In an old AAR movie from the 40s (Life Line of America) there's a shot of a large mainline steam engine with a crewman oiling around. It's plainly obvious that the main and side rods are painted white, as is the valve gear. There is glossy black paint around the bearing area. The line between the colors of paint is clearly and carefully demarcated.
In a lifetime of looking at trains I've never seen this before. Does anyone have a clue as to why that would be done? To make it easier to spot fractures, perhaps?
Most likely it was some "PR-Hollywood" idea for the film. Dumb.
I've also seen builder's photos with white painted rods. It went along with the overall gray paint the was often used on the entire loco. I've heard that this was a water soluble "whitewash" that was hosed off afetr the photo session. Such special paint was commonly used to better show details in the bulder's photos. I doubt that the locos were normally operated in this condition.
However, as another post pointed out, there is/was a technique for spotting cracks in mechanisms that used a sort of "whitewash" coating. The parts were first cleaned to remove all surface oils, then coated with the white stuff. Any (normally) invisible cracks would still have oils in them that would then creep out and stain the coating.
For appearance, esp. on engines destined for passenger service. Tires (rims) and edges of running boards also often painted white.
For builder's photos, engines were painted with a water-based medium grey, which photographed better than black. Siderods etc also painted white, again to show up better on the photos. The paint was washed off before delivery.
I'm not the least bit offended, just curious: you say you don't "store posts"; what does that mean? How do you read this newsgroup? Don't you use the conventional method of using a news client? I'm curious why you don't seem to have access to previous posts; seems like a clunky way to do things to me.
I read it as the posts come in. The posts I want to read, that is. My newsreader is set _not_ to d/l posts, it d/l only those I click on. So an unread post that's marked "read" and not downloaded disappears from the header list I see here. Read posts are deleted after 15 days. If a post contains Really Useful Information, I Save it outside the newsreader, on a separate drive.
Overall, I read about 10-20% of the posts on the NGs I monitor. For some NGs days can go by before I decide I want to read a post.
I don't know, Wolf; that still sounds a bit strange to me, unless I'm misunderstanding your methodology (always a possibility).
We both use newsreaders to read this group (as [insert name of deity here] intended). I too only "download" (open) those messages I click on; I think this is the default behavior for 99.9% of newsreaders.
But why are "read posts deleted after 15 days"? This part I don't get. With my setup, all posts, read or unread, stay unexpired for [a long time, don't know how long exactly]. Sounds like your newsreader is exacting a strange penalty for reading a post, by disappearing it so soon. The same with read posts being removed from the header list: why? My newsreader (Thunderbird) simply marks read posts as such, so they can easily be skipped over. They're still there, though, in case one wants to re-read them.
I see you're using Tbird (3.1.2) as well, so I don't understand exactly how you configured it to give this sorta weird behavior.
I probably read 5-10% of newsgroup posts on average.
Because that's how I set the retention policy (on this machine). It's been so long since I changed ed the number, I can't recall the default.
Messages not downlaoded are marked "read", and TBird doesn't ask the server for them. Again, I've set it that way. Only messages that have been downloaded appear on the header list. Right now, I have 43 messages from this NG on this machine, the earliest is 6 August.
All this mysterious behaviour is controlled by a file named .msf, in case you want to know. :-) TBird updates it every time message header is received.
The default is to d/l all unread messages, then you can "work off line". I changed that, is all.
I've also set the View to Unread. I can switch back if I need to.
I look at just all posts to the ..pictures.rail NG, but download only about 1/3rd of them. That raises the average of read posts. "You can't collect everything." But some people try. ;-)
As you may have gathered, I like programs (and OSs) that allow a high degree of customisition. That's why I bought only one Mac (G4 Powerbook, the grandchildren use it when they visit.) There are a couple of Linux distros for the Power-PC chip, I may install one of them. When I get time. Real Soon Now. ;-)
Hmmm; that does not sound like default or standard Tbird behavior at all. (Again, unless I'm massively understanding things here.) I also wonder if you (or I) are confusing downloading *messages* with downloading *headers*.
My copy of Tbird is set up pretty much the way it comes from the factory. When I start it up and connect with my news server, it downloads all new message *headers*, but no messages. It only fetches messages when I click on one I want to read.
When I read a message, it marks it as read. However, the *header* stays in the list (and doesn't ever need to be downloaded again, as that list resides on my 'puter; only new message headers are downloaded). So I really don't understand your setup, and why read message *headers* disappear from your list. That isn't standard at all, and shouldn't happen. (Well, unless you *want* it to work that way ...)
Well, yeah, that's one of the nice things about Tbird.
So I take it you know all about about:config, yes?
You're right, once headers are d/l, they stay (until retention policy removes them). My mistake.
No, but I've poked around in it quite a bit. Some things I want to change can't be changed. Eg, I want to eliminate "archiving" completely
- it's just another TBird folder. What's the point? If the Profile is corrupted, you'll likely lose the "archived" messages anyhow. What I want is archiving were set up so that you specified a folder _outside_ the Tbird Profile.
Well, besides about:config, there are the user configuration files (like user.js and prefs.js, some kind of "chrome" file, probably others) that can contain even more customization stuff. The problem that a lot of stuff is not fully documented, is poorly documented or is hard to find documentation for. It's kind of a geek's paradise, unfortunately.
I am not sure why you picked on this guy. I have my news reader set to delete all headers for read news immediately. All I ever see is unread news. I like it that way for the same reason I don't read yesterday's paper next week. Anything worth saving I save when I see it.
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