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Cubicle Privacy

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-was-told-i-could-listen-to-my-radio-at-a-reasonable-volume dept.

DarthDilbert writes "The NYTimes has a story about a noise canceling box for nosy cubicle neighbors. " Still no protection from mind readers. They know stuff.

5 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Linky by MoonBuggy · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/technology/30hil lis.html?ex=1275105600&en=4a1c68b85a47519f&ei=5090 &partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

    Reg free link.

  2. Re:Shame on you, editors by name773 · · Score: 3, Informative

    try improvising a duct system to reduce the necessary number of fans but still keep a good airflow pattern. it worked for me

  3. Not Noise Canceling! by Reverberant · · Score: 5, Informative

    The "Babble" technology that is discussed in this article is not noise canceling technology! Noise canceling technology uses soundwaves that are 180 degrees out of phase with the original waveform to cancel out the original soundwave.

    From the article description, Babble simply 'scrambles' sound waves so that speech is unintelligible, but it doesn't actually make anything quieter (in fact, based on the description it probably increases the ambient noise, just like masking systems). This device is used for speech privacy (which can be useful for meeting HIPAA regs for example), not sound cancellation.

    If you want to make things quieter, you'll have to resort to earplugs, sound-canceling headphones, or floor-ceiling partitions (ie walls).

  4. Silence or more noise? by ericandrade · · Score: 3, Informative

    Is it noise cancelling? It seems that it just adds sampled sound to mask conversations.

    "sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range"

    Horrible article. No details on how the product works or what it does.

    And for the map thingy... It's been done some time ago (2002).
    Here's a movie (25 MB) from Sony research (Jun Rekimoto, SmartSkin: An Infrastructure for Freehand Manipulation on Interactive Surfaces):

    http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/movies/c hi02-2-mp2.mpg

    Use VLC to view the movie.
    http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

    Movie taken from
    http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/smartski n/

  5. Re:Shame on you, editors by Txiasaeia · · Score: 3, Informative
    Last week I bought the following components:

    -Athlon 64 3200+ Venice
    -2x512 Corsair PC3200 2.5 CAS DDR
    -Leadtek 6600GT Extreme
    -Seasonic SS-380 power supply
    -MSI RS480R2-IL mATX motherboard
    -Pioneer DVR-109 Dual Layer DVD Burner
    -Thermalright XP-90 w/Nexus 92mm fan (CPU)

    ...and kept my Western Digital Caviar 80GB IDE HD. Guess what? The hard drive is incredibly noisy, while the rest of the system is virtually silent. My point is that it's very easy to assemble an x86 system that's virtually quiet; all you need to do is a bit of research. My other point is not to go all out on a gaming system and cheap out on the hard drive, or you'll be kicking yourself for months.

    --
    Condemnant quod non intellegunt.