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Speed of Light Measurement Using Ping
Thomas Colthurst writes "You've no doubt already read the story of ping,
but have you ever used it to measure the speed of light?" Here's a case where all that cat5 on college campuses can actually be used for education ;)
And according to Unreal Tournament, the speed of light is about 50 miles per hour.
That you'd only be measuring the amount of pr0n being downloaded by physics students... unless you had your own clean segment.
I never thought such a seemingly simple thing as a ping command could be used in a way related to physics/the universe. At this rate, we may be able to explain the space-time continuum by using a simple chat relay message sometime within the next couple of years. Hmm... AOL and the Universe... mind boggling isn't it?
"One man's meat is another man's poison."
--Bugs Bunny
...someone is very close to getting some sweet government funding to play quake all day!!!
M: "Joel, did you get those speed of light measurements this time?"
Joel: "No, It looks like we'll have to fire up another game. You wanna play one-on-one or co-op M?"
M: "Sweeeeet!!!"
:)
In high school, I measured geeks' resistance to pain and hunger by beating you up and taking your lunch money.
Do the same thing with pong, then I'll be impressed.
why go through all that trouble when all you need is a flashlight and a stopwatch?
Mess Stuff Up
We Slashdotted Los Alamos!
xxx.lanl.gov.is down.
"Here's a case where all that cat5 on college campuses can actually be used for education ;)"
Did I just hear education implied when talking about a college campus network? All these marvelous filesharing programs do little but propogate porn.
Hell, perhaps you could somehow measure the speed of light by observing how fast the search "teen sex" on Kazaa fills up.
1. Ping a machine farther away for more accurate results.
2. Have the entire lab flood-ping it to collect statistics at a faster rate.
3. Get some other shools doing this at the same time so you can compare results.
I recommend slashdot.org.
-... ---
Why on earth was a US Defense department group having a meeting in Norway? I need to get my boss to start having meetings in Maui. Sheesh.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
"ping -i .01 > tempfile1.txt" where ">" (the so-called 'pipe' symbol)
Then what's this thing: | ?
:)
Why do I keep typing pythong?
This is a little off topic, but not much so bear with me.
A friend of mine found physics easy in high school, but found his teacher unbearable. So he would always convert his (generally correct) answers into inconvenient units, you know, pico-thises, nano-thats.
One time the question was "what is the speed of light?"
His answer? "1 lightyear/year"
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
But I digress.
The text of the review in question, for you AC's who only read the part of the website above the fold:
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
Dunno how many of you read it but this is hilarious:
"The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:
ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder
He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure."
-Horizon
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan