So maybe GoPro should make an iPad case?

Appeared on Fark a couple days ago, with the comment that the (unprotected) camera they used to document the flight and fall also survived. So...

This client is not keen on having executables increase in size by 125% (e.g. from 500k to 1125k). We have warned them that this will result in a program that is hard to maintain as the tools become superannuated, and they have agreed that if issues develop, they will cover our costs of rebuilding on a more modern platform to get assistance from MS, but that they will then want the fix back-propagated. It is something to do with the size of their distribution media, I believe. While CD-ROM has been pretty much superseded by DVD-ROM, there doesn't seem to be a lot on the pipeline larger than 4.7GB.

It's more "The client will pay for his decision."

No, they use SLM, which IMHO is only slightly better than VSS, and which seems, according to MS devs, to have as its sole advantage over VSS that it is CLI only and does not suffer the slowdowns of the visual windowed interface.

Not to say I am a rabid VSS supporter; I have considered switching. As with any system, of course, there is the cost of switching -- how much does it cost to import ten plus years of VSS data? If it could be done, I'd definitely be interested in switching to something better supported (read: FOSS)...

I won't argue about VSS' flakiness, but I will say that so far it has not failed us when we needed to revert. The flakiness starts when you want to do something less than straight-arrow, like split a project, and there a lot of the flakiness actually comes from the integration with the other VS tools. In my experience. Your mileage may vary.

We've found that going with the Latest and Greatest causes a lot of grief: M$ has elected to change a lot of the way version control works with their 2010 update to VSS, for instance, and as we still have clients who insist on the more compact executables produced by Visual Studio 6 (11 years old now), we cannot upgrade any further than VS2008. On my current build machine, for instance, I have every VS version between VS6 and VS2008, and I use every one of them for building some part of some product.

That said, some form of version control is critical. All it takes is one fumble-fingered tech erasing a project (which is what spurred our installation of a source control system) or one showstopper bug introduced into the shipping product with no record of how it got there, and you quickly learn the value of having backed-up old source versions.

Your shop shows all the hallmarks of the single-developer shop that grew without direction, as they all do initially. I'd strongly suggest that it would be in your interests to try and get at least minimal tools together... and to update to a recent Java before you start losing sales because of an outdated and now unsupported platform.

We're all living in the Matrix already, coppertop. The machines won, and are now using us as their power source. The movie got one big thing wrong, though: heat is of no use to the machines. They have us on the equivalent of treadmills, making their generators spin.

Ah, but the BB gun will not stop the interference unless you somehow manage to short out the bulb and pop the breaker. Instead you'll get a free-air arc...

It's much more likely to tell the tale if you ask the neighbor.

An associate of mine reported the same issue. In his case it was a failed security lamp that was trying to come on at sunset and failing; it was only when the ballast gave up after an hour and a half that his wifi -- and his AM radio -- came back. Note that many security lights are sodium arc or mercury vapor arc; not much is as hard on RF in general as a big fat arc.

One point that is made is that you don't need a lot of power on the control shaft. Well, frankly, I don't see that... it looks to me as though, in a load situation, the power to turn the planetary gear and thus the output shaft would have to come equally from the sun gear and the ring gear.

Looking at the video, I see there is an anchor plate for the drive motor on the left, which uses an eccentric post to drive something on a second plate; that something results in the two shafts that go through empty space to the third, output plate. We never got much of a look at what was on the second plate. If this is going to have any chance at working, there would have to be some sort of dynamic load balance on that second plate.

The proof, not seen in this video, would be to decouple the drive motor from the control shaft, which would theoretically stop the control shaft from moving and put the thing in full speed forwards. Then load the output by trying to stop it. If the control shaft starts spinning, you don't have a useful product.

However, the link to "some Slashdotter idle time" links to the New Scientist... and that seems to be where the compromise actually hit me.

Don't know. Apparently yes - I'm on FF and Win ATM. It put up the usual warning box, I alt-F4'ed, it started putting up the usual "Scanning progress" window, I alt-F4'ed again before it completed page load.

I suspect that if I had hit any of the handy close boxes within the window that it would have installed; FF unfortunately accepts click on page-defined button, generally, as permission.