I store my iTunes library on a 20TB (~19TiB)Pegasus array today. Video size currently: MigiMac (OSX) [~ (master)]$ find/Volumes/Pegasus/iTunes/ -type f -a \( -name \*.m4v -o -name \*.mp4 \) -ls | awk '{tot+=$7}END{printf "Total size: %.4f Gig\n",(tot/(1024*1024*1024))}' Total size: 6802.7659 Gig
Mix of ripped movies and TV shows, but I also purchase a few season passes from the iTunes store... it's close to a-la carte cable and ends up being cheaper than getting all the channels required would be. I do actually purchase most movies on blu-ray (3d if avail.. it's fun sometimes). If it comes with a digital copy that works in iTunes.. great. If not, I rip a copy. Ultraviolet can go screw itself. Rips are done via makemkv/vobcopy -> handbrake -> iTunes.
I use AppleTVs to watch stuff probably 90% of the time. Another 8% or so is watching disks via my PS3... the remainder is Cable and streaming (I tend to not use netflix/hulu very often and cable TV only as background noise from time to time).
For backups (you do back up, right?)... Tier 1 is scripted rsync to a Synology DS2413 with ~18TB of disk Tier 2 is rotated 2x6TB striped disks in 2 identical Lacie 2Big Thunderbolt external drives. I rotate every couple weeks so one is locked in my desk at the office for "off-sites". I also rotate a disk in a static bag at the same time for my linux box's data backups (email/web/photo gallery).
My MBP (iTunes on it has my master music library for syncing to iOS dev due to history) is also backed up to it's own Time Capsule but I also use rsnapshot on my linux server to back it up to the disks rotated out at work in the static bag so I have off-sites for the MBP as well.
akin to the conceptual break between old touchscreens and modern 1:1 instantaneous response
This can't be stressed enough to people that haven't experienced other touchscreens much.
I have a Harmony Ultimate One remote at home, and the last couple of days the touchscreen part has gotten very laggy, especially at scrolling the menu. It is super annoying after being used to things always responding on everything else I use. I found how to reboot the thing and am going to try that tonight to see if it helps.
Note that I know that a tablet OS is a lot different from a laptop OS in terms of UX, as Microsoft learnt the hard way w/ Windows 8,
I actually bought a Surface Pro 3 (with Windows 10 on it) a couple weeks ago, mostly for some on the road (but still actual PC) gaming, and it's... interesting. It's not a bad little computer, but the tablet mode... well frankly, it sucks. It's barely that usable, the keyboard popping up or not when needed is sketchy at best, and the pinch to zoom type features are complete shit. At least as an ipad user for browsing the web for some time now, it's horrible by comparison on the SP3 in tablet mode.
So they still haven't learned yet. Or at least not the right lesson.
I've done jury duty a few times and even served on a murder trial back in 2000. It seems they tend to want to remove people who are critical thinkers in general. Both sides. They want people more easily swayed by emotions. At least it sure seemed like it. Though I did get on for the one trial, even though they knew I was titled an engineer and am technical (Unix Sysadmin). They excused a lot of other technically minded people and ran out of the limited excuses before I got into the top of the pool. At that point, at least one business owner and a couple of other people who were also at least somewhat technical got on as well.
Eh.. I'm still on the fence about windows 10. I just bought a Surface pro 3 with win10 the other day... mostly as a new toy and to replace an ageing gaming laptop (which is also massive). While it's pretty cool in a lot of ways, the tablet mode still leaves a LOT to be desired. The biggest annoyance I keep running into is the on-screen keyboard in tablet mode. It doesn't always pop up at all, and when I try to hit the icon on the taskbar, 1/2 the time it's not even there and things keep jumping around on there. Stuff like the date/time just vanished. The systray keeps moving way over to the left. The battery icon is sometimes 1/2 off the right side of the screen, sometimes gone completely.. and when I can tap on it, sometimes the actual popup shows up in completely random places.
I have hopes it'll improve, but it's still not really a "it just works" thing yet.
I can play Kerbal Space Program on my tablet on the go though.:)
but the younger crowd not only sees them as office furniture but doesn't think twice about setting up a webex on the spot and summoning the mages, without a day of advanced warning and a calendar invite.
Ugh.. yes. Not just the younger crowd, but seems more likely from them. One of my largest pet peeves is people that simply think that if you don't have time on the calendar blocked out, that it means you're not busy. Even with a calendar invite, it drives me crazy when people will send one shortly before a meeting they want to hold, then get all pissy when you don't go. Sometimes I'm just too busy, sometimes it's because I don't sit there all day watching for stuff to pop up in email or on the calendar.
I have a basic rule of common courtesy where meetings are involved: invites should be sent at least a full business day before a meeting. I know that myself, and several coworkers plan our day around the meetings we have (and that we're actually going to attend). Not to mention, page/txt/whatever invitees if the meeting plans change close to the meeting time, and I'd defined "close" to be anytime within an hour. Just this week I had another case where I travelled to another building, went to re-check the room as I walked in the lobby, and found that in the last 15 minutes, they'd lost the room and converted to online only. Man that pisses me off. If I'd gotten a page/txt I could've saved most of the trip and avoided wasting nearly as much of my time.
Now for a "Holy crap! We've got a fire to put out!" Yeah, setting up a shared session/chat-room/conf-call whatever on short to no notice.. that makes sense. For your little "boy I'm having a hard time working through this..." no.
There has to be *someone* around at least that can answer all the kid's questions.
This is pretty much me today... I'm 42, been at my current company over a decade and a half. There is one pretty big downside to it: People think you need to be involved in every project, because you're the go-to guy (or one of only a couple) with the experience with not only the OS and hardware but the internal company stuff as well.
Also, people continually come to you for help with just about everything. So it's very hard to focus on stuff and get things done. I tend to spend a lot of time working from home just to be able to focus when needed.
It does make you feel a heck of a lot more secure in your job though. I will say that.
AT&T also declined to elaborate on whether AT&T's billing system is capable of spotting unusual charges and, if so, why it doesn't routinely do so.
I had my own issues with our local phone company. Several years (yes years) after I bought and moved into my house I got a visit from the Police. Hearing a knock at the door at 10pm on a Saturday night scared the hell out of me... I have a gated yard, so it meant someone jumped the 4ft wall just to come up and knock. The said they'd gotten a 911 hangup. I've never had my land line hooked up in this house, and no phones plugged into any lines anywhere. They shrugged it off. A couple weeks later, more police visiting mid day, same reason. I called the phone company and they had no record of service at this address, the police (supposedly) also called, and everyone figured it was fixed.
Nope... 3rd visit from cops, even they were getting annoyed at this point. This time I spent nearly 2 hours on the phone with phone company. They finally kicked me over to another department (tech guys I think) who found that a previous tenant, years earlier, had the emergency only (life-line) service. It had been "disconnected" in the system in every way as far as billing and such were concerned, but wasn't actually physically disconnected. The tech guys were finally able to fix it.
This is a case where you'd think their system would be able to detect that calls were being placed by a residence that had no service. Nope.
the card is placed in a mechanical imprint device along with a carbon-copy receipt, and the merchant then slides a roller across it to imprint the face of the card directly on the receipt
hah.. yes, I am actualy old enough to have paid that way a few times myself when I was younger. I was always taught to ask for the carbons and rip them up in such cases too.
Also had them whip it out at Fry's once when the computers crashed (and the cashier was a complete idiot that had no idea how to fill out the form, add numbers together and compute tax) but thankfully the computers came back just before I simply walked away due to annoyance.
My latest replacement Capital One card (2nd in a year due to hacks) has a chip.. and no numbers on the front. Now the numbers are just printed on the back, with the cvv right below. So one pic and the info is all there.
My suggestion to the owner of the "Smart" TV was to get a Roku, Amazon Fire or some other stand alone device and ignore the TV's smart features.
Hah.. that's exactly what I've done. I have an AppleTV just because I've already got a pretty large iTunes library. When I wanted my current TV, I got a Samsung "Smart" one, only because it was the one of the size, quality and price I wanted. I played with the "smart" stuff for a few minutes, then basically never touched it again.
Damn good as a TV... beyond useless "Smart" features.
It's also go a camera with an attempted xbox kinect-like control features that (just like the rest of the "smart" stuff) was buggy at best. Thankfully said camera is a small module on the back that pops up and can be kept down so that it isn't on nor can actually see anything even if it were. I haven't popped it back up since the first days after I got the TV over a year ago.
But hell, I will at least admit the DMV does tend to get its mailings out on time and in proper fashion.
Here in CA, especially around the LA area, this hasn't been so true this year. There have been a few news reports about how people are finding that they can't even get an appointment inside the (usually) 3 month window the mailer gives them, because the DMV is so overloaded. So, to make the deadline (what I saw reported was for license renewals) people have to go in without an appointment and usually waste an entire day. I had to get mine renewed (birthday 1/26) and my appointment made online (mid December) was about 3 weeks out. Even then the place was packed on a Saturday, and it took about 90 minutes (no test, just redo thumbprint, eye check, new pic).
Some won't directly say it, but it's basically due to the massive increase in requests for new licenses, since the new rule kicked in to give licenses to illegal aliens in CA.
Because the credit card companies say it is, and are willing to charge smaller fees due to it being secure. They wouldn't do that if they didn't have a ton of faith in that security.
I was referring to Apple Pay in that line, which has not been hacked in any way that I've read. At the very least, not by simply sniffing your phone via the NFC bits since it's tied into the AppleID fingerprint reader to authorize a payment, using a token on the phone vs your CC info.
The next time U.S. cardholders receive a new card it will probably be equipped with an EMV chip, and most likely be contactless.
When I got my 2nd new card in a year (Target & Home Depot hacks) it came with the chip. Also the numbers are no longer the pressed-in type and are on the back. Every time I've used it I have to let the person know the last 4 numbers are on the back.
I'm still hoping more NFC in terminals and more support for Apple Pay. The handful of times I've used that, it's been much faster and it is more secure.
I always laugh at the hate for iTunes.. Yeah, I wouldn't mind something less "everything in one program" setup, but as a single point for media, I get it.
I've got 6.25TiB of data in my library, mostly video (obviously) and a pretty good mix of ripped vs purchased (I dropped all but basic cable and get season passes for the few shows I care about and don't want to wait until after the season is over) and it works fine for me. I've never had any real issues with it really. For rips, I use iFlicks to update the metadata (especially with TV show imports) when I import and things ripped vs bought look pretty much the same.
I sync to/from it all the time. I do probably 85% of my TV/Movie watching using it and it works. Once in awhile I need to reboot an appleTV because it seems to have an issue talking back to itunes. That takes 10seconds and only happens every 2 weeks or so max, but that'd be my one gripe these days.
The Colecovision baseball that had the specific controllers was a lot of fun.. until we learned the pitch that was a strike but couldn't be hit. Then games became a challenge of who could continue to pitch that exact pitch without making a mistake.
Man the intellivision had some great games though... B-17 bomber was awesome with the voice module. Tron Deadly Discs was a marathon game if there ever was one. My friend was the best at TDD and could play for hours until it finally got crazy hard.
When the entire RoadRunner residential IP spaces were blocked, I just got a virtual server (now a Linode) and simply run that as my MX. Helps on inbound mail as well for any times my home connection goes down.. it'll queue up there. I use trusted certs for relaying from home and send mail via authenticated SMTP (TLS required) for mobile devices, via the same virtual host avoiding issues with connectivity to home (which was rare, but now I don't have to worry). I also have the connections between the VM and home box use a port other than 25 to avoid any blocking of port 25 by my ISP (which, for San Diego at least, hasn't happened in years).
It comes down to $20 a month for the size of vm I got (I also started using it for a few other things too). I also do my greylisting and other anti-spam measure there before it even tries to deliver to my server at home.
I recently completed my PhD in computer science and hit the job market. I did not think I would have difficulty finding a job...
So you spent all the time only going to school and not working on getting at least a low level job in the field to have a foot in the door and to gain experience? That was huge mistake #1.
The PhD was on a very technical topic that has very little practical application and so working on it does not seem to count as experience.
Because it's not experience, by the very definition of experience (as related to working).
You specialized in something with very little practical application rather than looking at the job market for what would be worth something to employers? Huge mistake #2.
Have fun paying off those huge loans I'm betting you have now.
They did ultrasounds on me for a few years (they still had no idea how long to check for) and I actually got to see some of the evolution of the machines. I remember seeing the first time they started measuring the blood flow with blue and red representing directions of the flow.
It was such an unknown thing for so long, that I was turned down when I tried to donate blood at age 18. The nurse at the blood drive even called their central office to ask, but since no one knew what it was, they decided to err on the side of caution. Enough knowledge about it became more common over the years, I guess, as I was finally able to donate during a blood drive at work several years later.
Slashdot Mirror
I store my iTunes library on a 20TB (~19TiB)Pegasus array today. /Volumes/Pegasus/iTunes/ -type f -a \( -name \*.m4v -o -name \*.mp4 \) -ls | awk '{tot+=$7}END{printf "Total size: %.4f Gig\n",(tot/(1024*1024*1024))}'
Video size currently:
MigiMac (OSX) [~ (master)]$ find
Total size: 6802.7659 Gig
Mix of ripped movies and TV shows, but I also purchase a few season passes from the iTunes store... it's close to a-la carte cable and ends up being cheaper than getting all the channels required would be. I do actually purchase most movies on blu-ray (3d if avail.. it's fun sometimes). If it comes with a digital copy that works in iTunes.. great. If not, I rip a copy. Ultraviolet can go screw itself. Rips are done via makemkv/vobcopy -> handbrake -> iTunes.
I use AppleTVs to watch stuff probably 90% of the time. Another 8% or so is watching disks via my PS3... the remainder is Cable and streaming (I tend to not use netflix/hulu very often and cable TV only as background noise from time to time).
For backups (you do back up, right?)...
Tier 1 is scripted rsync to a Synology DS2413 with ~18TB of disk
Tier 2 is rotated 2x6TB striped disks in 2 identical Lacie 2Big Thunderbolt external drives. I rotate every couple weeks so one is locked in my desk at the office for "off-sites". I also rotate a disk in a static bag at the same time for my linux box's data backups (email/web/photo gallery).
My MBP (iTunes on it has my master music library for syncing to iOS dev due to history) is also backed up to it's own Time Capsule but I also use rsnapshot on my linux server to back it up to the disks rotated out at work in the static bag so I have off-sites for the MBP as well.
akin to the conceptual break between old touchscreens and modern 1:1 instantaneous response
This can't be stressed enough to people that haven't experienced other touchscreens much.
I have a Harmony Ultimate One remote at home, and the last couple of days the touchscreen part has gotten very laggy, especially at scrolling the menu. It is super annoying after being used to things always responding on everything else I use. I found how to reboot the thing and am going to try that tonight to see if it helps.
Note that I know that a tablet OS is a lot different from a laptop OS in terms of UX, as Microsoft learnt the hard way w/ Windows 8,
I actually bought a Surface Pro 3 (with Windows 10 on it) a couple weeks ago, mostly for some on the road (but still actual PC) gaming, and it's... interesting. It's not a bad little computer, but the tablet mode... well frankly, it sucks. It's barely that usable, the keyboard popping up or not when needed is sketchy at best, and the pinch to zoom type features are complete shit. At least as an ipad user for browsing the web for some time now, it's horrible by comparison on the SP3 in tablet mode.
So they still haven't learned yet. Or at least not the right lesson.
I've done jury duty a few times and even served on a murder trial back in 2000. It seems they tend to want to remove people who are critical thinkers in general. Both sides. They want people more easily swayed by emotions. At least it sure seemed like it. Though I did get on for the one trial, even though they knew I was titled an engineer and am technical (Unix Sysadmin). They excused a lot of other technically minded people and ran out of the limited excuses before I got into the top of the pool. At that point, at least one business owner and a couple of other people who were also at least somewhat technical got on as well.
Eh.. I'm still on the fence about windows 10. I just bought a Surface pro 3 with win10 the other day... mostly as a new toy and to replace an ageing gaming laptop (which is also massive). While it's pretty cool in a lot of ways, the tablet mode still leaves a LOT to be desired. The biggest annoyance I keep running into is the on-screen keyboard in tablet mode. It doesn't always pop up at all, and when I try to hit the icon on the taskbar, 1/2 the time it's not even there and things keep jumping around on there. Stuff like the date/time just vanished. The systray keeps moving way over to the left. The battery icon is sometimes 1/2 off the right side of the screen, sometimes gone completely.. and when I can tap on it, sometimes the actual popup shows up in completely random places.
I have hopes it'll improve, but it's still not really a "it just works" thing yet.
I can play Kerbal Space Program on my tablet on the go though. :)
but the younger crowd not only sees them as office furniture but doesn't think twice about setting up a webex on the spot and summoning the mages, without a day of advanced warning and a calendar invite.
Ugh.. yes. Not just the younger crowd, but seems more likely from them. One of my largest pet peeves is people that simply think that if you don't have time on the calendar blocked out, that it means you're not busy. Even with a calendar invite, it drives me crazy when people will send one shortly before a meeting they want to hold, then get all pissy when you don't go. Sometimes I'm just too busy, sometimes it's because I don't sit there all day watching for stuff to pop up in email or on the calendar.
I have a basic rule of common courtesy where meetings are involved: invites should be sent at least a full business day before a meeting. I know that myself, and several coworkers plan our day around the meetings we have (and that we're actually going to attend). Not to mention, page/txt/whatever invitees if the meeting plans change close to the meeting time, and I'd defined "close" to be anytime within an hour. Just this week I had another case where I travelled to another building, went to re-check the room as I walked in the lobby, and found that in the last 15 minutes, they'd lost the room and converted to online only. Man that pisses me off. If I'd gotten a page/txt I could've saved most of the trip and avoided wasting nearly as much of my time.
Now for a "Holy crap! We've got a fire to put out!" Yeah, setting up a shared session/chat-room/conf-call whatever on short to no notice.. that makes sense. For your little "boy I'm having a hard time working through this..." no.
It's cute that you think they'll grow out of it.
This is pretty much me today... I'm 42, been at my current company over a decade and a half. There is one pretty big downside to it: People think you need to be involved in every project, because you're the go-to guy (or one of only a couple) with the experience with not only the OS and hardware but the internal company stuff as well.
Also, people continually come to you for help with just about everything. So it's very hard to focus on stuff and get things done. I tend to spend a lot of time working from home just to be able to focus when needed.
It does make you feel a heck of a lot more secure in your job though. I will say that.
Like this.
I had my own issues with our local phone company. Several years (yes years) after I bought and moved into my house I got a visit from the Police. Hearing a knock at the door at 10pm on a Saturday night scared the hell out of me... I have a gated yard, so it meant someone jumped the 4ft wall just to come up and knock. The said they'd gotten a 911 hangup. I've never had my land line hooked up in this house, and no phones plugged into any lines anywhere. They shrugged it off. A couple weeks later, more police visiting mid day, same reason. I called the phone company and they had no record of service at this address, the police (supposedly) also called, and everyone figured it was fixed.
Nope... 3rd visit from cops, even they were getting annoyed at this point. This time I spent nearly 2 hours on the phone with phone company. They finally kicked me over to another department (tech guys I think) who found that a previous tenant, years earlier, had the emergency only (life-line) service. It had been "disconnected" in the system in every way as far as billing and such were concerned, but wasn't actually physically disconnected. The tech guys were finally able to fix it.
This is a case where you'd think their system would be able to detect that calls were being placed by a residence that had no service. Nope.
hah.. yes, I am actualy old enough to have paid that way a few times myself when I was younger. I was always taught to ask for the carbons and rip them up in such cases too.
Also had them whip it out at Fry's once when the computers crashed (and the cashier was a complete idiot that had no idea how to fill out the form, add numbers together and compute tax) but thankfully the computers came back just before I simply walked away due to annoyance.
My latest replacement Capital One card (2nd in a year due to hacks) has a chip.. and no numbers on the front. Now the numbers are just printed on the back, with the cvv right below. So one pic and the info is all there.
No PIN to go with chip.
Hah.. that's exactly what I've done. I have an AppleTV just because I've already got a pretty large iTunes library. When I wanted my current TV, I got a Samsung "Smart" one, only because it was the one of the size, quality and price I wanted. I played with the "smart" stuff for a few minutes, then basically never touched it again.
Damn good as a TV... beyond useless "Smart" features.
It's also go a camera with an attempted xbox kinect-like control features that (just like the rest of the "smart" stuff) was buggy at best. Thankfully said camera is a small module on the back that pops up and can be kept down so that it isn't on nor can actually see anything even if it were. I haven't popped it back up since the first days after I got the TV over a year ago.
The way it SHOULD work is that I put my phone over the NFC reader, it asks me for fingerprint, and done. Reality bites.
Hey, what do you know? That's exactly how Apple Pay works.
Here in CA, especially around the LA area, this hasn't been so true this year. There have been a few news reports about how people are finding that they can't even get an appointment inside the (usually) 3 month window the mailer gives them, because the DMV is so overloaded. So, to make the deadline (what I saw reported was for license renewals) people have to go in without an appointment and usually waste an entire day. I had to get mine renewed (birthday 1/26) and my appointment made online (mid December) was about 3 weeks out. Even then the place was packed on a Saturday, and it took about 90 minutes (no test, just redo thumbprint, eye check, new pic).
Some won't directly say it, but it's basically due to the massive increase in requests for new licenses, since the new rule kicked in to give licenses to illegal aliens in CA.
Because the credit card companies say it is, and are willing to charge smaller fees due to it being secure. They wouldn't do that if they didn't have a ton of faith in that security.
I was referring to Apple Pay in that line, which has not been hacked in any way that I've read. At the very least, not by simply sniffing your phone via the NFC bits since it's tied into the AppleID fingerprint reader to authorize a payment, using a token on the phone vs your CC info.
When I got my 2nd new card in a year (Target & Home Depot hacks) it came with the chip. Also the numbers are no longer the pressed-in type and are on the back. Every time I've used it I have to let the person know the last 4 numbers are on the back.
I'm still hoping more NFC in terminals and more support for Apple Pay. The handful of times I've used that, it's been much faster and it is more secure.
Huh.. I've got 2 on wired ethernet and one wifi and none of them do this.
I still compress (with very little loss in quality) my stuff using handbrake else my library would likely be more like 50+TB vs the 6.x TB it is now.
I always laugh at the hate for iTunes.. Yeah, I wouldn't mind something less "everything in one program" setup, but as a single point for media, I get it.
I've got 6.25TiB of data in my library, mostly video (obviously) and a pretty good mix of ripped vs purchased (I dropped all but basic cable and get season passes for the few shows I care about and don't want to wait until after the season is over) and it works fine for me. I've never had any real issues with it really. For rips, I use iFlicks to update the metadata (especially with TV show imports) when I import and things ripped vs bought look pretty much the same.
I sync to/from it all the time. I do probably 85% of my TV/Movie watching using it and it works. Once in awhile I need to reboot an appleTV because it seems to have an issue talking back to itunes. That takes 10seconds and only happens every 2 weeks or so max, but that'd be my one gripe these days.
Ah.. really classic gaming.
The Colecovision baseball that had the specific controllers was a lot of fun.. until we learned the pitch that was a strike but couldn't be hit. Then games became a challenge of who could continue to pitch that exact pitch without making a mistake.
Man the intellivision had some great games though... B-17 bomber was awesome with the voice module. Tron Deadly Discs was a marathon game if there ever was one. My friend was the best at TDD and could play for hours until it finally got crazy hard.
When the entire RoadRunner residential IP spaces were blocked, I just got a virtual server (now a Linode) and simply run that as my MX. Helps on inbound mail as well for any times my home connection goes down.. it'll queue up there. I use trusted certs for relaying from home and send mail via authenticated SMTP (TLS required) for mobile devices, via the same virtual host avoiding issues with connectivity to home (which was rare, but now I don't have to worry). I also have the connections between the VM and home box use a port other than 25 to avoid any blocking of port 25 by my ISP (which, for San Diego at least, hasn't happened in years).
It comes down to $20 a month for the size of vm I got (I also started using it for a few other things too). I also do my greylisting and other anti-spam measure there before it even tries to deliver to my server at home.
I'll have a Big Mic please.
501(c)4 is different and you can engage in political stuff (apparently) as long as it's not the primary focus.
Moveon.org is an example of an existing 501(c)4.
So you spent all the time only going to school and not working on getting at least a low level job in the field to have a foot in the door and to gain experience? That was huge mistake #1.
Because it's not experience, by the very definition of experience (as related to working).
You specialized in something with very little practical application rather than looking at the job market for what would be worth something to employers? Huge mistake #2.
Have fun paying off those huge loans I'm betting you have now.
They did ultrasounds on me for a few years (they still had no idea how long to check for) and I actually got to see some of the evolution of the machines. I remember seeing the first time they started measuring the blood flow with blue and red representing directions of the flow.
It was such an unknown thing for so long, that I was turned down when I tried to donate blood at age 18. The nurse at the blood drive even called their central office to ask, but since no one knew what it was, they decided to err on the side of caution. Enough knowledge about it became more common over the years, I guess, as I was finally able to donate during a blood drive at work several years later.