Here's how it's done (technical)
on
Focusing Audio
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· Score: 1
Halloween Fun!
You too can add a little something extra for the trick or treaters this year... or simply play the theme from "pee-wees playhouse" out of a.mid file to help your neighbors with the barking dog to sympathise with your ongoing lack of sleep. Selected snippets from "full metal jacket" gently raining against the timpanic nerves often encourage even the most recalcitrant drug dealer to move elsewhere... or so I've heard.
OK, here's how you do it:
This is a pretty well-known technology that has been around since ultrasonic transducers were first made commercially available. The pictures and stuff are misleading, so ignore them.
The Electronics:
Take two ultrasonic transducers, and modulate them so that the resulting interference (a difference signal) is the signal you want to reproduce. This is enough information to reproduce the effect for anyone who understands what a carrier is. You can do this with op-amps (in circuitry) using normal SSB modulation techniques (in the UHF audio range), or you can pretend that you have a unique academically induced entrepreneurial vision because you realized that DSP (digital signal processing) would allow you to do it better. Whatever. Because most ultrasonic systems have a fixed carrier, you'll need to be able to do pulse width modulation in order to get data in and out of the system. The easiest way to do this is to simply gate the carrier signal by
finding the output of the modulator and inserting a nand gate or comparator to feed your PWM signal in.
Don't expect high fidelity without DSP, and even then, it'll be less than.MP3 quality, better highs, lousy lows... But you could pretend you work for *the man* and grab an infrasonic subwoofer to make your projected voices a bit more old testament. Nothing like a subsonic field to give people the willies!
The Mechanics:
Think shotgun (or tube) mics in reverse. You can align the two transducers visually. The stuff I've seen involves either parabolic dishes (like the old edmund scientific big ear toys) or tubes (like the building center PVC and hacksaw variety), but with ultrasonic transducers instead of mics.
Here are the rest of the important building blocks:
You should think about triangles, with a sensor at the two base points. Figuring out how to aim the beam isn't hard - in fact, you can simply run the transceivers almost in a straight line.
You should know that the reason it works is because you're creating pressure field variations around the ear(s), so use power appropriately- it gets absorbed quickly with ultrasonics. Remember those pictures of sound waves traveling through air, water and wood? That's what this is.
Think about bats and echo-location, or wave patterns in the ocean. Or simply ask a physics teacher about "super waves", or a synthesiser player about adding sine waves. Dirt Simple. The effects work well when you have a wall to bounce things from. You'd be amazed at the amount of information one can pick up from the literature about "folks who hear voices..." - some of them are engineers who decided to see if they could replicate the effects through normal physical means in order to learn how to control it. Pretty Scary stuff. The only voices I have to put up with tend to belong to angry customers.
The incredibly lazy reader with cash to burn might want to simply buy a couple of ultrasonic communicators and hook them to the left and right channels of their stereos and experiment with playing metallica against their neighbor's windows. This technology is about as hard to master as a felt tipped pen. By the way, before you decide to try and annoy the neighbors, keep in mind that some people tend to express their anger in slightly less subtle ways- I'd hate to read about some poor geek having his transducers extracted from his lower GI tract simply because the annoying neighbor was a bit smarter than originally assumed. Play Nice!
I also thought that requiring a search warrant would reasonably limit privacy invasions by any agency.
Until I found a website for an automated search warrant request software package.
Like most of you, I don't do anything that anyone would be concerned about. I don't even keep copies of DeCss around, nor do I download metallica songs. And after seeing the anonymous family photo with the cucumber, the dog and what appears to be a small cheerleading squad, I haven't much interest in downloading Pr0n. With caffeine as my only drug, I'm not exactly worried...
I even pay my parking tickets and cable bill.
What is scary is the website I found (there are at least three packages for this)detailing software designed for automating search warrant requests (probable cause, non?) and capable of processing over 1100 search warrant requests per hour!
I found these sites by accident while looking for information on search engine technology in 1996. I won't list the URLS, but you can find them. One site talked about how much faster it would be when electronic authorization (EDI) interaction became available.
Imagine how low the threshold of probable cause will slip once some eager programmer decides that online email profiling data can go immediately into the search warrant request software, returning approval in under thirty seconds.
There are no laws saying that e-mail, packet scans and IP traffic logs cannot be held indefinately, or archived for the last 120 days. This didn't apply to telephone calls - while call logs could be accessed, recording the actual conversations required a warrant - so speech that occured before the warrant was safe, or left as hearsay evidence. With digital archiving of all traffic, the landscape has changed.
In the future, search warrants will effectively be *retroactive* - and can contain complete records of what you've done for months.
For most people, privacy is seen as a way to hide indiscretions from general knowledge, or as a way to "get away" with crime. It isn't - that's a small quirk that can be handled through our current legal system.
Privacy is really the way that we guarantee our right to stay at arm's length from our government (well, at least the individuals in it) and our ability to disagree and express that disagreement (without fear of punitive retaliation)to those in power, be they government officials, Microsoft or the MPAA.
As long as we have that, everything else in a democracy can work. We don't really want a truly libertarian state (Been to Moscow lately?), but a democracy that embraces responsibility and liberty like RSM embraces pizza and ego.
So Get off your dead asses and write those letters now! snicker.
Crusoe wasn't really shipwrecked on a desert island, but on the coast of a fairly populated continent.
In fact, he could have simply walked to civilization, but that wouldn't have been such a good story. I find this to be a decent analogy to what's going on at transmeta.
I must ask: Where the heck is the generic Evaluation board? I keep going over to the website, waiting for the Transmeta development stuff to become available, along with the generic $300 internet appliance development board, or the wearable computer development board, or even the somewhat risqué Gal Friday Personal Companion development board, which is being eagerly awaited by the guys over at Real Doll. I know a lot of technical geeks who would much rather spend several years hacking hardware and hydraulics and software to make a girlfriend who will put out after a romantic evening of watching deep space nine and listening to long winded rants about how stupid their boss is. (I got married early, so I skipped the need to learn hydraulics...)
Seriously, though: Is it just me, or has anybody else noticed that the draw for transmeta seems to be variable power draw more than any inherent improvements in speed?
I want my developer tools! (and yes, I understand that keeping the tool kits hidden may slow down the competition - but I want to be the first kid on my block with a transmeta pda... which I built myself.
And if they'd just get rid of that pesky cash, we could be taxed without any effort at all.
One of things that keeps government from being a total pain in the butt is that it's currently a lot of work to come and physically touch you.
That is, in order for someone in the gov't. to interact with you, they have to get physical somewhere along the line. Because of this, you have some slack. Slack is basically the ability to exist in a world of your own choosing, to some extent. You can go about your business relatively untouched.
This isn't a license to pirate warez, or to cause other people grief, but being able to treat interaction with your government as a minor concern. Because of this, the government and the citizen have a relationship, but the average citizen can choose to be at arm's length or locked in a bear hug.
When we eliminate the distance by choosing to interface with the government in electronic form, we give up that buffer. In other words, there is no longer any obstacle to directly debiting your bank account for whatever amount the government (state, city, federal) decides you owe them.
I can hardly wait. And it gets better - currently, many states revoke the drivers licenses of certain individuals for somewhat serious offences - failure to pay child support, DUI, etc.
This is essentially a way to selectively invoke police harassment, which isn't nesc. evil - but what about a future where your license is suspended because you didn't pay some tax or someone keyed in a SSN that matched yours when her finger slipped?
Maintaining inefficiencies is not always a bad idea - especially when you're not interested in becoming a well oiled cog. Separation between state and government agencies will soon start to evaporate, and it will become very easy to mess with people simply because some department head decides that power is a cool toy.
The brits invented it in the 1970's, but didn't accomplish anything. As usual. To quote forbes:
The Internet craze that has swept the U.S. seems to have bypassed France. What's the matter? Weren't the French ahead of everyone else, going on-line in 1983 with their Minitel terminals?
They were, but their lead has faded. Minitel is a government enterprise. Seventeen million Frenchmen use the creaky system to pay bills, order merchandise and chat electronically.
"The Minitel was a blessing in the 1980s and a problem in the 1990s," says Alex Vieux, organizer of the largest computer trade show in France, IT-Comdex. "When the Internet flared up, there was this heritage, but it was a bad heritage. We French thought we could continue to do on-line, but in a French way." You've got to understand France. The place is run by a bunch of control freaks. If they can't control something, they try to ban it. Not only was the Internet with its easy, open access a danger to Minitel, which yields $1 billion a year in revenue to the government, it also promised to democratize access to information. Horrors. But BT is insane. Compuserve and every other BBS on the planet made all this work from about 1982 on.
We have a little song, sung to the tune of "Hell is for children" by Pat Benatar.
Baby, cause SCO SCO is for losers...
We signed up with them three years ago. We took the little tests and became a SCO dealer, mainly because we had several clients who use SCO. The bad news: SCO is more painful than NT! Especially when you have to provide support for third party copy protected software. Imagine an OS where adding a second serial port requires a kernal recompile (remember early linux?) or discovering that you can crash the box by plugging in a mouse. That might have been OK in the days of Xenix, but not in the late 1990's.
SCO + Copy Protected Software Naturally, UNIX copy protection is nasty by definition. We had to deal with a package that was no longer supported (even though the company gladly charged $40,000 to get it running only a few months ago) and after any recompile, you had to call and have them modem in and tinker to get it running. I'd rather have a dongle.
It doesn't get any uglier, folks. Imagine having to call Microsoft after you restored a drive, and ask them to connect by modem and adjust your registry so the MS2000 suite would run after you upgraded a printer.
So then we became an authorized dealer. When we were talking to the SCO american sales channel, we asked, point blank: "Where's SCO linux?". No response, aside from being told they would provide linux support in the future. I asked: Why not just cut a deal, adopt a startup distribution and offer SCO linux - even at $500 or a $1000 for an unlimited license, I have clients who would gladly pay.
Well, that line of conversation went nowhere, although the nice man said "we're doing some linux things, but I can't discuss them." SCO's problem is that it's gone from being vaguely innovative to being just another *NIX clone. It's lack of actual software development and cost-plus licensing policies may have made a bit of money for the ex-management, but the strategy directly maimed the company when the winds began to change against NT.
The president of the company had a heart attack and died not too long after this linux thing came up, which is a bit sad. For a while, they were the only UNIX OS competing with Microsoft. In my book, that's useful...
SCO isn't evil, but it completely lacks anything resembling commercial vision. Tarantella? Non-stop computing? Pure rubbish. Silly hodge-podges of scripting and clustering are simply not enough to contribute to your longevity, gentlemen. Linux does all of this quickly, efficiently and far more easily with each new kernal release. My 17 year old nephew built an HA linux cluster, and he's not all that sharp.
The best thing from SCO was the Xwindows management tool they built, and they only built about 60% of it - leaving the rest to invoke existing scripts. If they had done the work and replaced the scripts and altered the Kernal to use runtime loadable configuration modules, they would have been impacting NT long ago.
The bottom line I want to see SCO flourish, but it will be painful for the compny no matter what direction they take. The world responds to faster, better and cheaper - and if you're not able to supply at least one of those three things, you're simply destined for the scrap yard. I'd hate to see that happen, because I really liked those UNIX books by James Mohr.
I did exactly this (stuck a camcorder on a kid's microscope) last week to help my niece see what cookie crumbs look like. If you want to see three articles about how to do it, set your threshold to 0 and then refresh... I posted as A/C and nobody seems to moderate this stuff.
Try it! It also works with binoculars and telescopes with the right tube and plenty of duct tape.
Slashdot Mirror
You too can add a little something extra for the trick or treaters this year... or simply play the theme from "pee-wees playhouse" out of a
OK, here's how you do it: This is a pretty well-known technology that has been around since ultrasonic transducers were first made commercially available. The pictures and stuff are misleading, so ignore them.
The Electronics:
Take two ultrasonic transducers, and modulate them so that the resulting interference (a difference signal) is the signal you want to reproduce. This is enough information to reproduce the effect for anyone who understands what a carrier is. You can do this with op-amps (in circuitry) using normal SSB modulation techniques (in the UHF audio range), or you can pretend that you have a unique academically induced entrepreneurial vision because you realized that DSP (digital signal processing) would allow you to do it better.
Whatever. Because most ultrasonic systems have a fixed carrier, you'll need to be able to do pulse width modulation in order to get data in and out of the system. The easiest way to do this is to simply gate the carrier signal by finding the output of the modulator and inserting a nand gate or comparator to feed your PWM signal in.
Don't expect high fidelity without DSP, and even then, it'll be less than .MP3 quality, better highs, lousy lows... But you could pretend you work for *the man* and grab an infrasonic subwoofer to make your projected voices a bit more old testament. Nothing like a subsonic field to give people the willies!
The Mechanics:
Think shotgun (or tube) mics in reverse. You can align the two transducers visually. The stuff I've seen involves either parabolic dishes (like the old edmund scientific big ear toys) or tubes (like the building center PVC and hacksaw variety), but with ultrasonic transducers instead of mics.
Here are the rest of the important building blocks:
You should think about triangles, with a sensor at the two base points. Figuring out how to aim the beam isn't hard - in fact, you can simply run the transceivers almost in a straight line.
You should know that the reason it works is because you're creating pressure field variations around the ear(s), so use power appropriately- it gets absorbed quickly with ultrasonics. Remember those pictures of sound waves traveling through air, water and wood? That's what this is.
Think about bats and echo-location, or wave patterns in the ocean. Or simply ask a physics teacher about "super waves", or a synthesiser player about adding sine waves. Dirt Simple. The effects work well when you have a wall to bounce things from. You'd be amazed at the amount of information one can pick up from the literature about "folks who hear voices..." - some of them are engineers who decided to see if they could replicate the effects through normal physical means in order to learn how to control it. Pretty Scary stuff. The only voices I have to put up with tend to belong to angry customers.
The incredibly lazy reader with cash to burn might want to simply buy a couple of ultrasonic communicators and hook them to the left and right channels of their stereos and experiment with playing metallica against their neighbor's windows. This technology is about as hard to master as a felt tipped pen. By the way, before you decide to try and annoy the neighbors, keep in mind that some people tend to express their anger in slightly less subtle ways- I'd hate to read about some poor geek having his transducers extracted from his lower GI tract simply because the annoying neighbor was a bit smarter than originally assumed. Play Nice!
warrant would reasonably limit privacy
invasions by any agency.
Until I found a website for an automated
search warrant request software package.
Like most of you, I don't do anything that anyone would be concerned about. I don't even keep copies of DeCss around, nor do I download metallica songs. And after seeing the anonymous family photo with the cucumber, the dog and what appears to be a small cheerleading squad, I haven't much interest in downloading Pr0n. With caffeine as my only drug, I'm not exactly worried...
I even pay my parking tickets and cable bill.
What is scary is the website I found (there are at least three packages for this)detailing software designed for automating search warrant requests (probable cause, non?) and capable of processing over 1100 search warrant requests per hour!
I found these sites by accident while looking for information on search engine technology in 1996. I won't list the URLS, but you can find them. One site talked about how much faster it would be when electronic authorization (EDI) interaction became available.
Imagine how low the threshold of probable cause will slip once some eager programmer decides that online email profiling data can go immediately into the search warrant request software, returning approval in under thirty seconds.
There are no laws saying that e-mail, packet scans and IP traffic logs cannot be held indefinately, or archived for the last 120 days. This didn't apply to telephone calls - while call logs could be accessed, recording the actual conversations required a warrant - so speech that occured before the warrant was safe, or left as hearsay evidence. With digital archiving of all traffic, the landscape has changed.
In the future, search warrants will effectively be *retroactive* - and can contain complete records of what you've done for months.
For most people, privacy is seen as a way to hide indiscretions from general knowledge, or as a way to "get away" with crime. It isn't - that's a small quirk that can be handled through our current legal system.
Privacy is really the way that we guarantee our right to stay at arm's length from our government (well, at least the individuals in it) and our ability to disagree and express that disagreement (without fear of punitive retaliation)to those in power, be they government officials, Microsoft or the MPAA.
As long as we have that, everything else in a democracy can work. We don't really want a truly libertarian state (Been to Moscow lately?), but a democracy that embraces responsibility and liberty like RSM embraces pizza and ego.
So Get off your dead asses
and write those letters now!
snicker.
In fact, he could have simply walked to civilization, but that wouldn't have been such a good story. I find this to be a decent analogy to what's going on at transmeta.
I must ask:
Where the heck is the generic Evaluation board? I keep going over to the website, waiting for the Transmeta development stuff to become available, along with the generic $300 internet appliance development board, or the wearable computer development board, or even the somewhat risqué Gal Friday Personal Companion development board, which is being eagerly awaited by the guys over at Real Doll. I know a lot of technical geeks who would much rather spend several years hacking hardware and hydraulics and software to make a girlfriend who will put out after a romantic evening of watching deep space nine and listening to long winded rants about how stupid their boss is.
(I got married early, so I skipped the need to learn hydraulics...)
Seriously, though:
Is it just me, or has anybody else noticed that the draw for transmeta seems to be variable power draw more than any inherent improvements in speed?
I want my developer tools! (and yes, I understand that keeping the tool kits hidden may slow down the competition - but I want to be the first kid on my block with a transmeta pda... which I built myself.
One of things that keeps government from being a total pain in the butt is that it's currently a lot of work to come and physically touch you.
That is, in order for someone in the gov't. to interact with you, they have to get physical somewhere along the line. Because of this, you have some slack. Slack is basically the ability to exist in a world of your own choosing, to some extent. You can go about your business relatively untouched.
This isn't a license to pirate warez, or to cause other people grief, but being able to treat interaction with your government as a minor concern. Because of this, the government and the citizen have a relationship, but the average citizen can choose to be at arm's length or locked in a bear hug.
When we eliminate the distance by choosing to interface with the government in electronic form, we give up that buffer. In other words, there is no longer any obstacle to directly debiting your bank account for whatever amount the government (state, city, federal) decides you owe them.
I can hardly wait. And it gets better - currently, many states revoke the drivers licenses of certain individuals for somewhat serious offences - failure to pay child support, DUI, etc.
This is essentially a way to selectively invoke police harassment, which isn't nesc. evil - but what about a future where your license is suspended because you didn't pay some tax or someone keyed in a SSN that matched yours when her finger slipped?
Maintaining inefficiencies is not always a bad idea - especially when you're not interested in becoming a well oiled cog. Separation between state and government agencies will soon start to evaporate, and it will become very easy to mess with people simply because some department head decides that power is a cool toy.
The Internet craze that has swept the U.S. seems to have bypassed France. What's the matter?
Weren't the French ahead of everyone else, going on-line in 1983 with their Minitel terminals?
They were, but their lead has faded. Minitel is a government enterprise. Seventeen million Frenchmen use the creaky system to pay bills, order merchandise and chat electronically.
"The Minitel was a blessing in the 1980s and a problem in the 1990s," says Alex Vieux, organizer of the largest computer trade show in France, IT-Comdex. "When the Internet flared up, there was this heritage, but it was a bad heritage. We French thought we could continue to do on-line, but in a French way." You've got to understand France. The place is run by a bunch of control freaks. If they can't control something, they try to ban it. Not only was the Internet with its easy, open access a danger to Minitel, which yields $1 billion a year in revenue to the government, it also promised to democratize access to information. Horrors. But BT is insane. Compuserve and every other BBS on the planet made all this work from about 1982 on.
sung to the tune of "Hell is for children" by Pat Benatar.
Baby, cause SCO
SCO is for losers...
We signed up with them three years ago. We took the little tests and became a SCO dealer,
mainly because we had several clients who use SCO. The bad news:
SCO is more painful than NT!
Especially when you have to provide support for third party copy protected software. Imagine an OS where adding a second serial port requires a kernal recompile (remember early linux?) or discovering that you can crash the box by plugging in a mouse. That might have been OK in the days of Xenix, but not in the late 1990's.
SCO + Copy Protected Software
Naturally, UNIX copy protection is nasty by definition. We had to deal with a package that was no longer supported (even though the company gladly charged $40,000 to get it running only a few months ago) and after any recompile, you had to call and have them modem in and tinker to get it running. I'd rather have a dongle.
It doesn't get any uglier, folks. Imagine having to call Microsoft after you restored a drive, and ask them to connect by modem and adjust your registry so the MS2000 suite would run after you upgraded a printer.
So then we became an authorized dealer.
When we were talking to the SCO american sales channel, we asked, point blank: "Where's SCO linux?".
No response, aside from being told they would provide linux support in the future. I asked: Why not just cut a deal, adopt a startup distribution and offer SCO linux - even at $500 or a $1000 for an unlimited license, I have clients who would gladly pay.
Well, that line of conversation went nowhere, although the nice man said "we're doing some linux things, but I can't discuss them."
SCO's problem is that it's gone from being vaguely innovative to being just another *NIX clone. It's lack of actual software development and cost-plus licensing policies may have made a bit of money for the ex-management, but the strategy directly maimed the company when the winds began to change against NT.
The president of the company had a heart attack and died not too long after this linux thing came up, which is a bit sad. For a while, they were the only UNIX OS competing with Microsoft. In my book, that's useful...
SCO isn't evil, but it completely lacks anything resembling commercial vision.
Tarantella? Non-stop computing?
Pure rubbish. Silly hodge-podges of scripting and clustering are simply not enough to contribute to your longevity, gentlemen. Linux does all of this quickly, efficiently and far more easily with each new kernal release. My 17 year old nephew built an HA linux cluster, and he's not all that sharp.
The best thing from SCO was the Xwindows management tool they built, and they only built about 60% of it - leaving the rest to invoke existing scripts. If they had done the work and replaced the scripts and altered the Kernal to use runtime loadable configuration modules, they would have been impacting NT long ago.
The bottom line
I want to see SCO flourish, but it will be painful for the compny no matter what direction they take. The world responds to faster, better and cheaper - and if you're not able to supply at least one of those three things, you're simply destined for the scrap yard. I'd hate to see that happen, because I really liked those UNIX books by James Mohr.
Try it! It also works with binoculars and telescopes with the right tube and plenty of duct tape.