Grrrr... OK, I think I'm almost over being angry at APC. We have one of their SmartUPS 3000 systems installed at school and the other day it turned itself off!

The story so far: A couple of years ago we purchased a used SmartUPS 3000RM on eBay to condition the power and keep the systems running in case anything happened at school. We put new batteries in it and everything was hunky-dory. Fast forward to last week - the "bad battery" light had been on for a while but everything was still running fine. I figured that we needed to replace the battery and would probably do it over the Christmas holiday. However, the UPS had other plans. Apparently, the non-enterprise APC systems don't fail closed, they fail open!! So, if the battery goes bad the system shuts down completely!!

We used to use Visual Source Safe for version control. Then one day we discovered that it was silently corrupting our files because a hard drive filled up and that was the end of VSS.

A version control system's job is to keep your files safe - NO MATTER WHAT! If it can't do that, it's worse than useless.

A UPS's job is to keep the power on - NO MATTER WHAT! If it can't do that, it's worse than useless.

Given that, I don't think I'll be purchasing any APC products for roobox. Someone pointed out that the midrange Liebert systems operate correctly even when the battery dies. I think I'll check them out