Thank you, you are correct, in haste I posted a bug which appears to be related to screen rotation but not the one iPhone users have.

IIRC the post was in the forums, and it was answered in a similar manner as these bug reports, e.g., it's not a standard so VLC doesn't consider it a "bug", if a user requires this extra functionality they need to take the appropriate steps to manually change the rotate transform in settings.

Just searching through the forum brings up various threads related to users asking for this functionality (searched on "rotate iphone"):

Reading through them now it appears that the issue, more specifically, is that EXIF tags are stored with the video clips that VLC is not reading.
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=79068&p=260277&hilit=rotate+iphone#p260277

VLC is a fantastic free program, but the attitude some/one of their devs have towards it's users is disheartening for the project as a whole.

A friend recorded a video with her phone, and held it so the video was taken in "portrait mode" vs. "landscape mode". On a PC I was surprised when VLC was unable to correctly orient itself as I was use to my Mac's native application always orienting properly.

I spent the time looking for solutions on their forum and the devs responses is nothing short of arrogant:
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/7766

Essentially users are told this is not a bug in VLC because the videos use a non-standard way of marking the video as rotated. Further they go on to say if a user wants to look at it, as it was shot, they need to manually tweak the rotation on the transform for playback. After a 7 step menu navigation process, this has the side effect of having to change the transform back for the next video you wish to play if it was shot in landscape mode. Essentially this has to be done on a video-by-video basis.

I'm hoping there are some Open Source projects that actually implement this correctly, but from the few I've tried so far, they all seem to have the same bug as VLC when it comes orientation. Standard or not, ignoring this rotation bit is rendering the program as crippled for 100,000's of people shooting videos this way. Coincidentally, I haven't found a commercial program that is subject to the bug, everyone I've tried (e.g., Quicktime, Adobe Premier, etc...) renders it properly.

I can always hope that, eventually, someone on the team will see the value in implementing this fix.

Maybe it's semantics, but I see "complain" to be different than "disagree". To that end there is a difference between having the "right" to complain vs. being "justified" in complaining.

So sure, you have a "right" to complain whether you bought it or not; but you're not really justified in that action unless you put money down for it.
But you can disagree with the product either way.

I havent' bought an EA game that uses Origin because I disagree with the service, restrictions, and how some vocal (complaining) players have lost access to their catalog. I fear any company having that power; that as I purchase more games I have more to lose if I speak up against something I find to be an injustice (such as DRM).

If enough sales are made, a publisher is initially not interested in the voice of those who did not purchase the game until the long tail starts and new market segments have to be tapped. As of today, EA is focusing only on those who purchased the game, because they actually fronted money to play. From everything I've seen, they've been doing an excellent job to, as quickly as possible, fix a really crappy situation; namely failure by their own success.

Now if the game was never initially purchased by the target market, and the reason gamers gave on surveys was "DRM", the studio would remove it, or at the very least scale back on how pervasive it acts. The fact is: the wide majority of gamers hate DRM, talk a good talk about how it's evil, but still shell out money because, as sconeu writers in a thread below, their mentality when told they should just abstain from purchasing it is, "'But then I can't play my shiny!!!!'"

So to the OP, no; we don't need a "Gamer Bill of Rights" because we have one right now: it's our wallet. Only purchase games that you believe in. If the DRM, ethics behind a company, or anything else that has to do with a game/publisher/etc... is disagreeable with you, simply don't buy their product. That's what I do. I look forward to seeing what indie makes a SimCity-like game that compares on it's level of fun; that's where I'll be putting my money, but until then I'll wait and find other games to play.

Years ago, I left a contracted programming job at a startup that paid about $150k annually, to pursue AAA game development, starting in the low $40k.
Whether working the 40 hr/week or in crunch, I was doing something I absolutely loved.
It was both one of the riskiest and best decisions I ever made, and would do it again in a heartbeat.

I'd rather hear about promising emerging techs we'll see in the future than press releases when these are out to the mass public; near future projects (consumer or otherwise) is one of the reasons I read Slashdot daily.

I'm sure in the process some items will be vaporware, but I'd expect the majority of these editor approved stories will make it to consumers.

I think VB5 also supported COM. (Unsure of this.)
MFC was around long before VB6. We were looking to leverage it at the project's inception but found ATL (with WTL) to provide a lite-weight alternative without the bloated class inheritance. Looking back, as good as ATL was, I don't think we would have survived using it without the WROX books and great samples from CodeProject and similar websites.

The problem is both MFC and ATL are essentially just wrappers to a high procedural, highly struct-passing Win32 API. I prefer them to straight Win32 calling, but they are complex and I'd be surprised if there was a way they could be simplified without losing the flexibility offered.

As for VB6, I believe the EXE's it generated were inherently COM enabled. Each program would support IUnknown and IDispatch. If you wanted a C++ program to talk to it, you needed the IDispatch. Inside of the VB6 world, types were great because they were abstracted, but you are right in that once you marshalled a type out of VB6 into the C++ COM space, it was a bit of a pain to have to work with types like a SAFEARRAYS instead of C array (or STL container.)

So for simple communication, it wasn't too bad. For complex interactions (like the ActiveDocuments we implemented) a crippled object model wasn't required but I would agree that it was a complex setup.

VB6 is simple, but there is a surprisingly large amount of power to be tapped from it, if you understand the underlying infrastructure.

Having done some hard core COM programming 10 years ago, for a Computer Based Testing "test driver", our team learned we could spend 2 days to get up a "ActiveDoc" in C++ using ATL, and WTL, or we could do the same thing in VB6 within an hour. Considering how fast it was to implement ActiveDocument and custom COM interfaces, I changed my mind on how weak I perceived VB6 was. (Unfortunately many of the VB trained, customer-based implementors of our interface were not as astute, and even in a VB6 environment didn't understand what they needed to do to create a component that would properly talk to the rest of our system.)

Still, knowing how quickly VB6 would let one get up an interface, I was able to help a room mate of mine create a level editor for our own rolled version of Zelda. It was a little cumbersome to learn how to read individual bytes of the palette based sprite files, but VB6 had all the power there.

All that said, VB6 should die IMHO. After (C# / VB).NET came out, it became a lot easier to make object dynamically talk to each other and perform byte level manipulation.

Spot on; I had a rant / post about this back in 2009 (that I had drafted years earlier)... hoping Apple would take over this market:
http://tronsterhartley.blogspot.com/2009/01/starting-to-clean-out-my-many-drafts-of.html

While it doesn't specifically have to be Apple, it seems that none of the established brands really understand what consumers need in a great car stereo. The Alpine model I mention in the above post included: a remote? Required holding a button for a few seconds to active a feature... in a car Has no way to fast scroll mp3 artists or songs, etc....

The only reason I settled on it was because it could connect to my iPod and play MP3s without a skip between the track. This was after calling up another manufacturer about their models of MP3 playing stereos and being told that gapless playback was "impossible". Thank you business man; you know jack about tech, but it doesn't matter because your company doesn't make a car stereo with a killer feature I need. (Although I could change the color of buttons; which was fun for about 1 day and I haven't touched since.)

I hate Apple's lock-in but vote for their products with my money because they really do care about design beyond what is in a device. It makes all the difference in the world when you have a product that "feels" right. Check out the Nest Thermostat, or Dyson Vacuums to see other companies who also match form and functionality.

I've witnessed writing documentation / seudo lines of code in comments on what a section is suppose to do is a quick way to ensure all pieces come together; frequently able to leave those comments afterwards to describe the following 1-N lines below it.

On the flip side, writing documentation after code can indeed point out bugs if the code is scanned as the documentation is written; it's not unlike a form of Rubber Duck Debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging .

In the end, the only glaring weakness is rewriting the (more minuet) documentation when refactoring the code it's describing. But I'd argue the extra time it takes to rewrite the documentation is, again, Rubber Duck Debugging the refactored code.... a good thing.

Actually the water pressure for the (hot water in the) showers has increased since the tankless system. It wasn't awful with the old one, but one could tell the difference if two people were taking showers at once. Now you cannot tell the difference. I don't interact with my house's water system any differently before; nor was I given instructions to.

The only limitation has been a slightly longer time for the hot water to start coming out.

I had mine installed last year (4/13/2011) because my traditional water heater was cracking and had started a leak. The plumber recommended it; said while they are relatively new to (residential) US, they have been used for awhile in Europe. I did do-diligence with Google and had it put in. The brand is: Noritz ( http://www.noritz.com/ )

So 1 year past its running well; if there is a follow up thread 4+ years down the road, I'll let you know how it's handling.

I haven't had a cold water sandwich effect. Only drawback is that it takes about 25 seconds for hot water to start coming out of the faucet (vs 10 seconds with the tank). Advantages:
- Mounted on wall (above washer/dryer) in basement; just gained about 3'x3' space back where my old huge tank was sitting
- I have seen a lower gas/electric bill since installed
- Should I choose; I can take a ridiculously long hot shower (of course always doing this would negate energy savings)

Two items I can recommend that cost a bit upfront but do indeed save money down the road:
- Nest Thermostat ( http://www.nest.com/ )
- Tankless water heater

A good tankless water heater will cost a few K (with installation, etc...) so perhaps just start with the Nest. There is currently a waiting list for them, but I was able to get mine about 3 months after waiting. It looks cool, and if used properly, will continually save you money over the life of the house.

I did listen to the full retraction, the dust incident is true and confirmed. Michael Daisey did not experience that on his trip. Is that a sign of poor factory conditions? Yes. Did the factories he visit have those issues? From the official reports it seems unlikely, beyond those we'll never know for sure because the bulk of Mr. Daisey's observation were lies; including the new lies NPR brought to light based on his first responses.

It's a shame because it would be great to hear a first hand account from a credible source. There are some good pro and con observations on the overall state of factory conditions (not just Apple factories) and overtime for workers at the end of the full retraction.

", while his work has been discredited, Michael Daisey wasn't inaccurate in his claims that working conditions are poor in iPhone and iPad factories."

That statement is nonsense.

Michael Daisey was discredited because working conditions were fine for iPhone or iPad factories; none of the horrible things he had reported on were true upon his visit. I've listened to original piece (when it aired) as well as the full retraction. He had to create lies based what he'd heard of previous (outlawed) practices of various Chinese manufactures as well fabricate people, events, and conversations in order to invoke an emotional response. Then he repeatedly, unapologetically used the theater as a scapegoat as to why he could tell people that he was telling a factual account, but in reality, was more lie than occurrence.

That said, the OP does have a good question about sweatshop free phones. I wish there was a list for all goods and services; seems internet searches pull up a lot of hits for clothing and apparel, but not so much for electronics.