Sure, I agree with your description - no problem. I just didn't see anything on the page you linked to that discussed very high frequency interference. Then again, I was at work so I wasn't searching very thoroughly.
Anyway, it's not important in any case because I wasn't trying to report some news or discuss some similar technology (which is after all not very new), but rather point out possible dangers of that kind of sound usage.
Yes, thank you for completely missing the point. I'm not trying to post news, thankyouverymuch, if I wanted to do that I would have submitted something to the editors. And, seeing as how it's been on Slashdot more than once, it probably would have been accepted, too - ESPECIALLY if it was an article from Popular Science years ago.
My post, if you had bothered to think about it at all, was about how extremely high-energy sound waves might possibly be DANGEROUS, and not, for example, something I would want happening constantly in, oh, I don't know, my REFRIGERATOR.
Yes!! This is exactly the grad student I was talking about. From the Holosonics site you linked, in the "technology" section:
While a graduate student developing '3D Audio' at Northwestern University in the late 1990's, Joseph Pompei had similar ideas of using ultrasound as a loudspeaker...
He doesn't give credit to any specific people at Northwestern, but as I recall he did most of the work anyway. Interesting!
Nah, I'm pretty sure it was more complex than that. IIRC the reason they got such an interesting result was because "the air was being compressed by the high-power sound waves into a medium that created non-linear interference" or some such.
I guess the basic idea (and this is how it ties into the article, in case anybody missed it) is that high frequency/volume sound waves are so powerful that they do nasty, complex things to the air that they're travelling in, creating things like extreme temperatures or other unusual behavior.
At ridiculous volumes and/or frequencies, sound has some amazingly powerful properties, but I'm skeptical as to how practical such a technology can be. Here's why:
A professor at my university was doing some personal research with a small team at his house on the properties of high-decibel sound. Based on incredibly complex differential equations, one could project two sound waves at ridiculously high frequencies and volumes to create a special kind of interference. This interference would in essence start a new sound (at a hearable frequency/volume) from where the two waves intersected, effectively making it seem like a controlled sound was being created out of thin air at any point in 3d-space.
I don't think I need to point out applications to this technology. BUT - he decided to discontinue the project before it was ever completed. He had several pets in his house (dog + cats) that he tried to keep away from the testing, but they were still being driven crazy by the sound. He also started developing nasty headaches and suspected that his high-range hearing was being destroyed.
Interestingly, one of the graduate students who worked with him on the project decided to continue the work on his own. From what I've heard, he had his work picked up and funded by the US military (DARPA, I think). When I heard this, it really didn't come as a surprise.
I've been in Federal court precisely once in my 15-year career, so I'm not expert (IAAC, but IANAL)
Hm.. IAAC.. I Am A Criminal? That would explain the 15-year career. Though if you've been in court that many times may I humbly suggest a new line of work?
Update the link in your sig. Northwestern university shut down the place where the demented cartoon movie was hosted because of the absurd amount of traffic it caused.
I just happen to be mentioning this. I'm not in any way affiliated with the demented cartoon movie, except for that fact that it was made by my brother.
It would be really good for everyone -- and for the signal/noise ratio -- if people could stop posting inexact stuff...
To think! - I posted a piece of misleading information on Slashdot! I've contributed to the downfall of an otherwise pure source of factual information. But if I can't post wildly misinformed and inaccurate information that gets modded up to +5, Funny on Slashdot, then..
A) Where can I?? B) The terrorists have already won. C) The trolls have already won. D) CowboyNeal has already won.
(Seriously though - yes, it does attack IIS servers, and also propagates itself through mass emailing. No, it doesn't attack exchange servers directly (but probably increases the load). But hey, if I wanted to be factually accurate, it wouldn't have been funny.)
This may be a cynical thing to say, but I think it was only a matter of time before some shady software like this was made.
I would remark "How could the makers of such a thing sleep at night?" - but I already know the answer: they sleep just fine. People like that don't believe that they're doing anything wrong.
Yeah, developers everywhere will rejoice in the performance boost in the new beta, but from what I understand it's roughly a 10% improvement. Considering that 1) most people won't have this boosted version of the plugin installed and 2) a 10% increase is great, but a long way from a revolution, I just can't get all that excited.
But it's a wonderful start and I highly commend the Macromedia flash player team for squeezing out that performance increase - I don't even know what they had to do to get it. But I do hope they can do even more. I, personally, would sacrifice some of the Flash features for a speed increase in code execution. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Yes, those are wonderful - but appear to be relatively small in scope (great graphics though). Flash programmers who use all of the environment's strengths and avoid its weaknesses have a very powerful tool. I was also thinking of:
- Stuart's Polar Rescue: an excellent engine by the master of the Flash physics engine
- Roadies: Very fun lemmings-like game, though when lots of Roadies are on the screen at once you'll take a big performance hit.
I consider all of the above to be triumphs in Flash games. (I just wish I had more time to work on my own personal isometric tile-based rpg engine with a-star pathfinding - a mostly functional work-in-progress).
Yes! - That's a great example of what I'm talking about. You can notice the tell-tale signs of a Flash game:
1) Not many moving sprites/creatures on the screen at once. In the sonic game, I think there was you (Sonic) and pretty much one other autonomous enemy on the screen at any given time. Flash has a lot of trouble handling many moving objects at once, because it needs to run behavior/movement code for each one. In contrast, it can draw lots of objects like there's no tomorrow.
2) The collision / tile code usually isn't quite right. Flash has some built-in collision methods, but they're not very robust and can suck up lots of the available processor very quickly. Doing a tile-based game is tricky because Flash doesn't really give much support for tiles and tile collisions. In the Sonic game you can jump up on a platform and walk on it, but the Sonic sprite is actually 1/2-1 tile below the ledge. I've seen that kind of thing a lot. It's very hard to do.
As someone who has played around with Flash long enough to know just about all of its limits, I can tell you that creating versions of ancient, 8-bit-or-less games (like Adventure) is probably the most useful application of Flash (in the gaming area).
This is mostly because the performance of Flash scripting is just so incredibly poor that you're pretty much constrained to make games that would have been state of the art 10+ years ago.
Atari 2600 games are great candidates for Flash games, but once you move forward in time to the 8-bit nintendo and, god forbid, the 16-bit super nintendo, you have a really difficult time trying to even muster up even enough processing power to replicate those.
For kicks I spent some time trying to write a Flash port of the original Legend of Zelda (8-bit), and ran into all kinds of performance issues. I've pretty much given that up - partially because of no time to work on it, but mostly because trying to replicate someone else's work (including the idiosyncratic bugs) got boring.
Lastly, don't take my comment to mean that great games can't be made in Flash - they certainly can, but it takes a great deal of cleverness to get around the constraints of the environment.
they said, frowning at HTML. "Listen - being listed as a programming language on some chump's resume - and it doesn't matter HOW many resumes - does not a programming language make!"
We filed comments in that FCC proceeding, which you can see at http://www.rric.net/FCC%20DSL%20Comments.pdf. Hopefully all readers here also filed comments in that proceeding.
In a historic display of reader participation, all Slashdot readers filed comments on this FCC proceeding. Unfortunately, with this amazing community response came the same signal-to-noise-ratio problem that has plagued the Slashdot commenting system.
The first thousand or so comments seemed to be sent in by the same user named "Anonymous Coward" and only contained some permutation of the cryptic "fp" message, or in some cases, "All your DSL are belong to us." The next thousand simply griped about spelling and grammar errors.
Your idea is interesting, but extremely dangerous. Like all technologies, the impact could be either positive or negative depending on who is in control.
My question is: who passes out the pills? The system sounds well and good, but doesn't account for human error and corruption. Perhaps someone along the process of distributing pills to a poor third-world country thinks it's a much better idea to leave an entire population of different-skinned people without the means of reproducing. People in power who have this idea are not unheard of.
I understand your idea, and at times even wish the same thing myself. When you see the way some parents abuse themselves and their children, you want there to be a test so that certain emotionally sick people cannot have kids.
And another lesson that people could hopefully learn someday is that almost ALL famine is politically based, despite how much certain people want to blame "greedy capitalists who hog all the resources of the world".
It would be nice to believe that - can you provide links to information that supports it?
I think it frightens audiences to see the hero die.
What! Bruce Willis dies at the end of the movie?! What is it with Slashdot and spoilers lately? Next you're going to be telling me that Anakin was Luke's.. ok, ok, you get the idea.
...because it doesn't use tabbed palettes. Those were introduced in Flash 5, and replaced in MX by a windowish-docking system. I would wager that Macromedia's decision to change the interface in MX was based far more on the lawsuit than on user feedback.
Adobe is seeking an injunction preventing Macromedia from selling "the infringing software" - which is, like I just said, Flash 5. Notice that Macromedia released Flash MX within the last month, and are now going to be actively phasing out their Flash 5 product and pushing MX instead. Is this good timing just a coincidence? You tell me. So what I'm wondering is what Adobe could possibly do to further harm the Flash product line (besides the $2.8mil in damages, of course).
There's another reason Flash ads are going to become the new wave - with the introduction of Flash MX, Flash files are compressed using z-lib, resulting in considerably smaller file sizes than previous versions. For example, on a project I'm doing in MX my 50k file was compressed to under 12k. Once people start adopting the Flash MX player and advertisers realize they can fit way more in one of those than a standard.gif or.jpeg, you're going to be seeing a lot more Flash ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, I agree with your description - no problem. I just didn't see anything on the page you linked to that discussed very high frequency interference. Then again, I was at work so I wasn't searching very thoroughly.
Anyway, it's not important in any case because I wasn't trying to report some news or discuss some similar technology (which is after all not very new), but rather point out possible dangers of that kind of sound usage.
Yes, thank you for completely missing the point. I'm not trying to post news, thankyouverymuch, if I wanted to do that I would have submitted something to the editors. And, seeing as how it's been on Slashdot more than once, it probably would have been accepted, too - ESPECIALLY if it was an article from Popular Science years ago.
My post, if you had bothered to think about it at all, was about how extremely high-energy sound waves might possibly be DANGEROUS, and not, for example, something I would want happening constantly in, oh, I don't know, my REFRIGERATOR.
Congratulations, you get: -1, Missed the point
Yes!! This is exactly the grad student I was talking about. From the Holosonics site you linked, in the "technology" section:
...
While a graduate student developing '3D Audio' at Northwestern University in the late 1990's, Joseph Pompei had similar ideas of using ultrasound as a loudspeaker
He doesn't give credit to any specific people at Northwestern, but as I recall he did most of the work anyway. Interesting!
Nah, I'm pretty sure it was more complex than that. IIRC the reason they got such an interesting result was because "the air was being compressed by the high-power sound waves into a medium that created non-linear interference" or some such.
I guess the basic idea (and this is how it ties into the article, in case anybody missed it) is that high frequency/volume sound waves are so powerful that they do nasty, complex things to the air that they're travelling in, creating things like extreme temperatures or other unusual behavior.
At ridiculous volumes and/or frequencies, sound has some amazingly powerful properties, but I'm skeptical as to how practical such a technology can be. Here's why:
A professor at my university was doing some personal research with a small team at his house on the properties of high-decibel sound. Based on incredibly complex differential equations, one could project two sound waves at ridiculously high frequencies and volumes to create a special kind of interference. This interference would in essence start a new sound (at a hearable frequency/volume) from where the two waves intersected, effectively making it seem like a controlled sound was being created out of thin air at any point in 3d-space.
I don't think I need to point out applications to this technology. BUT - he decided to discontinue the project before it was ever completed. He had several pets in his house (dog + cats) that he tried to keep away from the testing, but they were still being driven crazy by the sound. He also started developing nasty headaches and suspected that his high-range hearing was being destroyed.
Interestingly, one of the graduate students who worked with him on the project decided to continue the work on his own. From what I've heard, he had his work picked up and funded by the US military (DARPA, I think). When I heard this, it really didn't come as a surprise.
I've been in Federal court precisely once in my 15-year career, so I'm not expert (IAAC, but IANAL)
Hm.. IAAC.. I Am A Criminal? That would explain the 15-year career. Though if you've been in court that many times may I humbly suggest a new line of work?
How will he fit in there? From what I remember, K9 was much smaller than a normal-size human.
Ah yes, but you forget - it's much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Update the link in your sig.
m l, I do believe.
Northwestern university shut down the place where the demented cartoon movie was hosted because of the absurd amount of traffic it caused.
Quite amusing, really.
It's now at:
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/demented.ht
I just happen to be mentioning this. I'm not in any way affiliated with the demented cartoon movie, except for that fact that it was made by my brother.
It would be really good for everyone -- and for the signal/noise ratio -- if people could stop posting inexact stuff...
To think! - I posted a piece of misleading information on Slashdot! I've contributed to the downfall of an otherwise pure source of factual information. But if I can't post wildly misinformed and inaccurate information that gets modded up to +5, Funny on Slashdot, then..
A) Where can I??
B) The terrorists have already won.
C) The trolls have already won.
D) CowboyNeal has already won.
(Seriously though - yes, it does attack IIS servers, and also propagates itself through mass emailing. No, it doesn't attack exchange servers directly (but probably increases the load). But hey, if I wanted to be factually accurate, it wouldn't have been funny.)
I don't understand why people are always talking about the latest and greatest exchange killer.
There was already an exchange killer. It was called Nimda.
I couldn't resist...
Rainier Wolfcastle: The film is just me in front of a brick wall for an hour and a half. It cost 80 million dollars.
Jay Sherman: How do you sleep at night?
Rainier: On top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies.
Jay: Just asking. Yeesh!
This may be a cynical thing to say, but I think it was only a matter of time before some shady software like this was made.
I would remark "How could the makers of such a thing sleep at night?" - but I already know the answer: they sleep just fine. People like that don't believe that they're doing anything wrong.
Yeah, developers everywhere will rejoice in the performance boost in the new beta, but from what I understand it's roughly a 10% improvement. Considering that 1) most people won't have this boosted version of the plugin installed and 2) a 10% increase is great, but a long way from a revolution, I just can't get all that excited.
But it's a wonderful start and I highly commend the Macromedia flash player team for squeezing out that performance increase - I don't even know what they had to do to get it. But I do hope they can do even more. I, personally, would sacrifice some of the Flash features for a speed increase in code execution. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Yes, those are wonderful - but appear to be relatively small in scope (great graphics though). Flash programmers who use all of the environment's strengths and avoid its weaknesses have a very powerful tool. I was also thinking of:
- Andries's isometric car game
- Stuart's Polar Rescue: an excellent engine by the master of the Flash physics engine
- Roadies: Very fun lemmings-like game, though when lots of Roadies are on the screen at once you'll take a big performance hit.
I consider all of the above to be triumphs in Flash games. (I just wish I had more time to work on my own personal isometric tile-based rpg engine with a-star pathfinding - a mostly functional work-in-progress).
Yes! - That's a great example of what I'm talking about. You can notice the tell-tale signs of a Flash game:
1) Not many moving sprites/creatures on the screen at once. In the sonic game, I think there was you (Sonic) and pretty much one other autonomous enemy on the screen at any given time. Flash has a lot of trouble handling many moving objects at once, because it needs to run behavior/movement code for each one. In contrast, it can draw lots of objects like there's no tomorrow.
2) The collision / tile code usually isn't quite right. Flash has some built-in collision methods, but they're not very robust and can suck up lots of the available processor very quickly. Doing a tile-based game is tricky because Flash doesn't really give much support for tiles and tile collisions. In the Sonic game you can jump up on a platform and walk on it, but the Sonic sprite is actually 1/2-1 tile below the ledge. I've seen that kind of thing a lot. It's very hard to do.
As someone who has played around with Flash long enough to know just about all of its limits, I can tell you that creating versions of ancient, 8-bit-or-less games (like Adventure) is probably the most useful application of Flash (in the gaming area).
This is mostly because the performance of Flash scripting is just so incredibly poor that you're pretty much constrained to make games that would have been state of the art 10+ years ago.
Atari 2600 games are great candidates for Flash games, but once you move forward in time to the 8-bit nintendo and, god forbid, the 16-bit super nintendo, you have a really difficult time trying to even muster up even enough processing power to replicate those.
For kicks I spent some time trying to write a Flash port of the original Legend of Zelda (8-bit), and ran into all kinds of performance issues. I've pretty much given that up - partially because of no time to work on it, but mostly because trying to replicate someone else's work (including the idiosyncratic bugs) got boring.
Lastly, don't take my comment to mean that great games can't be made in Flash - they certainly can, but it takes a great deal of cleverness to get around the constraints of the environment.
they said, frowning at HTML. "Listen - being listed as a programming language on some chump's resume - and it doesn't matter HOW many resumes - does not a programming language make!"
We filed comments in that FCC proceeding, which you can see at http://www.rric.net/FCC%20DSL%20Comments.pdf.
Hopefully all readers here also filed comments in that proceeding.
In a historic display of reader participation, all Slashdot readers filed comments on this FCC proceeding. Unfortunately, with this amazing community response came the same signal-to-noise-ratio problem that has plagued the Slashdot commenting system.
The first thousand or so comments seemed to be sent in by the same user named "Anonymous Coward" and only contained some permutation of the cryptic "fp" message, or in some cases, "All your DSL are belong to us." The next thousand simply griped about spelling and grammar errors.
Your idea is interesting, but extremely dangerous. Like all technologies, the impact could be either positive or negative depending on who is in control.
My question is: who passes out the pills? The system sounds well and good, but doesn't account for human error and corruption. Perhaps someone along the process of distributing pills to a poor third-world country thinks it's a much better idea to leave an entire population of different-skinned people without the means of reproducing. People in power who have this idea are not unheard of.
I understand your idea, and at times even wish the same thing myself. When you see the way some parents abuse themselves and their children, you want there to be a test so that certain emotionally sick people cannot have kids.
But it opens the door to unimaginable genocide.
And another lesson that people could hopefully learn someday is that almost ALL famine is politically based, despite how much certain people want to blame "greedy capitalists who hog all the resources of the world".
It would be nice to believe that - can you provide links to information that supports it?
I think Penny Arcade said it best - back in 1999!
Since it looks like it's going to be a while before anyone can access the file, I've put up a copy on my local server.
Enjoy!
I think it frightens audiences to see the hero die.
What! Bruce Willis dies at the end of the movie?! What is it with Slashdot and spoilers lately?
Next you're going to be telling me that Anakin was Luke's.. ok, ok, you get the idea.
...because it doesn't use tabbed palettes. Those were introduced in Flash 5, and replaced in MX by a windowish-docking system. I would wager that Macromedia's decision to change the interface in MX was based far more on the lawsuit than on user feedback.
Adobe is seeking an injunction preventing Macromedia from selling "the infringing software" - which is, like I just said, Flash 5. Notice that Macromedia released Flash MX within the last month, and are now going to be actively phasing out their Flash 5 product and pushing MX instead. Is this good timing just a coincidence? You tell me. So what I'm wondering is what Adobe could possibly do to further harm the Flash product line (besides the $2.8mil in damages, of course).
The original Legend of Zelda in Flash MX: a prototype
There's another reason Flash ads are going to become the new wave - with the introduction of Flash MX, Flash files are compressed using z-lib, resulting in considerably smaller file sizes than previous versions. For example, on a project I'm doing in MX my 50k file was compressed to under 12k. Once people start adopting the Flash MX player and advertisers realize they can fit way more in one of those than a standard .gif or .jpeg, you're going to be seeing a lot more Flash ads.