Mr Schultz wrote I am composing this under pine on my new first Internet access from home The cost is just right free An outfit in Washington DC or Hackensack New Jersey depending on whom you believe is offering free internet service They call themselves the International Internet Association and their connection point is in Hackensack which is a local call for me They also offer free internet access to anyone via an 800 number which is charged at rate of 14 15 cents a minute for the long distance service Whether or not it will remain free remains to be seen Apparently the 800 number charge includes a 3 cents minute subsidy to pay for the Internet Those of us with local call access seem to get a free ride just for the privilege of exposing us to the new option of long distance service in their menuing system I m just getting my fingers wet not my feet yet I seem to have FTP Kermit and other resources at my disposal _ Pine seems to offer the possibility of sending and receiving
68. tributions to ATP Just as Hans Kristian Hoidalen worked for BPA via an intermediary Pacific Engineering PE so Prof Ametani too will be reimbursed by PE But there is an enormous difference Mr Hoidalen was paid for his time the dominant cost whereas Prof Ametani will not be so paid BPA is reimbursing only Prof Ametani s expenses for the trip to Portland airplane ticket hotel and meals As a result Prof Ametani s new computer code more about this later remains his own property However it will be available to anyone including BPA via ATP The contribution from Prof Ametani to ATP is being handled the same way the contribution of program EIGEN by CESI and ENEL was handled see the April 1994 newsletter To conclude the arrangement with Prof Ametani is a bargain for BPA a unique opportunity to simplify what otherwise might be a suicide mission for BPA s Dr Tsu huei Liu and this writer Thanks to Jim Hall a new sort of ATP cooperation with BPA has been made possible For a mere 5K in estimated expenses plus PE overhead BPA is able to take advantage of Prof Ametani s free advice during three weeks and perhaps also participate in a modification of the way the industry handles cables and their frequency dependence The first radical change in a decade now is being considered For BPA the leverage is great the cost is small whereas the potential EMTP payoff is enormous CABLE PARAMETERS is the new r
69. tself Software emulation also requires more frequent access to memory which bogs down processing Intel itself seems interested in such technology A short news story on page 10 of the same June 20 issue of PC Week magazine begins Intel Corp and Hewlett Packard Co have united to develop the next generation of microprocessor technology Intel and HP joined forces to develop compilers and processors that are up to 10 times faster than today s fastest Pentium chips Expected in 1997 or 1998 these CPUs will be binary compatible with Intel s X86 architecture Integrated audio is the latest extension of computers to catch your Editor s eye This term can be found in advertising for Ambra notebook computers on pages 78 and 79 of the May 231d issue of PC Week magazine Integrated audio lets you record play back and edit anything from comments to conferences No need to carry a separate tape recorder This particular book size product was not short of hard disk space 450 Mbytes so presumably this is where the editable sound would be stored As with the addition of FAX capability to modems the addition of audio recording to a portable computer appears to be a sure winner But how would the editing work Could one tamper with syllables and perhaps splice in synthesized speech The next step then would seem to be the use of such speech with ATP and TPPLOT error messages But who is Ambra IBM will close Ambra Computer
70. unds like exactly what ATP users will be needing Robert Meredith of New York Power Authority NYPA in White Plains provided the latest information about Ghostscript in E mail dated August 4 He wrote remainder of this paragraph I just FTPd the latest version of Ghostscript for DOS and Windows as well as Ghostview for Windows from ftp cs wisc edu It took probably close to 2 hours to get all the files downloaded They all seem to work though This is version 3 0 of the Ghostscript and version 1 1 of Ghostview The files available and their sizes are Fonts for all versions gs300fnl zip 1360K gs300fn2 zip 740K gs300dos zip 823K gs300win zip 382K gs300ini zip 406K gsviewll zip 496K That kept my modem busy As usual the DOS version is fast but does not have the flexibility offered by Ghostview i e changing screen orientation Ghostview does a very nice job of displaying our ATP postscript plots At 1280 x 1024 even at four plots per page all are readable These versions are hot off the press with dates of August 1 to 3 1994 DOS version Windows version Replacement European User Group This is a continuation of the story that covers most of page 10 of the preceding issue It documents the slow replacement of the former LEC the Leuven EMTP Center on the campus of K U Leuven in Belgium The first general announcement of services of the new ATP distribution center in Frankfurt Germany was made by Dr Mus
71. uter representative for Novell DOS 7 On July 8t Ms Young was provided with the July issue of Computer Shopper which contains advertising by ComputAbility Consumer Electronics on pages 514 and 515 One of the 9 colored feature boxes is for Novell DOS 7 The description is followed by PC 45 95 Interested readers are advised of the toll free telephone number 800 554 9903 This street price is much better than the information at the end of the Dueling DOSs story of the preceding paragraph That story concluded with a Product Listing box that included the following price Sugg List Price 69 95 upgrade As known for a long time list prices often mean little So what happened at BPA Around the beginning of August Ms Young explained that DOS 7 could not be ordered now because no more money remained in her budget This is yet another indication that those salmon are too expensive Cycloid Systems Inc of Flin Flon Manitoba Canada supplied BPA contractor Laurent Dub with the Salford C compiler This was preparation for work with compiled MODELS more about this next time The manual was brought to BPA June 28t at which time your Editor quickly noted that all FORTRAN library functions seem to be available impressive Of course DBOS x86 is used In the preceding issue telephone numbers were missing Graham Wood Cycloid Systems work 204 687 2038 home 687 3544 fax 687 3663 The ERROR illegal application XX wa
72. uter screens It does for PostScript what PRINTGL by Ravitz Software did for HP GL see story on page 18 of the April 1993 issue Ghostscript is better than PRINTGL in that it is royalty free and can be given to anyone The copy in use in Portland came from Robert A Schultz of New York Power Authority NYPA in White Plains early this year The 1 29 Mbyte archive GS26 ZIP is dated 16 November 1993 and the README DOC indicates one distributor to be Free Software Foundation Inc 675 Mass Ave Cambridge Massachusetts 02139 USA If NOPOST of STARTUP is zero rather than unity batch mode vector graphics CALCOMP PLOT of ATP will result in PostScript output ATPPOST 001 etc As explained in public E mail of the Fargo list server dated June 8 Ghostscript is generally compatible This writer took ATPPOST OO1 that was produced by simulation using the data of DC 53 Ghostscript does output a message about a missing font Can t find or can t open font file phvr gsf for font Helvetic substituting Ugly but this is just a warning The plot looks perfect except for an unwanted 90 degree rotation counter clockwise i e the time axis points upward The NYPA Post Script assumed landscape orientation whereas Ghostscript seems to assume portrait Searching the file for 90 this writer found the following line relrotatedeg 90 def relative rotation of So next he searched for relrotatedeg and found it only in rel
73. veling with modems it would seem Again KISS Movie stars of Hollywood would seem to be the latest group to have caught the E mail fever The following was noticed in the front page news summary of the June 3 5 1994 edition of USA Today newspaper STAR CONNECTION Communicating with celebrities by computer e mail is catching on Actress Rosie O Donnell left picture gets 20 to 30 messages a week There s even a new book E mail Addresses of the Rich amp Famous But how do you know there s really a star on the line 4D That s the right question all right remember those famous Christmas greetings from LEC around the end of 1992 In any case how big are these group discussions Page B6 of The Oregonian dated June 16 carries an Associated Press story by Evan Ramstad entitled Cyberspace draws celebrity crowds adoring fans It is said that record labels movie studios book publishers political parties and public relations firms have discovered they can reach a large audience quickly and directly through the on line systems The five largest Prodigy CompuServe America Online Genie and Delphi have about 3 million paying customers and are used by 2 million more analysts estimate Compu Serve and America Online hold live chat sessions in which up to 500 participants see the discourse scroll by and can jump in with questions The others put out a notice seeking questions for a particular celebrity T
74. ventually should be called simply Version 4 0 Page B20 of The Oregonian dated May 24 contains a story about its release which was announced by Bill Gates himself at the spring Comdex Windows World trade show in Atlanta Georgia It will be out late this year chairman Bill Gates said Monday So says Associated Press author Marc Rice As for size of the MS Windows world Mr Rice writes Now in its third generation sales estimates range from 30 million to 50 million units Your Editor can readily understand not knowing how many copies have been stolen But how is it possible for there to be such ambiguity about sales Maybe Microsoft has kept its sales figures secret Yet another indication of the dominance of MS Windows was noted on page 8 of the August issue of Computer Bits magazine at last count there were almost 300 accelerator board manufacturers But almost all of them rely upon less than a dozen chip sets produced by only 7 chip set manufacturers Hard disk prices continue to drop Supercom is the name of a computer store in a suburb of Portland At least once a week a sheet of advertising from this store is received by BPA s fourth floor FAX machine in the middle of the night The following prices for new drives are seen on FAX dated June igth 179 for 256 Mbytes 185 for 261 Mbytes and 199 for 344 Mbytes For national mail order consider Direct Connections which uses toll free order number 800 572 4305 A r
75. ver hear how Jeff Selman of Tri State in Denver fared with his own DBOS update Mr Selman was mailed the Version 2 71 disk and has not been heard from since usually a sign that the change worked Finally static var modeler Gabor Furst outside of Vancouver British Columbia Canada reported such a cure for his new Toshiba 4700CS in private E mail dated August igth Yet your Editor continues to compile and link both Salford EMTP and TPPLOT using Version 2 66 Why some computers particularly portables have problems is not known Fortunately the cure is known First Intel Pentium timing of Salford EMTP came from Robert A Schultz of New York Power Authority NYPA in White Plains This was inserted at the last minute toward the end of the preceding issue It was an important story that broke at the last minute so could not easily be given the prominence that it really deserved Since then others have tried Pentium for the support of Salford EMTP Jerry Nordstrom of BPA is one who acquired for other non EMTP purposes a 60 MHz ALR Evolution V ST Operation seems to be correct although simulation is a little slower than reported by Mr Schultz Using either MS DOS SMARTDrive or Salford disk caching the DISK_CACHE qualifier DC 1 remained in the time step loop for just over 18 seconds This is still very good but 3 seconds more than Mr Schultz had observed Someone from Siemens near Atlanta Georgia USA earlier had reported
76. w for CABLE CONSTANTS this provides a new explanation that had been forgotten in recent years Arithmetic has been converted from the original 32 bit COMPLEX to 64 bit COMPLEX 16 This was done at the end of the first week and it did change some of the answers significantly Fortunately Prof Ametani was here to approve of the new results G field numbers e g 10G12 4 for output were used in places by Prof Ametani s code For reasons of uniformity only these have been replaced by E field equivalents e g 10E12 4 that are standard elsewhere in ATP For those unfamiliar with the difference E field will always use an exponent whereas G field may or may not depending on the size of the number Unfortunately there is no gain of precision when the exponent is not needed I e G field numbers do not provide a system level alternative to optimal encoding of ATP e g for time step loop output In fact precision seems to be lost when an exponent is not used For example one column of the modal table was observed to contain the numbers 0 36840 and 1 29042E 02 both left adjusted So G field usage has been removed LU6VRT of STARTUP may be decreased by the new CABLE PARAMETERS code users should be warned The user may start with a larger value e g the 32768 as distributed by the user group but any such positive value will be reduced to zero as the new code begins This is a temporary need because the new code uses WRITEs

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