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Hark! I Hear a Dropped Packet!

Posted by timothy on from the wacky-ideas-are-good-ideas dept.

aarondsouza writes "The New Scientist has an article about Chris Chafe, a cellist and director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University in California, who has the idea that one can use sound as an audible measure of the health of an internet connection. By sending a bunch of sound pulses across the line and measuring echo time, an average ping time of 10ms would be heard as a 100Hz tone. The idea is that the human ear is much more sensitive to variations in pitch, and thus "listening" to the connection would be a better indicator of its health. The article is short on technical specs but the project page (SoundWIRE) has more."

2 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Thanksgiving Tradition? by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    " I get it, on April 1st all the stories are false; On Thanksgiving the stories are dupes."

    Thanksgiving? Oh yes, I forgot that it was US Thanksgiving today. (It was 6 weeks ago in Canada.)

  2. Re:Ratio by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    I think what pisses me off about the dupes is just that they show the editors don't give a shit when they do their job. If they did, they'd at least be able to check the links and their own homepage...

    I don't mind lazy workers when they take money from 'Da Man, but these jerks are wasting resources that should be going into Sourceforge and other admirable VA projects. They drone on about Free Market this-and-that, but if VA agreed with their sentiments, they'd be fired immediately and replaced by people who take their job seriously. I mean, Jesus, how hard it is to be a /. editor?