> Personally I have come to the conclusion that the best solution is virtual machines with a linux base system. Put every game that is sticky to windows into its own little container and just have hardware passed through.
Is there a Windows license available to consumers that allows simultaneous installation on multiple VMs under a non-Windows-based hypervisor?
Not really no. I recall that linus tech tips had same question when they made a similar setup.
The question about "how many installations does one license allow" does not seem to be much explored by the courts, so I am not that worried for personal setup like this. One could argue that multiple VM is just technical details for what is in practical terms a single user and a single machine.
> There is no need to regulate unethical employment practices when laborers have the freedom to seek employment elsewhere - the market can sort it out. But we need freedom of horizontal movement first.
And yet even in the supposedly so competitive SV tech market, abusive practices like forcing employees to sign arbitration agreements, at-will employment (can be dismissed with zero notice or severance and for no or any reason not prohibited by law), "unlimited" vacation that is really meant to discourage you from taking it, and long workweeks with no overtime pay are common.
Who doesn't get to deal with any of the above? Union employees (for the most part).
> The news has been full of dozens (maybe hundreds by now) of large and small companies using the tax change to increase employee wages and benefits.
No, there have been dozens or hundreds of companies claiming that tax cuts were responsible for employee compensation increases. Many of those were one-time bonuses, but the tax cuts are ongoing. In some cases where the benefits were ongoing (like Walmart's hourly pay increase), you'll find that they tend to coincide with the overall trend of state minimum wage increases. This is just PR: they're getting ahead of the trend and trying to attribute it to tax cuts rather than other forces.
Also, since employee compensation was tax-deductible even before the tax cut, taxes certainly weren't stopping companies from raising wages before the tax cut.
Pretty much. Companies are using the tax cuts to signal goodwill to the market, but in reality the temporary increase in benefits is an expense coming from pre-tax income.
The tax cuts are causing increased employee benefits is a red herring.
That's not quite how it works. Publicly-traded companies don't reduce their net income using a tax cut, because their entire industry is getting the tax cut. The company's market price is tied to how their NI compares to the rest of their respective industry NI.
Stock repurchases are filed on the balance sheet, post taxes, which is why companies take the increase in net income but then use the extra cash to buy back stock. The former keeps the company competitive and the latter increases the stock price.
A simple exercise: say you have a small business. Your tax rate is 35%, gross revenue is 200k, tax-deductible expenses are 100k (1 or _maybe_ two employees). We'll assume a C corporation, just for illustration purposes and that you care about the after-tax profit it generates. In practice for something this small you would probably just pay yourself a salary and be done with it...
Anyway, you have 100k taxable income, and 65k after-tax profit. If you paid your employees more, you would have less after-tax profit, because your tax rate is not 100%.
Now say the tax rate drops to 21% (this is the cut that happened) and you give your employees a 10% raise. Now you have 110k expenses, 90k taxable income, 71.1k after-tax profit.
So a tax cut in this situation does in fact allow an employer to both have more after-tax profit _and_ give raises to employees at the same time.
Now we can have a discussion about what government services the employees and the employer won't get as a result of the tax cut, of course. That needs to be accounted for too, in the grand scheme of things.
> That 21% tax rate relies on paying employees more?
I'm not sure what you're asking.
The 35 -> 21 change is the actual corporate tax rate change that happened end of last year in the US.
You don't _have_ to pay your employees more to be taxed at the 21% rate. But at the new tax rate you _can_ pay your employees more and till make more of a profit.
So in the end the whole question is where the money that would have been paid in taxes goes instead. It could be going to stock buybacks, dividends, investment in the company, raises for employees, or just sitting in the company bank account. In real life the answer is probably "all of the above" and the proportions vary.
Again, I'm not sure whether I answered your question, because I'm not sure what you're asking.
> At any rate, your software vendor has no legal responsibility to provide you with security updates. Maybe they should. But you’ll pay for that anyways.
Yes, those costs will ultimately be embedded in product pricing and borne by the customer, but that's good. It gives vendors a financial incentive to develop more secure software and reduce their security update costs (and earn more profit). (Nothing is perfectly secure, but a culture change and following certain practices can help. Think Microsoft pre-trustworthy computing memo and Microsoft today.)
In the old days with perpetually-licensed software, this was handled with a trial period (30-day demo or similar), or, where feasible, a feature-limited demo version (e.g. a game with one level as a demo). This is not a new problem or a problem without solutions.
I agree that subscriptions make perfect sense for services (because servers, support, etc. cost money on a monthly basis), but the trend seems to be to create an arbitrary reliance on a hosted service as a way to justify subscriptions. Luckily 1Password hasn't totally gone that way yet, since they still offer standalone licenses for local vaults, but I feel like it's the direction they're going.
> - It's unreasonable to expect people to pay the full price for minor security fixes that still need to go out
The ideal model for locally-run software, in my opinion, is to sell perpetual licenses to each major version for a one-time cost and promise security and maintenance updates for a certain period. New features can go into new major versions that users have to pay for (sometimes with discounted upgrade pricing), or, on a discretionary basis, as free updates.
This used to be the typical business model for locally-run software. Microsoft, for example, sold Windows versions for a one-time cost, promised security and some other level of updates until a certain year (and new features could be added on a discretionary basis), and provided upgrade pricing for new major versions that added new features. This kept control in users' hands, as their paid-for software could be used forever (at least until and unless external factors, like hardware incompatibilities, prevented it from working), though of course it would be very dumb to use, say, XP today on an Internet-connected machine. I am generally against subscription models for local software where there is no legitimate reliance on an outside service, and also against the trend of trying to create such a reliance for no legitimate reason ("We've added cloud sync and that's what the subscription is for. Servers cost money every month, which is why we're charging you every month." - except I can handle my own file storage and don't want your sync service).
Ugh, this trend of 'cloud sync' is highly annoying. Let me put an encrypted file on something that resembles a filesystem. If I want cloud sync, I'll put that file on Dropbox/OneDrive/GDrive/Whatever else.
It's only become a big thing after iOS and it's lack-of-a-filesystem and lack of inter-app data flows locked users out of their own devices.
Quite often I don't want many of the "new features". For me, bug fixes and security fixes are the main thing, followed by compatibility updates. I'm quite happy to pay for the latter when it was me that caused the issue by updating my OS/hardware in the first place. I'd quite like some amount of the former to be included in the original cost.
It's become a big thing because it's convenient. Every time I sign into 1Password on any of my devices, all of my passwords are there. I don't need an account with Google, Dropbox, or Microsoft for it to work and I don't need to do any manual setup. It "just works", which is exactly what the average person wants their software to do.
Manually dealing with files is a sign of poor software design for simple use cases, in my opinion. I quite like the iOS model that abstracts the idea of a filesystem away from the user because the user never cared about the file system anyways. They just had to deal with it to do whatever they really wanted to do.
If they have no incentive to upgrade, that's because the newer versions don't add any value for the user. This makes sense: 1Password is a pretty mature product at this point and there probably isn't much room to add new features, unless you want to expand the scope of the product.
That is to say that I personally (and again, this is just my opinion) don't care about any new features and would be unlikely to upgrade from version 6 on that basis. I may upgrade to ensure I will continue receiving security updates and OS and browser extension compatibility updates, but it would be nice to know how long such updates to version 7 are guaranteed for (presumably they will eventually release version 8 for a new fee and discontinue such updates to version 7).
> (and servers / APIs for it)
The users (like me) who are against subscriptions are only using local vaults (managing the storage sync ourselves) and do not care for or want the web/sync services.
I disagree. Security software (as opposed to boxed titles prior to the Internet era), subject to frequent review and that is updated regularly does offer continuing value in a steady stream of updates.
As another commenter said, the price of security is eternal vigilance.
