u/SantiiL1 — reddlx

By early 2007 Blockbuster's Total Access was actually outgrowing Netflix. Then the board blew it up. Anyone here remember Total Access from the inside?

Went down a rabbit hole on this and the numbers genuinely surprised me. Total Access hit ~2 million subs by January 2007 and was adding them faster than Netflix at that exact moment. For a second there, Blockbuster was actually winning the streaming/mail war.

Then Antioco gets pushed out after the bonus fight with Icahn, Jim Keyes comes in, jacks up the Total Access pricing and basically dismantles the one thing that was working.

What gets me is everyone online still repeats the "they were too dumb to buy Netflix for $50M" line, when the real story is they had the win in their hands and the boardroom threw it away.

For anyone who worked there in '06-'07 — did it feel like that on the ground? Like the company was actually turning a corner before management killed it?

reddit.com

u/SantiiL1 — 7 days ago

▲ 524 r/AskEngineers

If Roman concrete could self-heal and last 2,000 years, why does modern concrete still crack and fail in decades?

Been digging into Roman concrete lately and the engineering side is what got me, so I wanted to ask the people who actually work with the modern stuff.

The short version of what I found: those little white chunks in Roman concrete that everyone assumed were bad mixing seem to be lime clasts from "hot mixing". When a crack forms and water gets in, they react and reform calcium carbonate that fills the gap, so the concrete kind of heals itself. In marine structures it apparently got stronger over centuries in seawater.

Meanwhile modern reinforced concrete cracks, the rebar rusts, and a lot of structures are done in 50-100 years.

So my question for engineers here: is the Roman approach actually "better", or is this apples to oranges? I'm guessing modern concrete is solving a different problem — tensile loads, rebar, cure time, cost, scale — that the Romans never had to deal with. Where does the real tradeoff sit? Is self-healing lime concrete just not compatible with how we build now?

I put together a longer breakdown of the chemistry and the archaeology here if anyone wants the full context:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeJTxzwKYCQ

u/SantiiL1 — 26 days ago

▲ 18 r/historyvideos+1 crossposts

How mechanically difficult would the Antikythera Mechanism have been to build with ancient tools?

I’ve been researching the Antikythera Mechanism, and the engineering side of it is what surprised me the most.

The device used a complex gear system to model astronomical cycles and predict eclipses roughly 2,000 years ago. From a modern perspective, the concept is understandable, but the manufacturing precision feels extremely impressive for the period.

For engineers here: how difficult would it have been to produce something like this without modern machining tools?

Would the hardest part have been the gear design, the material work, the calibration, or the accumulated astronomical knowledge?

I made a short breakdown of the mechanism here if anyone wants the context

youtu.be

u/SantiiL1 — 1 month ago