Regarding hardware interfaces changing faster than software interfaces:
My experience has been that we need new connectors because the existing connectors are either too big or too small, or have the wrong plating material on the pins, or in some other way don't "exactly" meet the requirement, and costs can be optimized by creating a custom connector.
So I don't know if the issue is speed of change, and further, software is easier to change, so I think software interfaces *can* change more rapidly (i.e. within a single iteration of a product design), and there is usually a strong economic incentive to NOT change the hardware interface once it has been defined.
Greetings,
Stephan
PS: Your mail without line breaks at 76 chars or so wasn't very easy for me to reply to with good readability... (admitted: my mail client (Mozilla) could be better, I've solved the problem by forwarding the mail to myself and copy/pasteQuoted the line breaked result (since replying to or using for copy/pasteQuoted the original one resulted in quoted *not* line breaked lines, which is very ugly)).
Sorry. I sometimes forget that Outlook doesn't do this for you automatically. Our Lotus Notes mail does do it, and sometimes I forget.
-Dean
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