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