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Those tires are obviously bias ply, which I thought were extinct. That sent me down a rabbit hole, researching tires. Turns out bias-ply are still used on trailers, because they reduce the shimmy effect at highway speeds. Keeps the trailers under better control.
Radial technology is now the standard design for essentially all automotive tires.
Bias tires are still used on trailers due to their weight carrying ability and resistance to swaying when towed.
Now I'm getting ads for tires.
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Last edited by reader50; Jul 14, 2023 at 10:59 PM.
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Location: Iowa, how long can this be? Does it really ruin the left column spacing?
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Jul 24, 2023, 03:41 PM
What I'm figuring out is:
1) Everyone wants a bajillion gigs of bandwidth
2) There's absolutely no money to be made in providing free bandwidth to the general public
How many times do we have to see the same cycle of:
1. Create service providing free bandwidth
2. Burn cash building a userbase
3. Pivot to profitability
4. Crash and burn as the userbase moves to the next free service
Photobucket, Dropbox, tumblr, however many photographer-focused sites, Reddit is still insolvent and only the third party apps that weren't hosting content were profitable, YouTube is apparently still burning cash...who's next?
I've essentially dropped Dropbox AND Evernote. I still have the DB app on some devices, but I've recovered everything I had stored there and moved it to either local off-line or cloud places (I still use both iCloud and OneDrive). Both DB and EN changed rules kind of frequently, and got less and less useful, so I decided I didn't need them.
I have used other hosts for photos I have shared, but again they got to be more trouble than they were worth, so I ditched them. ImageShack wanted me to limit bandwidth for downloads; how does one limit other people looking at the pictures they share on web forums? I never used Photobucket, but their rule changes affected a bunch of people on other boards I frequent. In particular, their tactic of de-focusing shared images unless the user had a paid account was roundly hated by just about everyone I knew who used it.
I don't know whether profitability drove rule changes, or if the rule changes pushed down profitability, but for every free service I'm aware of - other than the free tiers for both iCloud and OneDrive - the two were connected.
Location: Iowa, how long can this be? Does it really ruin the left column spacing?
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Jul 25, 2023, 04:57 PM
Oh, I thought about Imgur but because they haven't crashed and burned yet, I left them out. But I was trying to remember what I did between Dropbox and just paying for my own web hosting, and it was Imgur. Until Imgur blocked hotlinking to most popular forums, so pictures I was sharing would show up here but not on the BMW forums. Yet another case where providing free bandwidth without capturing either ad revenue or at least user data was unsustainable.
So I got my own hosting for $12/month that includes three sites and unlimited storage and bandwidth (I'm assuming if I tried to use Netflix-level bandwidth or storage that they'd eventually clamp down). No more getting the rug pulled out from under me when yet another VC-funded site pivots to profitability and breaks the internet.
When I uploaded my Pixlas shots to Imgur, it was the first time I'd used them in months. They are rolling out a new interface - and the link to picture library led to an error page. I was able to switch to the old interface, and reach my pics.
Maybe it was an accident, a bug remaining to be fixed. Or perhaps they are encouraging people to make public posts on Imgur.
I’ve been using my own hosting for ages. My particular hosting package has some kind of up charge for lots and lots of traffic, but it’s way up there, as if I were doing my own version of “host your pictures here”.
I have three sites, pretty much unlimited storage, and there are lots of “helpful” tools for building commercial sites, too. So as not to sound like an advertisement on the forum, I’m not going to mention my host.
JetBlue plane at JFK airport (NY) unloaded too much weight from the front first. No injuries, no reported damage yet. I wonder if the rear unloading equipment includes spacers, to prevent the tail from reaching the tarmac.
Probably not. The ground crew “should” know to open and unload both forward and aft stowage at pretty much the same time, since there’s no way to be sure what the balance situation is at the gate.
Once the holds are emptied then refilled, the aircrew puts that info, along with fuel and passenger weight, into a simple formula. Sometimes the flight may be delayed a bit while ground crew moves heavy@ss bags from one hold to the other, and VERY rarely passengers may be asked to move to different seats to get the aircraft balanced properly.
But at the gate? The only safe bet is to unload everything equally. Or to be the subject of “airliner mishaps” memes.
Joe Pedestrian (whatever his beliefs) probably needs to kneel and cross himself several times here. And/or change his pants, but that’s a separate thing.
WHEEE! Some rookie is going to have to collect the hoses and stuff that flew out. Sort of like when fire responds to a traffic accident, and the guy with the short straw has to sweep up the car bits.
The FSK bridge was a good design that depended on ships not hitting the pilings that supported it. If you look at the pictures, you can see the power line towers are surrounded by a sort of floating barrier/buffer, while the pilings were not. It’s a matter of nobody ever considered big, heavy ships losing power, steerage, or other control-related catastrophe.
From everything I’ve read, the container ship’s crew did everything right, including sending a MAYDAY, the local police jumped into action and closed the bridge, and it appears that the only loss of life was maintenance workers who were on a break in their cars ON the bridge. The police attempted to get them off, but there wasn’t time to get there and alert them.
Considering that Carnival Cruise Lines just had one of their ships catch fire AGAIN, in the same part of the ship, it’s not like problems don’t happen to ships. Carnival was lucky this time, because the ship was anchored at Grand Turks, and they could manage passengers quickly. I can’t imagine the paperwork involved in evacuating thousands of passengers to lifeboats out in the open ocean, even if it’s just a precaution. Note: I’ve sailed on Carnival twice, and never again. Nice people, pretty ships, but compared to other lines, they have a LOT of problems.
I’m also NOT contributing to the flood of newly minted bridge engineers, ship pilots, police dispatchers, and so on who are all explaining why it happened and how they would have prevented it. The only real thing we know is that the ship hit the bridge - not the other way around - and it hit a very vulnerable point. The mayor of Baltimore said in a news conference that the bridge had recently passed inspections, so it was not a faulty bridge. Maybe it really was just horrible luck that caused the ship to lose power at the worst possible time. We won’t know until the accident is fully investigated and the report is published.
It’s a matter of nobody ever considered big, heavy ships losing power, steerage, or other control-related catastrophe.
One of the key points that I’ve heard voiced by actual engineers is that the ships that were in use when the bridge was designed and built were drastically smaller than the leviathans sailing today. That makes things a whole lot tighter going down the channel between the piers, with a lot less leeway.
That’s true, and a big issue for all shipping. Ships are getting bigger and bigger, across the range of types of ships. Continuing with my comparison with cruise ships, the first ship we sailed on, Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas, completed in 1997, displaces about 79,000 tons (GWT). Their newest ship, Icon of the Seas, completed this year, displaces almost 249,000 tons. Rhapsody is 279m long with a beam of 32.2m, while Icon is 364.75m long with a beam of 48.47m. While cargo ships haven’t quite gone to such extremes, they have gotten bigger too, a lot bigger.
The ship that hit the bridge, the Dali (after artist Salvador Dali) is 300m long, with an empty displacement of 95,000 tons, and can carry almost 10,000 20-foot containers. She was completed about 9 years ago. Sources say she had about 4,700 containers on board at the time of the accident.
I’m curious about what the investigation will find regarding why the Dali lost power several times. Dali uses a diesel engine to directly drive its fixed pitch propeller. This means her engine must be stopped and restarted in reverse to reverse power (slow down). But her bow thruster, which provides port-starboard thrust, appears to be electric. She has four diesel generators for electricity…and video of the accident shows ALL of her lights going off several times.
Theorizing now, it looks like they had issues with electrical power throughout the ship at the worst possible time. The ship was inspected last summer in Chile, with a single deficiency being found, and inspected again last September in the U.S. without any deficiencies, so it’s not likely that it was “poorly maintained”.
With quad-redundancy on their electric generators, I'd expect the fault to be in a common element. Like a shared fuel pump, or the transfer box where the power feeds come together. Or a plugged air intake, assuming all generators shared the same intake vent.
From experience (on land) transfer boxes tend to be really reliable, but anything can fail. With the speed at which the lights came back on (several times) it looks like it was some sort of basic thing like the transfer system, but that’s as far as I can theorize.
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