Slashdot Mirror
Hark! I Hear a Dropped Packet!
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."
The original is still on the homepage! http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/28/123820 9&mode=flat&tid=95
How's he going to know it's a dupe to delete it? He obviously isn't reading the front page so why bother reading the comments? Sad but true.
Lets look at ratios. Three dupes from slashdot, thirteen thousand, four hundred and twelve dupes from idiots bitching about slashdot duping. It's hard to bitch about duping AND be taken seriously, when the bitch is a dupe. Atleast the stories are more interesting ...
Robert Anton Wilson
Yawn!
While I did find it an interesting tool, it wasn't very useful at all. After several minutes of listening to tones, you will get tired of it. I found it more useful to vary the amplitude rather than the frequency. I set the amplitude to zero for the normal expected latency. Then when a small problem started, you'd get a slight sound. As it got worse, it got louder. That was much more useful for constant monitoring.z
...this is really, really, sloppy work. I'm bored of this. Can I get the URLs of some other geek-friendly news/info sites? Ones that have a bit more QA?
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
The human ear (and the corresponding piece of driver code in the brain) is very sensitive to regularities and irregularities in sounds. If you convert something to sound and get used to it, you can very easily spot how it "sounds wrong" when something changes
Seismographists used to convert earthquake vibration patterns to human-audible sounds; this way it became very easy for a trained ear to distinguish between natural quakes and Soviet nuclear tests. On a screen, both looked like a jumble of lines.
Of course, a clever piece of software can do this too - but you already have this clever piece of software installed for free in your brain.
(Unfortunately it is free-beer, as the source is not available. Hmmmm, I guess rms should target God as the largest producer of closed-source software in the Universe?)
Yeah, OK, I did too. Still ironic. And yes, for those who like to debate the meaning of Irony (would that subject be Ironology? *), I think that this case does fit the definition pretty damned well.
*- Yes, yes, I expect it would be Etymology or Didactics or something. And arguing that point might be... somewhat ironic?
Be careful! New moon tonight.
Plaguarism for karma is extremely dishonest. You didn't change a single word of YE's post on the previous version of this story. Looking at your posting history, this would seem to be a new low for you.