Yes, you are correct, vacuum tube amps have higher levels of distortion (and noise in most cases) compared to solid state amps. For vacuum tube amps the characteristic curve of distortion is a quadratic function called the second harmonic (frequency double the original sound and an overtone factor produced by most musical instruments - eg. a stradivarius - that gives depth and richness to sound). Solid state amps on the other hand produce tertiary and quintic harmonics that are not as pleasing to hear (which is why they try to reduce distortion for solid state amps to zero).
Slightly dated but eye opening article. Researchers estimate that by age 23 nearly one in three Americans will have been arrested. The number of Americans with criminal records today is larger than the entire U.S. population in 1900.
Living in the bay area these numbers were eye opening to me. Maybe YC isn't the right place for this discussion, but as a tech worker I'm wondering how we as a community can bring about any change to help disenfranchised youth.
As someone who works in the semiconductor industry, one of the most exciting things happening right now is the development and emergence of persistent/storage class memory (PCM/RRAM/3DXP/NVDIMMs). The implications of a persistent alternative to DRAM is immense and besides fundamentally changing compute/memory/networking/storage architectures it will also change programming models and SW stacks as we know them today. This is a topic I feel doesn't get enough visibility here, especially given that support for such technologies has already started getting baked in to Linux and Windows.
>>There’s also a wide body of research that’s found that decreasing latency has a roughly linear effect on revenue over a pretty wide range of latencies and businesses.
There is no published research I'm aware of. However, you can find an article about every major tech company talking about how reducing their latency increased whatever their core metric was (not necessarily linearly though, sometimes it was and even steeper curve). I know for sure this is true at eBay, Netflix, and reddit because I've seen the numbers personally, and I have friends at Google, Amazon and Facebook who have said the same.
Came to the comments looking for these links, too.
Results of my research are below; everything I found is anecdotal, consistent with the other comments. The most robust is the presentation at Velocity in 2009. [4, 5]
My notes:
Small ecommerce vendor, 2012. One second delay in page-load causes 7% loss in customer conversions. [1]
Marissa Meyer, 2006 Web 2.0 conference. Extra 1/2 second in page load time dropped traffic by 20%. [2]
Greg Linden, 2006 (same link as above) "We had similar experience at Amazon.com. We tried delaying page in increments of 100ms and found very small delays result in substantial and costly drops in revenue. [2]
Greg Linden, Make Data Useful, 2006 - Every 100ms delay costs 1% of sales. [3]
Velocity, 2009. The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP Chunking in Web Search Presentation. Multiple observations. My net: Delays under 500m measurably impact customer satisfaction metrics, magnitude increases commensurately with delay. (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) [4, 5]
This was an error by the author of the blog post. There isn't a wide body of research confirming this. There aren't academic papers. There is merely anecdotal evidence/marketing material from industry participants.
