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 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?)
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
I remember reading about something similar a few years ago. Basically they took all the different readings from a nuclear reactor control room and extrapolated a tone from them somehow. If any of the readings went outside of nominal the done would sound much different. Because the human ear is sensitive to this, the operators would know something is amiss.
We should start a tradition on slashdot where we only post stupid sentences for dupe stories. Here's mine:
Great.
If I did this at my job I would be fired or hollered at.
Come on already. I love /. I spend too much time reading it as it is. Why must I have duped stories to wade through?
Moderation and the Friend/Foe system are supposed to make /. easier to read, by filtering out trolls and crapflooders. Perhaps it's time to allow the STORIES to be moderated. I enjoy reading all /. stories, because invaribly, I learn something, or get a new perspective on an issue or idea. Having valuable front page space taken up by something that was already discussed (on the same day!) only annoys the readers and surely affects the advertisers effectiveness.
I am only a reader and poster of rants and one-liners, sure, but I happen to like /. I hate to see it like this.
Perhaps I should have assumed there was a lack of attention to the site, when I sent a fixed flag icon to Taco, and never got a response - email or otherwise. I'd guess that Taco gets many emails asking questions, ranting about features, moderations, trolls, and plenty of spam. My note was purely friendly and included the new icon.
No response. No 'Thanks but no thanks', automated "Yoyre emial iz impotent to us". Nothing
That's it. Have a good Thanksgiving. Turkey ....taking effect... sleeeeepy...so sleeeepy.... must fall to ... floor....
*snore*
It shouldn't be too hard to add some dupe prevention code to Slash. It seems that you could snag all URLs out of a story and compare them to URLs from the last 60 days or so and if there is a match, present a warning to the editor.
When I was younger, we used to have a Dragon 32 microcomputer, which loaded up external data through cassette tapes. If I remember correctly, the tape recorder's line out was plugged into a port onto the computer. So to load up a game, you played the tape, which made a whole host of squeakings and gratings. But you could tell, with some practise, when the loading was going well, and when it was going to fail. Kinda like with this article, though in this case, it's with a network.
I think I'll play with it for a while and then pass it on again. I suppose one could think of it as a 'karma library'
I am a Karma Library.