That's a great story..I mean, not the fact that the machine that makes or breaks the contract is that old and fragile, obviously, but I remember when my HDD was 20MB and there's no way I could recover some of those files anymore, or even use them if I could. It doesn't help that one of my biggest data losses was when I was in the middle of writing a file to 5.25" floppy on an Apple ][c -- which had no hard drive, and I was working on the only copy of my text files...and mistakenly pulled the disk before it had finished writing. Clobbered quite a bit in that one error in judgement, but fortunately it was only personal, nothing like the lathe you fixed. Nice of him to reward you (both finanicially and by telling your boss), but even better that he took your advice and checks things out monthly.

I'm with you -- we have this same discussion at work from time to time and I never think it's worth getting a few extra dollars now at the expense of definetely never working for them again. As you said, better to be fair. I'd rather have that be my repuatation anyway.

I'm on the same page as you at least -- while we didn't bother going to extremes for the transfers as it was mostly personal stuff, one of my clients recently decommisioned their last 3/4" deck (somewhat prematurely, if you ask me, as a lot of important archival/historical material hasn't yet been transferred). The engineers spent that week cleaning all the oxide off the heads after just about each tape that went through, which is what came to mind when reading the GP.

I, of course, had the foresight to transfer my material years ago, but it was mostly the talent with their big interview of so-and-so or the time they were on location at such-and-such. I'd say only half of the tapes even played anymore. Wish i would have thought to help bake them, I could have been a hero :-)

It's kind of frustrating, though -- "back in the day" there were very few formats to chose from, now I've got material spread across at least five tape formats and four or five proprietary file types/codecs...in five or ten years, it's going to be a lot harder to transfer everything than it was getting material off of 3/4.

OSX ships with a much better PDF reader out of the box

I used to think this, then within a week or two I had the following problems

• Created a PDF from OS X which someone couldn't open (not sure what reader she was using but as it was a corporate PC and she does a lot of PDF work, I assume it was the full Adobe suite).
• Edited a lengthy interactive PDF, saved it with my input, and sent it back to someone else, who saw a blank form (I ended up using my PC which has Foxit Reader to re-enter everything).
• Tried to open an interactive PDF that had form fields filled in, but the fields were just blank.

That's when I decided that Preview is okay for quickly viewing simple PDFs but that I really need to find a replacement program for anything serious.

Very interesting, but compare the details of the filing to the statement released by the superintendant that states:

Upon a report of a suspected lost, stolen or missing laptop, the feature was activated by the District's security and technology departments...This feature has only been used for the limited purpose of locating a lost, stolen or missing laptop. The District has not used the tracking feature or web cam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever.

Seems someone needs to get their story straight...

Seriously, what could have made the school district think that this was, in any way, a good idea?
Well, it seems bone-headed now but a year ago when (theoretically, I don't actually know) a few laptops were stolen on the bus, from the locker rooms...figuring out which students were stealing them doesn't seem so bad, does it? Okay, you're right, it still seems like a bad idea...

The main problem was with resource forks causing a bunch of ._foo files, but there's not too much you can do about that if you're copying data from HFS+ to something else

Try rsrc = false in your unison profile.

Calling it "excellent" might be a stretch but a lot of what they do is generally "better than average" -- take Gmail, since that's mostly what this article is about. Before Google, no free email provider offered POP access, much less IMAP; incoming and outgoing attachments were required to be small, and archiving old messages was limited by severely small data limits. Gmail really raised the bar of expectations.

Not that being this way excuses their behavior, especially in cases like this; but there's certainly more to Google's "reputation for excellence" than just their search engine.

No, that's not native, which the GP specifically mentioned. There's nothing like trying to coach my coworker through downloading and installing ntfs-3g (and, until the latest version, MacFUSE first) over the phone (especially the time there was no internet access). Good luck trying to explain why they need it, too, since the drive is RO with the native driver ("if I see it, why can't I write to it?").

Also, last time I checked (I don't use it that much), performance was abysmally slow. I just realized I'm a bit outdated, so I'll have to upgrade and see if that fixes it.

NTFS-3G is awesome, true, but isn't native.

It's not really the same thing; in the US we have network breaks and local breaks, they're scheduled as such and all the local stations take their local breaks at the same time -- the network doesn't air anything during those spots so nothing is "covered up". In Canada, they apparently cover up both the local and network breaks with their own breaks, effectively blocking all the network commercials that we look forward to.

Hope I've explained this sufficiently; it's the difference between a scheduled local spot when there is no network spot run versus the (highly-anticipated) network spots being covered up.

Actually, the GP is correct -- the US 525 (and most other modern systems, with the exception of France) use negative modulation. 100%+ white can even cause the RF transmitter to completely cut out, I'm told. (actually I just looked in to it a bit further, apparently anything over 130 IRE causes the zero carrier, which leads to the buzz we've all heard [leitch PDF]).

Anyway, IRE isn't the same as the percentage of full modulation -- IRE is a (somewhat invented) scale for referencing the luma information; to continue your scope comment you also see -40 IRE as part of the sync pulse; this of course doesn't correspond to the video signal being at -40% modulation, so it doesn't necessarily follow that 100 IRE == 100% modulation.

Anyway, this old wikipedia article[1] is the best explanation I can find online right now and also has some information on why negative modulation is preferable to positive modulation.

By the way, I'm not 100% certain but believe this negative modulation is only the AM RF over the air transmission and not the vanilla component/composite video in a facility. If that's true (and again, I'm not sure); that certainly would lead to further confusion in measuring and testing.

Hope this helps rather than confuses :-)

1: The section above about "IRE Interpretation" completely confuses me, though. I think the writer wrote "100% white" in a few places they meant "black"