You can’t buy an upright bass for $450. What you can buy, for that amount of money, is a bass-shaped object made of extraordinarily low-quality wood, with cheap tuning gears, a neck that will probably separate from the rest of the “instrument” within a year, and a weak tone with no volume.
If you want to buy an actual upright bass that’s worth playing, you’re going to have to spend at least a thousand dollars, unless you can find a very good deal on a well-used instrument.
From that auction:
**
Warm Amber Gloss Finish! **- translation: a cheap sprayed-on orange varnish. Double Kerfing! - translation: we don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about. “Double” kerfing is not a woodworking technique used in bass making. Arched Back Construction !! translation: the bass has an arched back. Okay. Big deal. Most of them do. The exclamation marks are unwarranted.
**24:1 ratio Tyrolean-style Machine Heads for precise, easy tuning !! ** - translation: cheaply made stamped metal gears that don’t have a chance in hell of staying in tune. Dyed Hardwood Fittings! - translation: instead of using ebony for the fingerboard, we use some kind of shitty, soft, cheap wood, and paint it black.
The timeouts largely stopped during the period when search was disabled. Now that it has been re-enabled, the timeouts are again occurring, though with less frequency because the time between additional searches has been lengthened to five minutes.
I encounter multiple board hangups daily and I liked it better when search was disabled, but you can’t please all the people all the time and I’m sure there are plenty of others around here who prefer to have search capability even if it means occasional hangups.
I think the current situation is a reasonable compromise till the upgrades take effect.
It’s not a whoosh, sorry if it comes off as one. I don’t read everything on this forum, and don’t often read either the Pit or the ATMB, so I guess I missed most of the previous discussion on the issue.
I remember when the search was disabled and there was the big outcry about the performance, it wasn’t so much the timeouts as it was the major incidents of the whole board being completely down. At least that’s how I remember it anyway.
Well, if you’d read the announcement linked to at the top of every page, you’d know that sometime in the next few months a new server will be installed that will be dedicated to handling searches, which should make the performance problems go away(well, searches will probably still be kinda slow, but that’s not a big surprise).
A better way of putting is that a crappy search implementation is making the board time out, but that’s out of the hands of the people running the site.
The one big problem is that there are too many posts in the database for efficient searching. And there are a lot of threads. Ok, the two big problems are too many posts in the database and a lot of threads. And we have a lot of users. Wait, wait - the three problems really plaguing the SDMB are too many posts in the database, a whole lot of threads, and a lot of users. And old equipment. The four big problems this place has are…wait, let me start over.
I love it when people throw arbitrary nuggets of useful knowledge at me in the middle of a rant. I now know virtually nothing about upright basses, whereas before I knew absolutely nothing. Keep up the good work
Count me as one of the few that never experience timeouts. I visit the board every day (~10-20 threads a day) with IE6 and I get a timeout maybe once/month. Has anyone tried to do a tracert?
I read probably 20 threads a day, and respond to 5 on average, maybe, and rarely get timeouts. Guess I’m one of the lucky ones.
And if you want a nice bass, find a friend or relative that has one in the attic that isn’t being used. That’s what I did. I forget the brand, and I left it with my parents in CA when I moved to MI, but I do remember that it’s at least 120 years old, German made, and sounds awesome. I used to play it in church under an electric guitar, and had no problem with being acoustic. Great tone. There’s a crack in the bottom of the neck due to my cousin hanging it from the scroll, but my mom (hey, I was a freshman in HS at the time!) paid him $350 I think, and it needed another $400 in repair. Well worth it. And a halfway decent bass is $1000. The bass that a friend played in the college orchestra, which was owned by the college, was worth more like $10k.
I agree! In fact the instant the 404 error appears, the scream that issues from me is so brutal and violent that tears form in my throat and a fine red mist stains my monitor. To clean it, I keep a spray-bottle of ammonia handy and give the monitor three spritzes and each of my eyes two to burn out the traumatic vision. I’ve already shattered three fingers by smashing them down repeatedly on the F5 key. What’s left pinky going to do tonight? Try not to break into a curl.
I really enjoyed the brief period of prompt response we had when search was turned off. I’m really looking forward to the new hardware, and I hope the db problems get fixed. Because I enjoy this place a lot more when it’s actually, you know, working.
Ken Smith Basses. Top of the line starts at $25,000. Absolutely beautiful instruments.
Upton Bass. A well-respected workshop in Connecticut that makes all their instruments in the US. I play this model. Their entry level instrument is $1,700 and I’ve heard it is a great deal for the money.
There was a time when you got official warnings for telling people how to use Adblock to strip out the Google ads…
Course I also remember that one of the stated reasons why there are no avatars or image tags being that it would overtax the servers. And I still can’t figure out how it is that free sites with larger databases and more users don’t need to have a five minute wait between searches.
Perhaps they have competent IT staff.
With anyone competent handling the DB, even an average inexpensive server can handle the user workload that a web forum of this size would generate. One of the major features of databases is that they are searchable, that they can be indexed, and that they can contain huge amounts of information and still allow you to find one sentence in seconds.
Before anyone screams about how big this database is, I can practically guarantee that it is smaller than the databases at customer sites that I work with, and less complex, and I’d be up shit creek (probably fired) if my stuff was as reliable as this.
