You're(sic) car has a watch? how stylish. Most cars just have clocks.
My're car (well, truck) has a monitor, which I often watch. So I don't accidentally clock somebody. It's a timely solution.
You should see what I did to solve my blind driveway problem. That one involves a radio transmitter, a frame combiner, two cameras, and a remote receiver in the truck. I watch that too, similarly concerned about clocking issues. Solves a number of problems hands down.
What's so hard about plugging it in before you go to sleep at night?
Oh, nothing. The problem comes when you roll over, and either yank the charger onto the floor, setting your home on fire, or you tear your rotator cuff when the cord gets tangled up with the Hitachi Magic Wand cord and the MW is stuck firmly into its easy-access spot in the headboard.
Wait... you aren't thinking of taking this off every night and putting it back on every morning, are you? Cuz *that* isn't going to fly.
Much more practical: earpiece that gives you your notifications privately, passes through audio outside the earpiece (transparent, sonically speaking.)
No display, only a mike and a tiny sound transducer, so it can run off minimal power. Right there in your ear canal too, so temperature, pulse, and motion sensors will work great. Add my brilliant idea for a solar skullcap and, viola! Nerdgasm.
Until it can sit on my wrist for a year or so without needing my attention, it's not a watch, it's an annoyance. I'm so unwilling to fuss with stuff like that, I bought a deep water capable tritium watch that is illuminated (glows) all the time, numbers, hands and outer ring.
I think this is how smartwatches will go over with just about everyone else. Less function than the phone, which we already have, twice the annoyance (have to take it off to charge it.) Not likely to fly. Google glass (which I *despise* but anticipate the success of) is a much more functional wearable (and you could easily shoehorn med sensors in there, too... just a little more integration, etc.)
As for the medical/sports aspect, it's a pretty lame "sport" (croquet?) that would let a watch get by unscathed, and medical sensor suites are already available, and with considerably longer time-between-charges, too.
Just gonna go ahead and call this the Segway of wrist thingees.:) Sounds good, looks good, isn't good.
Semi related, when is someone going to market a solar-cell surfaced skullcap? I mean, heck, if you're going to wear a computer on your face, you might as well wear a power supply assist on your head. Maybe a little propeller for when the wearable's batts and the skullcaps reserves are fully charged.;)
The compromise found within the Bill of Rights essentially listed a number of prohibitions so the new government absolutely knew that they could in no way interfere with this core set of rights.
This is precisely correct. Sadly, it didn't work. Primarily, I think because the constitution is toothless: Violate it, and... nothing happens.
Re: sure you want to go with 'undead' ?
on
Perl Is Undead
·
· Score: 1
And with a few 5-packs of 36-exposure 35mm film for about $15
lol. Yes, exactly. Horrible cumulative costs, bulk, and tons of opportunity loss unloading and reloading. DSLR win.
What happens with digital SLRs; is, there is no real explicit limit to the number of shots, so people are encouraged to be wasteful and not very careful in setting up their shot, anyways
No. DSLR's allow review and deletion of bad shots. So you end up with nothing but great shots. Unless you have no skill, in which case, it's not the tech that's the problem no matter what you're using. DSLR win.
and still gets every pictures you really wanted, anyway
Nope. You won't even know that until you develop. With a DSLR, you actually do know.
while the 2000 exposures of DSLR gets you a lot of just-because pictures
Nope. Again, on the spot review gets those tossed. It's all good stuff if you're a good photog. DSLR win.
All of these require your camera to be idle and powered off for long periods of time.
Wait, what? No! Swap a battery, you're up and running and you're also charging; also, most DSLRs (mine for sure) can run tethered to power no problem, which is very useful in undertakings like astrophotos. But really, swap and charge is pretty typical. Shooting time is far longer than charging time, so two sets of batteries and you're 100% continuous. Swapping takes about a second. Or, you can go with a double-power grip, and shoot for a couple days running without a swap. DLSR win.
A manual 35mm camera doesn't need 30 seconds to be powered back on
My Canon powers up so fast I can't get my finger from the power button to the shutter button. Are you talking about 1990's tech? Time to look again. DSLRs are fine here today.
Since your 35mm camera doesn't need power to be up on standby, and ready to shoot the instant you push the button; it has a considerable advantage in one respect.
Again, this is all in your imagination.
There is little downtime.... the only servicing that is required, is occassionally to swap out a finished film cassette, and load new film,
Yes. Constantly. It's horrible. Been there, won't go back.
With batteries..... you can never be too sure, how far you will get with them
Perfectly good battery metering these days. I swap at 25%, which means about once a day when actively shooting. So actual down time per day is about a couple seconds. I *never* run out of power.
it depends on how long you have to leave the camera on fully powered, before you get a chance to take the shots you want.
Nope. My camera has a perfectly good sleep capability. Leave it on, it'll sleep if you don't shoot. Tap the shutter once, it's up and ready to go with no perceptible delay. Complete non-issue. Again, perhaps years ago. Not today.
Not *one* of your points has any serious juice behind it. There's a message in that for you, if you care to be sensitive to it.
A couple of batteries and you can shoot thousands of shots. You can also recharge them in the car, or even from a portable solar system. Or plug them into local power, often including laptops and so on. You can also trivially tack on larger battery capacity. I rest my case.
To the best of my knowledge no human capability is actually unique
Then, no offense, your knowledge sucks.:)
See any Dolphin designed computers? Spaceships being built by elephants? This is about extreme high levels of intelligence, AND, as you intimate, the dexterity and sensory complement to use it. That's what we have that makes us unique. And you should know that.
That's a pretty good precis of what it'll take for another race to be visible to us, or to come see us. And as we have detailed evidence from a highly diverse lab that's been running a "What's the probability of making a high intelligence via evolution?" experiment for millions of years, with one, exactly one, high intelligence result, it's not too difficult to draw a few basic conclusions, such as, "the answer is the probability is extremely low."
If this holds elsewhere, then the odds of us spotting, or being visited by, another high intelligence are also extremely low.
The point of parent is that if the intelligent "us" were not us, someone else would have evolved to be as intelligent.
This is unfounded speculation, for one thing; but for another, unless you can show that we actually suppressed or repressed a form of this type, the requirement of "not being us" is irrelevant. It never happened, and we never tried to make it not happen, nor does our existence raise any particular reason for it not to happen (in fact, I'm pretty sure we would have either enslaved them or vice-versa), and even if you skip the last 50k years, there are still millions remaining with tons of varieties and mutations and it *still* never happened. So there's absolutely no place to stand when arguing that "something else would have evolved with this characteristic." Nothing we know of demonstrates this assertion. Nature doesn't need us. That's not how evolution works. Things don't arise simply because there is a niche.
There are no other movers at all, after a huge number of variations in life, and a huge amount of time for them to happen. That's the point.
You can't argue 2nd mover until you can demonstrate there is one. Until then, the odds against 2nd (and 3rd, etc.) movers on Earth are well established: every other species than ours, ever, to one.
Your failure is only due to you taking the sentence out of context. I ALSO clearly wrote at length about spacefaring, which is both spot-on, on topic (we're talking about the Drake equation here) and obvious.
If you read my entire post, and you understand it, you can then, perhaps, construct a counterpoint. As it is, you are arguing with yourself.
You are speculating in direct conflict with the facts at hand.
All those years. At least hundreds of millions of them. Perhaps more, depending on how fast you think something might arise. All those species. Exactly one spaceship-capable result. Therefore, the odds against spaceship-building beings here are well established at this time: 1:VeryLargeNumber.
You have not presented any counterpoint to this. If there is a planet full of cetacean like creatures busily mourning their dead, we're not going to find them with SETI, see? Nor are they going to ever show up here to say hello. If there's a planet of parrots, talking up a storm, we're not going to find them with SETI, either, and even though they can fly, they're not going to get to space, or even that close. So these levels of intelligences are wholly irrelevant to the entire idea and purpose of the Drake equation, which is constructed in an attempt to answer the question, "Why have we not heard from other space traveling/competent intelligences?", or more concisely, "Where are they?"
BTW, until or unless dolphin speech is understood to be an artifact of high intelligence, carrying complex information, rather than sounds more or less on par with dogs barking, your assertion there, insufficient as it is, does not hold up. Speech is not unique to high intelligence by any means. It's the content of the speech that matters, and only ours, to date, is actually known to transfer content that is relevant to the Drake equation.
Now get me that data that shows that only large scale mutations drive evolution
Like the majority of your post, strawman.
My point is that the data shows unequivocally that the odds against spaceship and radio building intelligence arising here on earth, despite its being teeming with life, are extremely high. Since no one's been trying to off intelligent species intentionally, and intelligence turns out to be a very favorable thing in terms of survival, the conclusion is that intelligence does not arise except very rarely (eg, us.)
Extrapolating directly from these facts, I *speculate* that this may be a general characteristic of high (spaceship-building, radio making) intelligence, and observe that if you put the numbers we have seen here that represent those odds honestly, into the Drake equation, you end up with very few instances indeed (try it instead of arguing pointlessly.)
If you have *anything* to say that counters that point, by all means, say it. Otherwise, you make no valid counterpoint and I see no reason to engage further.
The thing about analog sound devices have always been that they sound warm and pleasant under most settings.
Nonsense. When run in their linear range, which is to say, where they are designed to normally run, analog devices, be they tubes, fets or bipolar transistors, all follow the input signal faithfully, plus or minus inherent noise -- no "warmth" or other characteristics are inherent. *NONE*. Digital also.
However, when a tube is pushed into its nonlinear range, the gain transfer curve bends over comparatively smoothly so that what would be a clipped signal in a device like a bipolar transistor, turns first into a compressed signal, and even later down the curve, begins to evidence distortion that resembles clipping, but has, because of that still-somewhat-gentle curve, an entirely different set of dominant harmonics as compared to, for instance, a bipolar transistor at or near saturation.
That characteristic is why (knowledgable) musicians who use distortion as a tonal tool typically prefer tubes; specifically because they *do* run the tubes out of the linear area of the transfer curve, and the result is interesting and often pleasing. When the distortion is the result of a transfer curve that abruptly goes from highly linear to highly nonlinear, as is the case with bipolar devices, the result is most unpleasant.
However, this choice does not *ever* hold true for a musical reproduction system based on tubes that isn't running in a range that will distort the music. You'd have to turn it up so far that one or more elements of the preamp or power amp is pushed past the linear part of its transfer curve, and then *everything* distorts -- and that's not a "warm" sound, that's a "hey, your system is sucking, turn that thing down" sound.
So, for example, if I get out my Les Paul or my Strat and plug it into a tube amp, I'm doing so because the amp's distortion is going to very significantly color the reproduction of what I play. I'm going to adjust the amp specifically so I *get* distortion. It'll sound fabulous. I'll get feedback, there will be awesome weirdnesses when I hit harmonics on my strings, pick and fretting artifacts will sound very different, etc. When I record this as accurately as possible, however, and subsequently play it back on a musical reproduction system of ANY kind, I am NOT going to adjust that system so that it distorts, because I don't want MORE distortion, I want exactly, and I mean *exactly*, what I recorded. All the more so when it's my guitar plus drums, bass and vocals. Etc. Adjusting a music reproduction system doing that task so that it distorts is the act of a madman or a masochist. Tube, transistor or digital whatever completely aside, the entire objective of an audio system is to get the music to your ears without changing it in any way that degrades the transfer. So the kind of distortion the playback system would evidence if overdriven is (had better be!) utterly irrelevant.
The fact is, a digital system, an analog bipolar system in class A or properly biased AB, and a tube system in class A or a nominal push-pull configuration with an output transformer all reproduce essentially the same signal in human perception terms, plus or minus noise. But noise is a significant factor with tube designs. Sidle up to your tweeter and listen. Hear that hiss? That's coming from the tubes themselves. Now do the same with a 24- or 32-bit prepro and an amp with a 110db noise floor, like a Marantz MA700. Viola! No audible noise at the tweeter. It's there, but it's so blinking minuscule, you can't perceive it. Entirely a good thing.
So the whole "audiophile" trip about tube amps being "better" is a complete confusion of something they do for musicians playing a specific instrument (ex guitar, horn, bass), which they do not usefully do for general sound reproduction, because, and hear me on this, music consisting of more than one instru
...and film and development costs eventually change that triple dollar sign to tens of them. Or more. While the DSLR can hold at four. Not to mention running out of film when you're not done shooting, not knowing the quality of the shots you've taken, not being able to have a 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th and...) chance, being limited to a fixed sensitivity, and the immediate and unavoidable aging process that starts the moment a print is finished.
No thanks. Been there, done that, it totally sucked. It's just a retro urge, hipster nonsense in terms of any functional issue you can name. If it's fun for you, by all means, go for it, but don't ever kid yourself you're doing something worthwhile on the quality front. What you're actually doing is crippling yourself intentionally, both on the front end, when you shoot, and the back end, when you develop.
It's comparable to the resurgence of interest in vinyl records. The only worthy attraction is in the sheer retro-ness of it. It certainly isn't in the quality; a good DLSR today is an amazing tool, capable of far more than yesterdays SLRs in every area but outright spectral retargeting (IE, you can put IR film in an SLR and go -- an IR sensor of equal quality, not so much), and that includes in ultimate image quality in normal regimes. Even as far as developing goes, modern software has made the range of actions and remediation one can pull off in the darkroom look like a tiny collection of beginner's moves.
I do not regret, not even one little bit, no longer having to do the tray-and-line dance with my work. Furthermore, I shoot more, and better, with my DSLR than I could ever have hoped to accomplish with any SLR I ever owned.
Up until the current generation of DSLRs, I always felt that I wasn't *quite* there. But today, I literally have no reason to look back. I have to hand it to Canon, Nikon, etc... they've done a great job. Between the quality obtainable, the ability to go out and shoot a thousand *good* images without changing "film", the incredible range of usable ISO (sensitivity to light), in-camera preview -- and disposal -- so you actually know what you have while you're still on-site and able to try again, to readily available histograms and after-the-fact white balance... and then "developing" with Aperture or Lightroom... I'll take a DSLR every time.
No. I don't. However, I live 300 highly rural miles from a city I really must visit regularly.
without more than a short break
Again, no. I take breaks. However, there are no charging stations (or gas stations, for that matter) at the Missouri river crossing. It's a long ride. It's not even an optional ride. We (usually) go for medical reasons, my lady's breast cancer treatments and some issues I have as well. We also go for construction supplies and shop for various things not available to us where we live. And restaurants. We have few choices at home, and I confess we do go a little overboard when in the city.
at an insane cabin temperature
Well, again, no. Montana typically reaches -40 in the winter where we travel, complete with significant snow and ice obstacles, while it can just as easily hit over 100 in the summer. Either way, cabin climate often needs effective control without causing the trip to end because the vehicle ran out of power. Also, arriving frozen -- or broiled -- is not really an option. We drop the windows on nice days, just like most others, I suppose.
The car has to be huge and inefficient, but must also be extremely cheap
Large, yes. We carry lumber and so forth. Inefficient, no, but frankly not too worried about it. Cheap? $50,000 is "cheap"? Really? You're kinda funny.:)
Renting is not an option, I need this regularly."
Yes, that would be because there are no rental facilities here, and "regular" is because neither disease nor medical care seems to care one whit about our preferences in the matter. So strange, don't you agree?
Okay, you represent about 0.01% of the population, maybe EVs are not for you.
Probably less. I never said otherwise. I also indicated my plans were to keep what I had, which does the job just fine.
Every time Boeing announce a new aircraft I don't moan about it not fitting on my driveway or being able to circumnavigate the world twice without refuelling for my niche application.
However, you might be moved to comment if someone seemed to be curious why you hadn't bought your own aircraft, but instead, decided to stay with whatever mode of transport you had integrated into your lifestyle.
Hey, thanks for posting. I found your remarks highly entertaining. Clueless, rude, inappropriate, somewhat pinheaded, poorly thought out -- but highly entertaining.
Slashdot Mirror
You want to watch out slinging facts around. Those PC types are dangerous.
Well, probably not if you want to survive the day...
My're car (well, truck) has a monitor, which I often watch. So I don't accidentally clock somebody. It's a timely solution.
You should see what I did to solve my blind driveway problem. That one involves a radio transmitter, a frame combiner, two cameras, and a remote receiver in the truck. I watch that too, similarly concerned about clocking issues. Solves a number of problems hands down.
Oh, nothing. The problem comes when you roll over, and either yank the charger onto the floor, setting your home on fire, or you tear your rotator cuff when the cord gets tangled up with the Hitachi Magic Wand cord and the MW is stuck firmly into its easy-access spot in the headboard.
Wait... you aren't thinking of taking this off every night and putting it back on every morning, are you? Cuz *that* isn't going to fly.
Much more practical: earpiece that gives you your notifications privately, passes through audio outside the earpiece (transparent, sonically speaking.)
No display, only a mike and a tiny sound transducer, so it can run off minimal power. Right there in your ear canal too, so temperature, pulse, and motion sensors will work great. Add my brilliant idea for a solar skullcap and, viola! Nerdgasm.
Until it can sit on my wrist for a year or so without needing my attention, it's not a watch, it's an annoyance. I'm so unwilling to fuss with stuff like that, I bought a deep water capable tritium watch that is illuminated (glows) all the time, numbers, hands and outer ring.
I think this is how smartwatches will go over with just about everyone else. Less function than the phone, which we already have, twice the annoyance (have to take it off to charge it.) Not likely to fly. Google glass (which I *despise* but anticipate the success of) is a much more functional wearable (and you could easily shoehorn med sensors in there, too... just a little more integration, etc.)
As for the medical/sports aspect, it's a pretty lame "sport" (croquet?) that would let a watch get by unscathed, and medical sensor suites are already available, and with considerably longer time-between-charges, too.
Just gonna go ahead and call this the Segway of wrist thingees. :) Sounds good, looks good, isn't good.
Semi related, when is someone going to market a solar-cell surfaced skullcap? I mean, heck, if you're going to wear a computer on your face, you might as well wear a power supply assist on your head. Maybe a little propeller for when the wearable's batts and the skullcaps reserves are fully charged. ;)
This is precisely correct. Sadly, it didn't work. Primarily, I think because the constitution is toothless: Violate it, and... nothing happens.
This.
lol. Yes, exactly. Horrible cumulative costs, bulk, and tons of opportunity loss unloading and reloading. DSLR win.
No. DSLR's allow review and deletion of bad shots. So you end up with nothing but great shots. Unless you have no skill, in which case, it's not the tech that's the problem no matter what you're using. DSLR win.
Nope. You won't even know that until you develop. With a DSLR, you actually do know.
Nope. Again, on the spot review gets those tossed. It's all good stuff if you're a good photog. DSLR win.
Wait, what? No! Swap a battery, you're up and running and you're also charging; also, most DSLRs (mine for sure) can run tethered to power no problem, which is very useful in undertakings like astrophotos. But really, swap and charge is pretty typical. Shooting time is far longer than charging time, so two sets of batteries and you're 100% continuous. Swapping takes about a second. Or, you can go with a double-power grip, and shoot for a couple days running without a swap. DLSR win.
My Canon powers up so fast I can't get my finger from the power button to the shutter button. Are you talking about 1990's tech? Time to look again. DSLRs are fine here today.
Again, this is all in your imagination.
Yes. Constantly. It's horrible. Been there, won't go back.
Perfectly good battery metering these days. I swap at 25%, which means about once a day when actively shooting. So actual down time per day is about a couple seconds. I *never* run out of power.
Nope. My camera has a perfectly good sleep capability. Leave it on, it'll sleep if you don't shoot. Tap the shutter once, it's up and ready to go with no perceptible delay. Complete non-issue. Again, perhaps years ago. Not today.
Not *one* of your points has any serious juice behind it. There's a message in that for you, if you care to be sensitive to it.
A couple of batteries and you can shoot thousands of shots. You can also recharge them in the car, or even from a portable solar system. Or plug them into local power, often including laptops and so on. You can also trivially tack on larger battery capacity. I rest my case.
After as many as a thousand shots, I get to change one (1) card. And with film? lol. Just lol.
You, sir, are utterly bewildered.
Then, no offense, your knowledge sucks. :)
See any Dolphin designed computers? Spaceships being built by elephants? This is about extreme high levels of intelligence, AND, as you intimate, the dexterity and sensory complement to use it. That's what we have that makes us unique. And you should know that.
That's a pretty good precis of what it'll take for another race to be visible to us, or to come see us. And as we have detailed evidence from a highly diverse lab that's been running a "What's the probability of making a high intelligence via evolution?" experiment for millions of years, with one, exactly one, high intelligence result, it's not too difficult to draw a few basic conclusions, such as, "the answer is the probability is extremely low."
If this holds elsewhere, then the odds of us spotting, or being visited by, another high intelligence are also extremely low.
This is unfounded speculation, for one thing; but for another, unless you can show that we actually suppressed or repressed a form of this type, the requirement of "not being us" is irrelevant. It never happened, and we never tried to make it not happen, nor does our existence raise any particular reason for it not to happen (in fact, I'm pretty sure we would have either enslaved them or vice-versa), and even if you skip the last 50k years, there are still millions remaining with tons of varieties and mutations and it *still* never happened. So there's absolutely no place to stand when arguing that "something else would have evolved with this characteristic." Nothing we know of demonstrates this assertion. Nature doesn't need us. That's not how evolution works. Things don't arise simply because there is a niche.
There are no other movers at all, after a huge number of variations in life, and a huge amount of time for them to happen. That's the point.
You can't argue 2nd mover until you can demonstrate there is one. Until then, the odds against 2nd (and 3rd, etc.) movers on Earth are well established: every other species than ours, ever, to one.
Your failure is only due to you taking the sentence out of context. I ALSO clearly wrote at length about spacefaring, which is both spot-on, on topic (we're talking about the Drake equation here) and obvious.
If you read my entire post, and you understand it, you can then, perhaps, construct a counterpoint. As it is, you are arguing with yourself.
You are speculating in direct conflict with the facts at hand.
All those years. At least hundreds of millions of them. Perhaps more, depending on how fast you think something might arise. All those species. Exactly one spaceship-capable result. Therefore, the odds against spaceship-building beings here are well established at this time: 1:VeryLargeNumber.
You have not presented any counterpoint to this. If there is a planet full of cetacean like creatures busily mourning their dead, we're not going to find them with SETI, see? Nor are they going to ever show up here to say hello. If there's a planet of parrots, talking up a storm, we're not going to find them with SETI, either, and even though they can fly, they're not going to get to space, or even that close. So these levels of intelligences are wholly irrelevant to the entire idea and purpose of the Drake equation, which is constructed in an attempt to answer the question, "Why have we not heard from other space traveling/competent intelligences?", or more concisely, "Where are they?"
BTW, until or unless dolphin speech is understood to be an artifact of high intelligence, carrying complex information, rather than sounds more or less on par with dogs barking, your assertion there, insufficient as it is, does not hold up. Speech is not unique to high intelligence by any means. It's the content of the speech that matters, and only ours, to date, is actually known to transfer content that is relevant to the Drake equation.
...wait a minute. I like hookers. They inspire me to do all the technical stuff I do. :)
Like the majority of your post, strawman.
My point is that the data shows unequivocally that the odds against spaceship and radio building intelligence arising here on earth, despite its being teeming with life, are extremely high. Since no one's been trying to off intelligent species intentionally, and intelligence turns out to be a very favorable thing in terms of survival, the conclusion is that intelligence does not arise except very rarely (eg, us.)
Extrapolating directly from these facts, I *speculate* that this may be a general characteristic of high (spaceship-building, radio making) intelligence, and observe that if you put the numbers we have seen here that represent those odds honestly, into the Drake equation, you end up with very few instances indeed (try it instead of arguing pointlessly.)
If you have *anything* to say that counters that point, by all means, say it. Otherwise, you make no valid counterpoint and I see no reason to engage further.
He said one thousand dollar speaker wire , lol.
Nonsense. When run in their linear range, which is to say, where they are designed to normally run, analog devices, be they tubes, fets or bipolar transistors, all follow the input signal faithfully, plus or minus inherent noise -- no "warmth" or other characteristics are inherent. *NONE*. Digital also.
However, when a tube is pushed into its nonlinear range, the gain transfer curve bends over comparatively smoothly so that what would be a clipped signal in a device like a bipolar transistor, turns first into a compressed signal, and even later down the curve, begins to evidence distortion that resembles clipping, but has, because of that still-somewhat-gentle curve, an entirely different set of dominant harmonics as compared to, for instance, a bipolar transistor at or near saturation.
That characteristic is why (knowledgable) musicians who use distortion as a tonal tool typically prefer tubes; specifically because they *do* run the tubes out of the linear area of the transfer curve, and the result is interesting and often pleasing. When the distortion is the result of a transfer curve that abruptly goes from highly linear to highly nonlinear, as is the case with bipolar devices, the result is most unpleasant.
However, this choice does not *ever* hold true for a musical reproduction system based on tubes that isn't running in a range that will distort the music. You'd have to turn it up so far that one or more elements of the preamp or power amp is pushed past the linear part of its transfer curve, and then *everything* distorts -- and that's not a "warm" sound, that's a "hey, your system is sucking, turn that thing down" sound.
So, for example, if I get out my Les Paul or my Strat and plug it into a tube amp, I'm doing so because the amp's distortion is going to very significantly color the reproduction of what I play. I'm going to adjust the amp specifically so I *get* distortion. It'll sound fabulous. I'll get feedback, there will be awesome weirdnesses when I hit harmonics on my strings, pick and fretting artifacts will sound very different, etc. When I record this as accurately as possible, however, and subsequently play it back on a musical reproduction system of ANY kind, I am NOT going to adjust that system so that it distorts, because I don't want MORE distortion, I want exactly, and I mean *exactly*, what I recorded. All the more so when it's my guitar plus drums, bass and vocals. Etc. Adjusting a music reproduction system doing that task so that it distorts is the act of a madman or a masochist. Tube, transistor or digital whatever completely aside, the entire objective of an audio system is to get the music to your ears without changing it in any way that degrades the transfer. So the kind of distortion the playback system would evidence if overdriven is (had better be!) utterly irrelevant.
The fact is, a digital system, an analog bipolar system in class A or properly biased AB, and a tube system in class A or a nominal push-pull configuration with an output transformer all reproduce essentially the same signal in human perception terms, plus or minus noise. But noise is a significant factor with tube designs. Sidle up to your tweeter and listen. Hear that hiss? That's coming from the tubes themselves. Now do the same with a 24- or 32-bit prepro and an amp with a 110db noise floor, like a Marantz MA700. Viola! No audible noise at the tweeter. It's there, but it's so blinking minuscule, you can't perceive it. Entirely a good thing.
So the whole "audiophile" trip about tube amps being "better" is a complete confusion of something they do for musicians playing a specific instrument (ex guitar, horn, bass), which they do not usefully do for general sound reproduction, because, and hear me on this, music consisting of more than one instru
America was .
FTFY.
...and film and development costs eventually change that triple dollar sign to tens of them. Or more. While the DSLR can hold at four. Not to mention running out of film when you're not done shooting, not knowing the quality of the shots you've taken, not being able to have a 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th and...) chance, being limited to a fixed sensitivity, and the immediate and unavoidable aging process that starts the moment a print is finished.
No thanks. Been there, done that, it totally sucked. It's just a retro urge, hipster nonsense in terms of any functional issue you can name. If it's fun for you, by all means, go for it, but don't ever kid yourself you're doing something worthwhile on the quality front. What you're actually doing is crippling yourself intentionally, both on the front end, when you shoot, and the back end, when you develop.
It's comparable to the resurgence of interest in vinyl records. The only worthy attraction is in the sheer retro-ness of it. It certainly isn't in the quality; a good DLSR today is an amazing tool, capable of far more than yesterdays SLRs in every area but outright spectral retargeting (IE, you can put IR film in an SLR and go -- an IR sensor of equal quality, not so much), and that includes in ultimate image quality in normal regimes. Even as far as developing goes, modern software has made the range of actions and remediation one can pull off in the darkroom look like a tiny collection of beginner's moves.
I do not regret, not even one little bit, no longer having to do the tray-and-line dance with my work. Furthermore, I shoot more, and better, with my DSLR than I could ever have hoped to accomplish with any SLR I ever owned.
Up until the current generation of DSLRs, I always felt that I wasn't *quite* there. But today, I literally have no reason to look back. I have to hand it to Canon, Nikon, etc... they've done a great job. Between the quality obtainable, the ability to go out and shoot a thousand *good* images without changing "film", the incredible range of usable ISO (sensitivity to light), in-camera preview -- and disposal -- so you actually know what you have while you're still on-site and able to try again, to readily available histograms and after-the-fact white balance... and then "developing" with Aperture or Lightroom... I'll take a DSLR every time.
No. I don't. However, I live 300 highly rural miles from a city I really must visit regularly.
Again, no. I take breaks. However, there are no charging stations (or gas stations, for that matter) at the Missouri river crossing. It's a long ride. It's not even an optional ride. We (usually) go for medical reasons, my lady's breast cancer treatments and some issues I have as well. We also go for construction supplies and shop for various things not available to us where we live. And restaurants. We have few choices at home, and I confess we do go a little overboard when in the city.
Well, again, no. Montana typically reaches -40 in the winter where we travel, complete with significant snow and ice obstacles, while it can just as easily hit over 100 in the summer. Either way, cabin climate often needs effective control without causing the trip to end because the vehicle ran out of power. Also, arriving frozen -- or broiled -- is not really an option. We drop the windows on nice days, just like most others, I suppose.
Large, yes. We carry lumber and so forth. Inefficient, no, but frankly not too worried about it. Cheap? $50,000 is "cheap"? Really? You're kinda funny. :)
Yes, that would be because there are no rental facilities here, and "regular" is because neither disease nor medical care seems to care one whit about our preferences in the matter. So strange, don't you agree?
Probably less. I never said otherwise. I also indicated my plans were to keep what I had, which does the job just fine.
However, you might be moved to comment if someone seemed to be curious why you hadn't bought your own aircraft, but instead, decided to stay with whatever mode of transport you had integrated into your lifestyle.
Hey, thanks for posting. I found your remarks highly entertaining. Clueless, rude, inappropriate, somewhat pinheaded, poorly thought out -- but highly entertaining.