SourceSafe was nice with its built in tools integration when everyone else at the time was non existent. It was really meant for a 2-5 person team. Anything bigger and the thing would die on its own database updates. But if you are still using that thing today you should move away from it. It is terrible for usage today. I got to the point I was doing backups every 6 hours and keeping rotating backups on hand for when it decided to corrupt itself. Then I as subjected to clearcase and sourcesafe was amazing compared to the complexity that thing brought. I knew it was bad when they had to send out a consultant just to show us how to get it installed correctly and make branches.
ClearCase?! An enormous pile of unnecessary complexity. Where I worked they hired a fulltime person just to manage it!
I remember fondly, there was no way to back out a commit. The hired consultant told me "Just check out the previous version and check it back in over the bad change!"
So now our test group would have two(!) changes to test, instead of zero. Brilliant.
I also remember ClearCase had five (5!) views of the same database. Commands worked on one of the five view, and god help you if you got confused.
SourceSafe apparently had integration with the VBA editor in Office 2000 [1]. I've never used it, but it seems like it would have been handy when I had to work in VBA.
It does have the third movement. I tried it for shits and giggles:
- Playing fast sections of a song is like mashing through a cutscene, but it's easier to press quickly (not sure at a consistent pace) with multiple fingers. The original piano music was meant for multiple fingers as well.
- The hardest part is advancing the right number of buttons. I don't even know the right number of notes in the trills, and would kinda prefer if the website automatically advanced through trills finer than a 16th note, so it's less likely to end up desynced with the actual piece (I'm not sure if you get used to it with learning each piece or not).
- The website has noticeable audio latency, which makes it hard to associate keypresses and which sound came out in fast sections.
This is a great kind of thing for getting people into music. There's a piano in my local pub and when people say they "can't play piano" I'll play a 2-5-1 in C and tell them to hit any of the white notes. People love that they can make up their own tunes having never played before.
I was miserable for most of my piano lessons (I learned to sheet read well – I become a fairly adept piano-playing robot – but I never sort of "figured out" music more generally.) That said, one lesson my teacher played a basic blues chord progression and told me to hit anything on the blues G scale however I wanted. That was one of the most fun times I've had making music ever. Well, the only time that has been fun, actually.
Witch King vs Gandalf in the movie distorted a key point about the wizards: they were tasked to assist humans and elves against evil, but not to use their power to defeat the enemy on their own, or to rule over Middle Earth. Saruman tried do do both, and lost eternity for it. Peter Jackson understood that, but chose for theatrical reasons to sweep it aside, just as he did the enigma of the Old Forest and the (in Tolkien's own words) "most important chapter in the book" on the Scouring of the Shire (the author compared it to "the situation in [Britain] after the war").
That sounds the same setup as Nice Guy Eddie has in Reservoir Dogs. Probably you don't want to meet the people who had those cards as they might have a penchant for chopping people's ears off and setting them on fire.
Lucky you, you never used clearcase or Visual SourceSafe!