Also, you don't need to carry your wallet, with lots of notes in; you can pay a bus fare and buy a sandwich or a beer or two with that pocket-full of coins.
US coins come from the US Mint, bills from the Federal Reserve.
In a normal transition, banks get lots of $1 bills, return them to the government and get $1 coins in exchange.
But, because of the turf war between two arms of government, the Fed keeps printing new $1 bills and exchanging them for old ones, rather than taking in the $1 bills and replacing them with coins.
This is why Spain is breaking up - because (comparatively) rich Catalans are objecting to paying taxes for the south and west.
Italy has had this same problem for years; relatively rich Lombards, Piedmontese and even Tuscans object to funding the Mezzogiorno and the Sicilian Mafia. The Lega Nord is a political party based on that principle.
Britain is different - Scotland has almost exactly the average income for the UK, and that's the bit that's closest to leaving.
But, of course, it is quid pro quo - they're paying you, that's what makes them an employer.
The legal term is "consideration". As long as they give you something - anything - of value, then the contract is valid (in this respect).
If you're volunteering, then it's different - if you volunteer for a charity or your church, then they really don't have a claim on anything you create while you're there.
That would be a breach of the Berne agreement by the US (specifically, that copyright cannot be dependent on registration, and that would include transfer of copyright).
Why should a non-US citizen, employed by a non-US company have to file paperwork in the US?
Turn it around - that would mean that every single person who worked on Windows would have to file paperwork in every country in the world before Microsoft could release it in that country. That's mad.
The alternative is to abolish work-for-hire (which I would support) and that the most an employer could contract for would be a transferable non-exclusive licence for the duration of the copyright as it stood at the time of the fixation of the work. That would also kill off corporates' vested interest in copyright extension.
Personally, I would prohibit all transfers of copyright; the author or their estate would be the only holder; everyone else would be a licensee. This would also mean that their estate could not be completely wound up until 50/70 years after death.
Number of people is also number of potential customers. That's why there are more jobs in the USA than in Luxembourg - there are 311 million people in the USA and only half a million in Luxembourg. Curiously enough, adding the extra 310.5 million people resulted in there being a lot more jobs.
Corporations have power, partly because so many people lack the self-confidence to negotiate terms of an employment contract, and even fewer will pay a lawyer to actually review the contract and negotiate. This is why C?Os get much better terms (not just a higher salary) - they do negotiate contracts and get a lawyer or an agent to make sure it's done properly.
But mostly because employment is so much more efficient these days. We can produce everything everyone needs and many of the things people want with much less than 100% of people in work. If you're at a significant risk of unemployment, then you don't have a strong negotiating position. The only way to fix that is to make unemployment nicer. The less bad unemployment is, the harder it is for employers to screw people over.
On the other hand, Edison then employed other people to work for him on inventions and filed patents in his own name on their inventions because otherwise he (who had paid them to invent) had no claim on their inventions.
I'd want an "in the ordinary course of their duties" clause (ie, "if, in the ordinary course of their duties, the employee makes a patentable invention, then the patent rights to said invention vest in the employer as a work for hire").
IOW, your job should specifically involve you in doing original work - like a programmer (though I oppose software patents), or a design engineer, or a pharma chemist or chemical engineer. Then your invention belongs to your employer - because they were paying you to invent things as your job (or part of your job).
More likely: "the people in our office on a holiday weekend hadn't a clue how to do their jobs and didn't know how to reinstate a channel. By the time they got hold of somebody on the phone who was both competent and sober, the event had finished."
There are dozens of websites that are ad-funded and include Maxim photo-shoots and up-skirt and down-blouse pics of celebrities and clips of sex scenes from Hollywood movies and an occasional Playboy celeb and clothed porn stars.
Most of them perceive themselves as gossip sites aimed at a male audience, but their appeal is basically about pics of attractive women in little or tight clothing. Isn't that soft porn? Some of them show topless pics and "camel-toe", some don't.
So where is your definition? - sexy bikini/lingerie pics (US Maxim, Victoria's Secret), topless (the Sun, UK Maxim, FHM), naked but not showing more than nipples (Zoo, Nuts), naked but not showing much (Playboy), naked and showing everything (Hustler).
What about Hollywood films with sex scenes in them. Want to have topgun.xxx ? sincity.xxx ?
How about advertising: dietcoke.xxx ?
Now there is plenty of real porn out there, and yes the Skinemax-type soft porn is dead. But soft porn is porn that won't admit it's actually porn. Once it admits it's porn, then the drive to harder and harder core kicks in until you reach the point where people start getting turned off rather than on (and then it diversifies into fetishes).
But nothing I listed above apart from Hustler would describe itself as porn. Not even Playboy. Playboy do porn too, but they would regard the magazine as being more like Maxim than Hustler. And they'd be right.
Guessing as to why Microsoft are sitting on Virtual PC/Mac for so long:
They're waiting for Conroe/Merom.
I'm now going to speculate wildly - which is what/. is for, isn't it?
Speculation #1: Conroe and Merom will be out towards the end of this year and there will be MacBooks and Mac towers that are running on them
Speculation #2: Mac OS X 10.5 will be a three-architecture OS: Power PC, x86 and x86-64. Conroe and Merom are x86-64 Core-architecture processors, so why not implement the OS in the native x86-64 rather than 32-bit x86?
Speculation #3: Microsoft know or have guessed that this is coming and are planning on a new Virtual PC that natively supports x86-64.
A few points: VPC/Win doesn't support 64-bit OSes at all, VS/Win only supports a 64-bit host OS with multiple 32-bit guests (which is still useful as you can share out gobs of memory between the guests).
My guess is that the VPC team - ie the ex-Connectix team - at Microsoft are writing an all-new 64-bit emulated hardware environment, with a better graphics card than the ten-year-old S3 they currently emulate (one that will do Aero Glass in Vista, at least) and are going to create builds of this environment as VPC/Win, VPC/Mac and VS, all of them as 64-bit-only applications. My further guess is that the current versions of VPC and VS for both platforms are the last 32-bit versions.
People do not need to use Windows at work, they are required to.
Tell you what then, find me a document management system for anything except Windows. Seriously - even ODMA itself is Windows-only.
Right then, that's every major law firm that needs Windows. It was document management that finally talked some of us out of WordPerfect 5.1/DOS and into Windows in the first place. Sure, Word runs on Macs, but the DMS client doesn't. Lots of LOB applications don't but run on Macs, but kicking the usually very small developers for those into doing a Mac version wouldn't be that hard; plenty of 10-20 person development houses can turn quite quickly if a major customer makes the right kinds of noises.
An implementation of Interwoven WorkSite client, or a Hummingbird client on Mac OS X with a proper Office integration would be an absolute requirement to just look at a Mac here. And I'm sure I'm not coming from the only kind of organisation that takes the same stance.
The same, incidentally, is true for *nix. If someone wants a nice big open source project, then try implementing something half as good as WorkSite.
Is licensing more than about offering discounts and instead more about tracking for marketshare and trying to entice users to be entrapped and unable to migrate? Then, if such users be 'contemptable' by not "falling for it", does the bsa and the software company try to ring them up.
Yes, licensing is about more than offering discounts and things.
You need a licence to copy software. Since you copy software from the CD-ROM to the hard drive when installing it, and from the hard drive to RAM when running it, you need a licence to run software.
That's why, when you buy software in a box, there's a "shrinkwrap" licence and, when you buy software via download, there's a "clickwrap" licence.
Even with FOSS, there are licences - GPL, and the like. The only software that doesn't require a licence is public domain, and the only public domain software is that which has been intentionally released to the public domain, as copyrights have not expired on anything (they expire either 95 years after the code was written, or 70 years after the programmer died, depending on the authorship).
Avoid software that needs to be run with administrator privilages.
Like, just about anything that runs on Windows.
Like what? MS Office works fine; All the IM programs work fine. Even Visual Studio will run as an LUA, though you do need enhanced privileges to debug a running process (as you should).
Sure, a lot of games don't run well under a non-admin account. But that's pretty much it. Oh, and QuickBooks. See the Threatcode website for a proper list of what won't run as LUA.
I'm in the process of rolling out Windows XP Pro N in a business environment.
This is really handy as it stops people playing WMVs, MPGs, etc that they get sent by email, which results in our Exchange server not getting clogged up with video files.
Can someone clearly explain to me why (other than greed) software is licensed based on how many number of CPUs/ cores are in a machine to begin with?
1. Mostly it's databases. Take a look at a Microsoft SKU list; there aren't many products other than SQL licenced that way that anyone ever buys.
2. Otherwise, there would be an incentive to buy one huge machine for all databases, instead of many smaller machines with separate databases.
3. It creates an incentive for the DB vendors to make the software really good on machines with lots of processors. Most applications don't have noticeable multi-threaded performance gains; DBs do.
But isn't the point of virtualization to run more than one process per CPU?
Yes.
1. Most Microsoft things aren't licensed per-processor. Most people only use SQL Server of the ones that are.
2. This means you can have a dual-processor box, with four VMs on, each one running Windows and one running SQL, and pay for one Windows Enterprise licence and one SQL processor licence. Previously you needed five Windows licences and two SQL processors.
We run several instances (~20) of Windows XP on a VM server for developers to use. Would this now require 20 XP licenses plus host OS instead of 1 XP license and the host OS license?
It already did!
1. This only affects products that are priced per-processor. Unless you're fairly unusual, that means SQL Server.
2. The other change is about Windows 2003 Server R2 Enterprise Edition. You can now have four VMs running 2K3 for the price of one Enterprise Edition licence.
Why does one copy of Windows cost more if you have more CPUs, since it's still only one copy of Windows?
Windows isn't licenced per-processor, it's licenced per-server.
The only Microsoft application licenced per-processor that anyone's likely to care about is SQL. Previously, you paid one licence per processor in the server that you ran SQL on. Now you pay one licence per processor that SQL is actually using in a virtual environment.
Here's a complete list of per-processor licenced applications (from my Select price list; the actual prices are under a NDA, sorry):
SQL Server Commerce Server Host Integration Server BizTalk Server Speech Server Application Center ISA Server Identity Integration Server Content Management Server
Of those, ISA Server is something no-one sane would install in a virtual environment, so this doesn't affect it. The others are not really big deals.
Also, remember they already change per-processor. If you don't like per-processor pricing, fine; but don't complain about per-processor pricing being reduced.
Slashdot Mirror
An eagle eating a pair of great tits ?
Small pocket coin-purse is really useful.
They're like £2 or so in any market, or even on Amazon or eBay - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B008K09YAY/
Also, you don't need to carry your wallet, with lots of notes in; you can pay a bus fare and buy a sandwich or a beer or two with that pocket-full of coins.
US coins come from the US Mint, bills from the Federal Reserve.
In a normal transition, banks get lots of $1 bills, return them to the government and get $1 coins in exchange.
But, because of the turf war between two arms of government, the Fed keeps printing new $1 bills and exchanging them for old ones, rather than taking in the $1 bills and replacing them with coins.
Equilaterally curved (Reuleux) heptagons work fine. The UK 50p and 20p use that shape, and they roll.
They have constant diameter, but not constant radius.
This is why Spain is breaking up - because (comparatively) rich Catalans are objecting to paying taxes for the south and west.
Italy has had this same problem for years; relatively rich Lombards, Piedmontese and even Tuscans object to funding the Mezzogiorno and the Sicilian Mafia. The Lega Nord is a political party based on that principle.
Britain is different - Scotland has almost exactly the average income for the UK, and that's the bit that's closest to leaving.
Buy a third-party PS3 clone that doesn't require the signing keys.
True. I'm not a lawyer, but I work for them.
But, of course, it is quid pro quo - they're paying you, that's what makes them an employer.
The legal term is "consideration". As long as they give you something - anything - of value, then the contract is valid (in this respect).
If you're volunteering, then it's different - if you volunteer for a charity or your church, then they really don't have a claim on anything you create while you're there.
That would be a breach of the Berne agreement by the US (specifically, that copyright cannot be dependent on registration, and that would include transfer of copyright).
Why should a non-US citizen, employed by a non-US company have to file paperwork in the US?
Turn it around - that would mean that every single person who worked on Windows would have to file paperwork in every country in the world before Microsoft could release it in that country. That's mad.
The alternative is to abolish work-for-hire (which I would support) and that the most an employer could contract for would be a transferable non-exclusive licence for the duration of the copyright as it stood at the time of the fixation of the work. That would also kill off corporates' vested interest in copyright extension.
Personally, I would prohibit all transfers of copyright; the author or their estate would be the only holder; everyone else would be a licensee. This would also mean that their estate could not be completely wound up until 50/70 years after death.
Not really.
Number of people is also number of potential customers. That's why there are more jobs in the USA than in Luxembourg - there are 311 million people in the USA and only half a million in Luxembourg. Curiously enough, adding the extra 310.5 million people resulted in there being a lot more jobs.
Corporations have power, partly because so many people lack the self-confidence to negotiate terms of an employment contract, and even fewer will pay a lawyer to actually review the contract and negotiate. This is why C?Os get much better terms (not just a higher salary) - they do negotiate contracts and get a lawyer or an agent to make sure it's done properly.
But mostly because employment is so much more efficient these days. We can produce everything everyone needs and many of the things people want with much less than 100% of people in work. If you're at a significant risk of unemployment, then you don't have a strong negotiating position. The only way to fix that is to make unemployment nicer. The less bad unemployment is, the harder it is for employers to screw people over.
On the other hand, Edison then employed other people to work for him on inventions and filed patents in his own name on their inventions because otherwise he (who had paid them to invent) had no claim on their inventions.
I'd want an "in the ordinary course of their duties" clause (ie, "if, in the ordinary course of their duties, the employee makes a patentable invention, then the patent rights to said invention vest in the employer as a work for hire").
IOW, your job should specifically involve you in doing original work - like a programmer (though I oppose software patents), or a design engineer, or a pharma chemist or chemical engineer. Then your invention belongs to your employer - because they were paying you to invent things as your job (or part of your job).
More likely: "the people in our office on a holiday weekend hadn't a clue how to do their jobs and didn't know how to reinstate a channel. By the time they got hold of somebody on the phone who was both competent and sober, the event had finished."
When will October 1993 finally arrive?
Posted on September 6943, 1993
This is one of the rare cases where England is correct and Britain isn't - Scotland has different laws on this and encryption is OK there.
Wales follows England's laws. I have no idea about Northern Ireland.
There are dozens of websites that are ad-funded and include Maxim photo-shoots and up-skirt and down-blouse pics of celebrities and clips of sex scenes from Hollywood movies and an occasional Playboy celeb and clothed porn stars.
Most of them perceive themselves as gossip sites aimed at a male audience, but their appeal is basically about pics of attractive women in little or tight clothing. Isn't that soft porn? Some of them show topless pics and "camel-toe", some don't.
So where is your definition? - sexy bikini/lingerie pics (US Maxim, Victoria's Secret), topless (the Sun, UK Maxim, FHM), naked but not showing more than nipples (Zoo, Nuts), naked but not showing much (Playboy), naked and showing everything (Hustler).
What about Hollywood films with sex scenes in them. Want to have topgun.xxx ? sincity.xxx ?
How about advertising: dietcoke.xxx ?
Now there is plenty of real porn out there, and yes the Skinemax-type soft porn is dead. But soft porn is porn that won't admit it's actually porn. Once it admits it's porn, then the drive to harder and harder core kicks in until you reach the point where people start getting turned off rather than on (and then it diversifies into fetishes).
But nothing I listed above apart from Hustler would describe itself as porn. Not even Playboy. Playboy do porn too, but they would regard the magazine as being more like Maxim than Hustler. And they'd be right.
I've always wondered about running Windows from within VMware on a Windows [same one] host.
You could read the EULA, or the PUR.
"You may install up to two copies of the software on one device."
Guessing as to why Microsoft are sitting on Virtual PC/Mac for so long:
/. is for, isn't it?
They're waiting for Conroe/Merom.
I'm now going to speculate wildly - which is what
Speculation #1: Conroe and Merom will be out towards the end of this year and there will be MacBooks and Mac towers that are running on them
Speculation #2: Mac OS X 10.5 will be a three-architecture OS: Power PC, x86 and x86-64. Conroe and Merom are x86-64 Core-architecture processors, so why not implement the OS in the native x86-64 rather than 32-bit x86?
Speculation #3: Microsoft know or have guessed that this is coming and are planning on a new Virtual PC that natively supports x86-64.
A few points: VPC/Win doesn't support 64-bit OSes at all, VS/Win only supports a 64-bit host OS with multiple 32-bit guests (which is still useful as you can share out gobs of memory between the guests).
My guess is that the VPC team - ie the ex-Connectix team - at Microsoft are writing an all-new 64-bit emulated hardware environment, with a better graphics card than the ten-year-old S3 they currently emulate (one that will do Aero Glass in Vista, at least) and are going to create builds of this environment as VPC/Win, VPC/Mac and VS, all of them as 64-bit-only applications. My further guess is that the current versions of VPC and VS for both platforms are the last 32-bit versions.
People do not need to use Windows at work, they are required to.
Tell you what then, find me a document management system for anything except Windows. Seriously - even ODMA itself is Windows-only.
Right then, that's every major law firm that needs Windows. It was document management that finally talked some of us out of WordPerfect 5.1/DOS and into Windows in the first place. Sure, Word runs on Macs, but the DMS client doesn't. Lots of LOB applications don't but run on Macs, but kicking the usually very small developers for those into doing a Mac version wouldn't be that hard; plenty of 10-20 person development houses can turn quite quickly if a major customer makes the right kinds of noises.
An implementation of Interwoven WorkSite client, or a Hummingbird client on Mac OS X with a proper Office integration would be an absolute requirement to just look at a Mac here. And I'm sure I'm not coming from the only kind of organisation that takes the same stance.
The same, incidentally, is true for *nix. If someone wants a nice big open source project, then try implementing something half as good as WorkSite.
Is licensing more than about offering discounts and instead more about tracking for marketshare and trying to entice users to be entrapped and unable to migrate? Then, if such users be 'contemptable' by not "falling for it", does the bsa and the software company try to ring them up.
Yes, licensing is about more than offering discounts and things.
You need a licence to copy software. Since you copy software from the CD-ROM to the hard drive when installing it, and from the hard drive to RAM when running it, you need a licence to run software.
That's why, when you buy software in a box, there's a "shrinkwrap" licence and, when you buy software via download, there's a "clickwrap" licence.
Even with FOSS, there are licences - GPL, and the like. The only software that doesn't require a licence is public domain, and the only public domain software is that which has been intentionally released to the public domain, as copyrights have not expired on anything (they expire either 95 years after the code was written, or 70 years after the programmer died, depending on the authorship).
Avoid software that needs to be run with administrator privilages.
Like, just about anything that runs on Windows.
Like what? MS Office works fine; All the IM programs work fine. Even Visual Studio will run as an LUA, though you do need enhanced privileges to debug a running process (as you should).
Sure, a lot of games don't run well under a non-admin account. But that's pretty much it. Oh, and QuickBooks. See the Threatcode website for a proper list of what won't run as LUA.
I'm in the process of rolling out Windows XP Pro N in a business environment.
This is really handy as it stops people playing WMVs, MPGs, etc that they get sent by email, which results in our Exchange server not getting clogged up with video files.
I note that you can't get Media Center N, though!
Can someone clearly explain to me why (other than greed) software is licensed based on how many number of CPUs/ cores are in a machine to begin with?
1. Mostly it's databases. Take a look at a Microsoft SKU list; there aren't many products other than SQL licenced that way that anyone ever buys.
2. Otherwise, there would be an incentive to buy one huge machine for all databases, instead of many smaller machines with separate databases.
3. It creates an incentive for the DB vendors to make the software really good on machines with lots of processors. Most applications don't have noticeable multi-threaded performance gains; DBs do.
Why shouldn't they charge per-processor instead of per-computer?
Oh, and i'm pretty sure there's no differences between the copy you get for 1 processor, and the copy you get for 8,16, or 32 processors.
Single processor: you should probably be running MSDE, which is "free"
Two processors: SQL Workgroup Edition
Four processors: SQL Standard Edition
Eight+ processors: SQL Enterprise Edition.
But isn't the point of virtualization to run more than one process per CPU?
Yes.
1. Most Microsoft things aren't licensed per-processor. Most people only use SQL Server of the ones that are.
2. This means you can have a dual-processor box, with four VMs on, each one running Windows and one running SQL, and pay for one Windows Enterprise licence and one SQL processor licence. Previously you needed five Windows licences and two SQL processors.
We run several instances (~20) of Windows XP on a VM server for developers to use. Would this now require 20 XP licenses plus host OS instead of 1 XP license and the host OS license?
It already did!
1. This only affects products that are priced per-processor. Unless you're fairly unusual, that means SQL Server.
2. The other change is about Windows 2003 Server R2 Enterprise Edition. You can now have four VMs running 2K3 for the price of one Enterprise Edition licence.
Why does one copy of Windows cost more if you have more CPUs, since it's still only one copy of Windows?
Windows isn't licenced per-processor, it's licenced per-server.
The only Microsoft application licenced per-processor that anyone's likely to care about is SQL. Previously, you paid one licence per processor in the server that you ran SQL on. Now you pay one licence per processor that SQL is actually using in a virtual environment.
Here's a complete list of per-processor licenced applications (from my Select price list; the actual prices are under a NDA, sorry):
SQL Server
Commerce Server
Host Integration Server
BizTalk Server
Speech Server
Application Center
ISA Server
Identity Integration Server
Content Management Server
Of those, ISA Server is something no-one sane would install in a virtual environment, so this doesn't affect it. The others are not really big deals.
Also, remember they already change per-processor. If you don't like per-processor pricing, fine; but don't complain about per-processor pricing being reduced.