Why?

Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.
Is it that by not living in the past you become modern? I try to know as much about things as I can. In my work I had no option. Part of my interest started when someone brought me a Dynaco to repair. I was known to live in the past enough to know how.

I was talking to my friend Alan who is close to 80 who is a lecturer in electronics. He has a new job teaching the Army ( REME ). He has been out of work for a while and was getting bored. Talking as we do he says he saw and was involved with 1958 NTSC 405 lines. I never would have thought that.
 
By far ahead I think he means solutions which require less intelligence and less effort to get generally favorable results to give people the illusion their lives are getting simpler and are thus now more free, while they work more, are paid less and are further deprived of the solace of human connection.
 
Disabled Account
Joined 2017
I wouldn't read that far deeply into a post made by radiosmuck. He's just taking a stab at someone interested in farting around with old tape gear.


But yeah he is completely wrong and hasn't got a clue just how wrong he is.


If for example you archive a high bandwidth analog video format such as Laserdisc onto DVD and MPEG2 you are then throwing away a huge chunk of data that will come back to bite you in the **** again later on if you ever decide to play back that DVD on a suitable monitor that can show you what is missing from the DVD which was present in the original. MPEG2 is restricted by its age and its maximum bitrate.


To make a truly lossless copy of even just Betamax you will need at the very least a Bluray burner with analog composite input, in addition to this you would require a professional TBC.


But people who like to make the comment that analog formats are obsolete and are therefore inferior to ALL digital formats preceeding them, including DVD and Bluray, are either ill informed or just annoyingly trollish.


The fact is, I've had to copy directly into a lossy but practically lossless 4:2:2 MagicYUV codec and just to preserve a single tape I require 50-80GB of hdd space to do so. It then goes downhill from there after I re-encode into H.265, which also requires me to have a final filesize of 30-50GB in order preserve all of the original content without any loss of material.


And that is at a rather pitiful resolution of 768x576.


If anything it is the modern day digital fans which have had the wool pulled over their eyes and have been conned into believing that DVD MPEG-2 and H.265 are in some way a good format. These people have in some incredible leap of faith decided that high compression ratios are a good thing. If you've bought into DVD in a huge way and paid dearly for this massive library then I have something to say to you, you've been conned from the very start. Are you truly going to sit there and tell me that 9GB of MPEG-2 video is in some fashion lossless? Hell no you are not.


The fact is, we will never have an acceptably lossless codec until the physical format is reinvented, and until that time we will be farting around with digital streaming and playing back of content from media servers/hard drives.


I've said before and I'll say it again.
DVD is dead.
Bluray is dead.
ALL current physical formats are dead. They DO NOT have the capacity to hold even 1 hour let alone 2 or 3 of lossless modern codec information.


The ONLY truly lossless physical format currently out there right now MIGHT be a very expensive SD card or SSD or HDD, if you manage to fit a lossless movie onto that then you are going to be getting the best quality possible and your source would have to be film.


Until anyone here manages to reach that point and capture and preserve a video tape in a lossless codec (or with H.265 with the slider turned all the way to the right) then don't talk to me about digital formats being somehow superior to analog formats.


YES analog formats are inferior to digital formats, but 99.99% of the time when you are talking about digital formats you are NOT capturing and playing back the full analog signal in its entirety, you are NOT preserving the original signal and THAT is because the physical media currently isn't up to the task right now, but it might in the future. But I would hate to see what size a completely lossless RGB (no chroma subsampling) encode would look like of 4K or 8K footage.


To use an analogy, with the current digital codec landscape you are trying to reproduce or teleport a real human being by teleporting them and forcing that person to exist by recreating them out of swiss cheese instead of bone and flesh that is what 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 does alone by itself let alone and nevermind the whole clusterguppy that is modern digital codecs.


The cake is a lie.
 
Last edited:
By far ahead I think he means solutions which require less intelligence and less effort to get generally favorable results to give people the illusion their lives are getting simpler and are thus now more free, while they work more, are paid less and are further deprived of the solace of human connection.

I love precision mechanisms, I served an apprenticeship as a scientific instrument maker in London and have been employed in a high precision environment all my working life
I once played vinyl, I still have 4 quality turntables. I've threaded tape through a tube Ferrograph 2 track 15/7.5 semi pro stereo tape deck, which I still have.
I have a number of fine mechanical cameras including a Nikon F, F2 and a Contarex Bullseye, also a really beautiful pre war folding Zeiss Icon Super Ikonta 531.
I also have a Curta mechanical calculator and old Breitling Navitimer which unfortunately needs repair and I'm frightened to ask.
Although I really appreciate precision mechanical craftsmanship, my listening and viewing pleasure is now pure digital. I have an old Pioneer CT-F 1000 cassette deck, weighs a ton and cost a fortune in the 70's and does not hold a candle to the little bluetooth mp3 player I can hide in my fist.
I listen to more music now than when the only medium available was vinyl and reel to reel tape.
My acceptance of digital extends to my basement workshop where I have converted 2 small Asian machine tools to CNC, BUT, I do not have a cellphone, which obviously takes away ones freedom.
 
Last edited:
Technology only takes away what you give it. I have a cell phone, but have people ask me why I don't answer it all the time when they call.

If it is important leave me a message, or better yet, text me. I pick my phone up about once an hour when not particularly busy and look for text messages. Otherwise it is just a piece of technology I ignore.
 
Likewise. The small Nokia phones fit in a jeans mini pocket which makes the phone ever-ready. Also it makes it only available if really required like a gun in it's holster. It will stay charged for days and has an excellent FM radio as a nice touch, it's close to the quality of my various nice FM tuners. It has the the very best scientific calculator I ever had. What it doesn't do a piece of paper will add on. Anti-log being the most obvious which can be done by appoximation. As I do that all the time many answers come quickly.

Friends know I answer my phone when I find time. I seldom use it as a phone. I never activated the internet. I use the most dreadful pay as you go package which I guess is $130 a year. This stops me sending daft texts or substiuting the landline. What I did do was add the cheapest memory card. That really has been useful, the camera is useable and has even taken a few nice sunsets etc and amplifier internals.

I have an iPhone in a box that my ex wife gave me. Every time she asks why it never moves from the cupboard I always say it won't fit in my jeans pocket. Think about that, an iPhone is a useless substitute for a laptop and a Nokia. Negative progress. I plan to put a sound meter App on it one day.

My boss is a person who always wants answers yesterday and so he should as it can be about safety. Equally months can go by without him calling or answering my updates. A text to me and an answer avoids panic. I seem to be able to carry most projects in my head and that goes back years. That gives me time to get to a computer and refine the answer. My phone seems to have invented a version of flight mode I didn't activate, I value that. Sometimes I have to say to my boss " I did send you a text on that, shall I forward it "? He then says he gets so many that maybe he missed it. That's pure gold as the blame game is stopped in it's tracks. Not that it ever was that ( ? ). Ditto emails.

Do other people find that modern things often devellope non critical software faults? Nearly everything I own has something like that. It's the fact that they all work well enough I find hard to understand. I tend to keep things so maybe I am the one in a million that finds out. I only keep things that I like.

My 17 year old VW car needs medication I feel. One has to be so polite for it to be the car I remember. The ex is still insured to drive it 10 years on. Would you believe that's cheaper ! Every time she ask I say " sure, but it might kill you ". That isn't untrue, it's engine management is quirky. I never ask it to do what it won't and certainly not when overtaking. My garage understands the fault and couldn't fix his own VW with the same. He switched the engine off on the move which he said is as stupid as is possible to be as a workable fix. The answer is don't overtake where power might be critical. This seems to be not untypical these days as faults. That VW fault is no worse than saying brakes can not do everything, for someone who doesn't know the car it's not ideal. I have a list of things it isn't if wondering. The two remaining are the ECU vacuum input and wastegate. The latter seems less likely. The ERG also. The turbo vanes doubtless come into it. By careful driving it's 95% as good as ever and uses no oil. The lights are dangerous as modern cars are too bright for it to compete. A lamp upgrade wouldn't help as it the lack of high grade optics that is the problem. I love my VW despite the Hitler years ( We Brits suffer that anew ). It's a bit like me, a bit broken. I even have an illness I should be very frightened of. I seem to be able to do 95% of what I could when 40 so why worry.

Phone texts were a test mode for engineers I understand. It was decided to keep the feature in the unlikely event someone would ever use it ! I am right handed and left hand text with my thumb if a primitive phone. It is so unusual that. The Nokia like the NAD3020 is what you really need, alas the need to be one of the sheep has taken over. I suspect my phone is 70% a calculator. I feel very relaxed when I am not doing what the others do yet have the tool should it be useful. My girlfriend who was a super social person and would have been a book of modern behaviour now has her head in the phone 24/7. I think she is now more Maladroit than me and I am certainly that ! I say nothing to her as I can remember who she really is.
 
Disabled Account
Joined 2017
There hasn't been advancement in computer technology for the last 6 years. No really. 2012 was the first year that we reached 7,000-9,000 CPU Mark points in the Passmark benchmarking software and that level of performance is what we have stuck to for the last 6 years. Nobody actually needs anything more than that and for basic web browsing work if you turn off the ridiculously inefficient graphics trims in Windows 10 you can even go down to roughly 3,500 or 4,000 Passmark score and still have a very snappy and smooth computer at your disposal.

But it is vitally essential to have a 4 core/thread CPU at a minimum today. You can now get a Ryzen 5 2600 CPU with 4 cores/12 threads for $250-$300 AUD and a Passmark score of 13,000! More than plenty for the forseeable future. I would love to see the excuse for a mainstream user to want to buy or use a high end modern CPU such as the Core i9-7980XE is, 27,000 Passmark score, what exactly would you use that for? And no CAD work or video editing is not a mainstream excuse. So what is going to happen when we finally reach 40,000 points? what would be the mainstream use case then if we cannot even find one now? VR? That is really a GPU heavy process...

So no, the mainstream purpose of modern cpu performance isn't going to change very much if at all in the next 10 years. So therefore it is true that most people will be very comfortable with a CPU from 2012-2018 being used well into 2030.

A car today is also as good as its going to ever get, the only option left to add to a car is fully automated driving. This makes all improvements in cars redundant from now on. I highly doubt that VR goggles in a car for the driver will become a thing but you never know! We might end up be driving around like fighter pilots in the future with a fully immersive VR HUD.

The formula for housing hasn't changed in 50 years in Australia.

Televisions have just about reached perfection. Once everybody reaches 4K LED television we may just give up on bothering to upgrade the tv any further and we may even just ditch the traditional television and go towards a VR Goggle design for TV/Movie production and consumption.

Digital codecs have made fiddling about with physical media obsolete, streaming or storing information on hdds is now the new thing.

What is left? Not much advancement left. Even whitegoods are spectacularly good at what they do now and with great efficiency.

The problem is I cannot actually imagine human beings continuing to be interested in advancements in technology from now on, the greatest passtime these days is going retro and looking back on old technology with which we may have missed the "perfect" style or type. The Citreon DS comes to mind as one of the more refined car designs that we have completely passed over. As an example cassette tapes are very convenient and have no DRM and they show exactly what is written on the tape, they don't get scratched like CD's do because of the rugged cartridge design and they don't get lost in between the seats like a USB flash drive or SD card does. To play one you don't need to fumble about with a touchscreen and make sure you have cellular connectivity, or agree to some kind of draconian privacy invading contract which you cannot read right now because you are driving AND it starts playing back instantly, and the tape ejects instantly.

The only advancements left in our society are with digital radio overtaking analog AM/FM broadcasts, 4K DVB streaming, raising house energy efficiency even further, installing/retrofitting solar panels on older homes and battery banks, upgrading/replacing old whitegoods with newer ones and that is just about all that I can think of.

People today have nothing to do, we can become so easily bored with modern technology because it never really breaks down, I suspect that software programmers actually write in bugs and fiddle with code to somehow improve it simply because they are bored and not necessarily because they believe that the older code was so bad that it required completely replacing from the ground up.

That is why your Nokia is just good enough, its because it is, the primary reason for human beings making tools in the past is because it has made our lives easier, well our lives are so easy now that we are literally growing out of our chairs, so what else is next to improve upon? Nothing. There is nothing to improve upon. But I suspect that MMS will make your SMS-only Nokia obsolete very soon if it hasn't already.


For all the good producing all of these toys we are no better off than when we were digging worms out of a log in the rainforest, except now we have to argue with an ignorant boss and do painful math in our heads just to get a feed. What is the point in thinking anymore? If there is going to be no more advancement then what is the point in having a job anymore? Because having a job staves off the boredom.
 
Last edited:
I run Linux, XP and 10, My least favourite is 10, 7 was OK. The XP has just been given a new hard-drive and had it's files cloned. It was a minute to midnight as that one was grinning through it's bearings. I do keep back up files, all the same. Linux is this laptop. For some reason only Linux will run now, A silicon fault. 10 runs as many old things as I can via emulators.XP is not secure as it's greater downside. I always use my laptop with a mouse.
 
I wouldn't read that far deeply into a post made by radiosmuck. He's just taking a stab at someone interested in farting around with old tape gear.


But yeah he is completely wrong and hasn't got a clue just how wrong he is.


If for example you archive a high bandwidth analog video format such as Laserdisc onto DVD and MPEG2 you are then throwing away a huge chunk of data that will come back to bite you in the **** again later on if you ever decide to play back that DVD on a suitable monitor that can show you what is missing from the DVD which was present in the original. MPEG2 is restricted by
<snip>
The depth and breadth of your misunderstanding is breathtaking.

 
Penicillin and VHS have a lot in common. A simple idea that is not simple to produce, need and a ready market pushed progress. A VHS machine possibly is as complex in tollerences as key parts of an aircraft. When Beta I knew these off by heart, alas not now. I seem to remember head concentricity was 1 micron which I take to be imperial ( I have no idea what that meant exactly, the boss was rather careful not to allow my little fingers inside ). That's just silly for a domestic machine and yet had to be right. If not the MHz of bandwidth were reduced. That's the point I made before. If a Beta went off tune the VHS was no worse. My feeling is Beta was more fussy. As far as I know the way a Beta was set up was a Sony test tape. My best guess is the lock nut on the head was loosened and a tool inserted to midly position the head whilst working. I know it could go off soon after setting and required hours of resetting until it settled. I was told firmly to keep out. Ironically if the boss wasn't there it fell to me to do something. I limited myself to very careful head and pinch wheel cleaning. Sony always talked about denatured alcohol, we used Iso. He was an odd man. He would be pleased we fixed it, like not wanting to think about his daughter on a date he didn't want to know the rest. They were his babies. Most of this was the time before VHS and domestic sales. Beta was a U-matic at a knock down price at that time.

I remember one day we did a filming session of some of the less well known food producers. It was top grade equipement. Unfortunately there was a rolling bar on the picture. Thinking it through I said to the people I thought we had an interaction with the lighting of the venue. It was fine with them and we were paid as it was their conference skills they were polishing up rather than being peacocks. The boss remained stone faced throughout. On returning he said it was a fault in the camera he thought had self cured itself (!?!). His son said afterwards, the old b-----d should have said thank you. I also had shown my conference skills. I honestly thought it was that. I always liked him for that, Mr T of the USA reminds me of him.

On that filming session I learnt a lot. It was about people not use to public speaking doing their best. The old boy coaching them seemed totally wrong, like someone they picked up at the pub. However as time passed the guys got better and better. I can only guess his less than dramatic personality made them feel dynamic. At the same time he was time served and an expert. The first guy I rememeber who did well was from a company called Moo Cow ( not quite ) and they did dairy products. They filled the gaps in the market. The real teaching was to say that simple thing in a relaxed way. Most important was to be proud of what they did. As small as this collective was it would be a multi million pound industry.
 
Administrator
Joined 2007
Paid Member
Some Beta machines needed the use of an eccentricity gauge when fitting a replacement head disc. The gauge screwed onto the stationary part of the drum assembly. The disc had to be torqued down evenly and not over tightened.

This eccentricity requirement was removed in later models where the disc was a precision machined fit with no adjustment needed.
 

Attachments

  • Capture.JPG
    Capture.JPG
    33.4 KB · Views: 60
Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.