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Here's a good example of an important control room. Generation 101: How PJM Operates and Dispatches. This is the control room that controls the power grid for the eastern United States. The presentation covers what the people there do. The slide "Dispatch Operations" shows the operating positions, and the next slide shows a more recent picture since the displays were upgraded.

This is a very organized operation. There are five positions, and they have specific responsibilities. Each position has a number of screens of its own, and the positions are placed close to the big wall screens most relevant to them. The transmission operator is in front of the transmission screens, the generation operator is in front of the generation screens. Those are the two people who directly run the grid. The shift supervisor, master coordinator, and reliability engineer sit further back on a raised level. There's a viewing gallery in back, behind windows, where visitors can watch but can't bother anybody. Interestingly, there are curtains for closing off the viewing windows, and they're on the control room side.

If you want to see some of the displays they are looking at, the data is available in Flash format. There's a economic system involved in power generation, with bids for power, so all the market players have to be able to see the data. The interaction between the control room and the bidders is complex. The control room does have the option of ordering "non-economic operation", where they tell generators what to do instead of merely sending price signals, but they only do that in emergencies. In more serious emergencies, they can order "conservative operation", which means all generators come on line and provide power to meet the load, regardless of cost. That's very rare.

Note that this is an operating center, not a response center. There's a routine workload. Over the course of a day, generators are started up and shut down as the load changes. The two people in front mostly handle that. The three people in the back row are there mostly to deal with problems as they come up. The physical layout reflects that. A data center or a security monitoring center has a completely different workflow, and may need a completely different physical layout.

It's a worry. Power grids use the Internet extensively. Since "deregulation", generating companies and distribution companies are separate businesses, and the generating companies compete with each other. The generating companies make bids, the distribution companies buy from the bids, and the grid operator (a neutral party) keeps the players connected and runs the market. Bear in mind that these systems don't have much excess generating capacity. 12-20% excess capacity during peak periods is typical. For a good overview of how this works, see Background on Generation Control, an online training course from PJM, the biggest grid operator in the world.

Most of the communication between the various players takes place over the Internet. The bid handling is done on machines connected to the Internet and many of the applications involved are Windows-based. The execution of a power buy involves the transfer of a set of switching decisions from the bid-handling machines to the machines which actually have control over generation and transmission equipment.

Details of the PJM Dispatcher Application and Reporting Tool are available. This is the main way generation companies and the dispatch center communicate. The user interface is Flash in a browser. Bid and buy information is shipped around as XML.

If the Internet-based apps go down, they revert to "conservative operation" and stop trying to optimize the economics. All generation facilities, even high cost peaking plants, crank up to at least standby power levels, in case they're needed. Export of power to outside the control area in trouble is stopped. Coordination is over the "all call", a squawk box system, and satellite phones. Worst case, everybody backs down to a preplanned schedule of what they're supposed to be doing at each hour of the day. In this mode, millions of dollars per hour are being lost, but the grid can probably be kept up.

One worry is insertion of bad data into the bid system via the Internet. The California ISO had outages in the early part of the last decade when energy traders put bids into the system which resulted in transmission congestion, forcing the CAISO to buy more expensive power. Back then, California had an energy auction every half hour. That was an extreme of deregulation. Now, the grid manager has more authority; generating companies put up data which offers price/quantity curves as bids, the grid operator takes them in increasing order of cost, and "energy traders" like Enron are no longer involved in hour by hour decisions. So there's more stability in the system.

Internet-based attacks against the control systems are also a worry. There definitely are connections to the external Internet. PJM seems to be using XML, in well-defined formats, to pass data across that boundary. They're not dumb. The problem is making sure that there aren't unwanted connections somewhere amongst the hundreds of different companies which connect to the control side of the system.

It's interesting that PJM doesn't rely on "security through obscurity". Hundreds of thousands of people have to know how this works. So they put the manuals, training materials, and live operational data on the Internet. (Right now, there's a problem near the West Virgina/Ohio border.)

perhaps it was about including buzzword as a text processor.

Apple's issue with Flash has something to do with the potential of Flash, in hands of a real Developer. It can render App Store useless. Control is gone.

I speak about things like these

http://g.ho.st/
https://buzzword.acrobat.com/

Flash Lite 3 is already distributed free (to developers) if you want to code an application for Symbian using Flash. Of course, Symbian has nothing to say about it.

Imagine entering a website which will stream music to you and offer mp3 downloads for a fee, all in web browser. That is the worst nightmare of Apple.

Buzzword is excellent. It allows users to create print-perfect documents, collaborate with any number of co-authors, and control versions and keep track of changes. PC Magazine calls it "an impressively well-designed application." I use it daily and I have to say I love it. http://buzzword.acrobat.com/

Let me know when you can do apps like picnik or buzzword in JavaScript, CSS and DHTML without having a nightmare of browser incompatabilities to work around.

Try https://www.acrobat.com./ It gives you access to Buzzword, ConnectNow, My Files (file locker) and the ability to create and share documents... and best of all, its all FREE.