via Dilbert
Dilbert 2017-02-20

SAP’s licensing fees "apply even to related applications that only offer users indirect visibility of SAP data," according to a Thursday ruling by a U.K. judge. Slashdot reader ahbond quotes Network World:
The consequences could be far-reaching for businesses that have integrated their customer-facing systems with an SAP database, potentially leaving them liable for license fees for every customer that accesses their online store. "If any SAP systems are being indirectly triggered, even if incidentally, and from anywhere in the world, then there are uncategorized and unpriced costs stacking up in the background," warned Robin Fry, a director at software licensing consultancy Cerno Professional Services, who has been following the case…
What’s in dispute was whether the SAP PI license fee alone is sufficient to allow Diageo’s sales staff and customers to access the SAP data store via the Salesforce apps, or whether, as SAP claims, those staff and customers had to be named as users and a corresponding license fee paid. On Thursday, the judge sided with SAP on that question.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via Slashdot
SAP License Fees Also Due For Indirect Users, Court Rules

Link

As part of his extensive Squeeze Box retrospective, “Weird Al” Yankovic dusted off this previously unreleased 1982 parody of the Beatles’ song Taxman, replacing its subject with one more appropriate to the time – at the height of Pac-Man Fever. Wakka-wakka-wakka.

via The Awesomer
Weird Al: Pac-Man

Kitchen Knife

Jimmy DiResta needs a new kitchen knife. He could go buy one, or he could make one—from scratch. The way that he marks the centerline of the edge of the bar stock, and uses an out-of-square length of wood to grind the blade angle, is very clever:

Triple Tenon Joined Lumber Rack

Matthias Wandel engineers a very atypical and space-efficient structure for a lumber rack:

Push Stick Saw

Frank Howarth gets artistic with his push stick design:

"Goodbye Shop"

This is kind of a shocker! After all of the work April Wilkerson put into kitting out her shop and improving her home and property, she and her husband are selling the place. I did not see this coming.

Epoxied and Sandblasted Live Edge Slab Coffee Table

You might think creating a live edge table is just a matter of throwing the slab on the legs. Not so. Here Marc Spagnuolo shows us how to epoxy voids in the wood, use a sandblaster to clean up the live edge, and goes over in detail the crucial finishing process:

Finishing Experiments

Finishing seems like such a black art that I’m always glad to see people giving tips or doing experiments with it. While the first three minutes of this video is the Samurai Carpenter turning bowls, he then explains how he’s using epoxy resin (as Spagnuolo did above, to repair voids) and experimenting with some "Turbo Cure" and wax. At the end he announces he’s got a trio of new Japanese saws for sale on his site:

DIY Coffee Table with a Concrete Top

Ben of HomeMade Modern uses his plywood/reinforcing mesh/concrete technique to create a coffee table:

via Core77
How to Epoxy Voids in Wood, Make Your Own Kitchen Knife, Pour a Concrete Coffee Table and More

  Meet the “Most Armed Man” in America.  He goes by “Dragon Man” from Dragon Man’s Range outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado.  His brother taped a 20-minute video of the…

The post Meet the “Most Armed Man” in America appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

via The Truth About Guns
Meet the “Most Armed Man” in America

If you love making your knuckles and other joints pop, you might’ve heard that doing so is “bad for you” and that “you’ll get arthritis.” Short answer: we’re not sure. Long answer: this video from Vox gives you the lowdown on what’s actually happening in your joints.

That characteristic (and honestly, disturbing) popping sound you hear when you crack knuckles is from a gas-filled lubricant within your joints called synovial fluid. Popping your joints creates stretched out space between your bones and sucks the fluid into that space, the event of which is associated with that lovely sound.

As for whether it’s “bad,” well, the research is not clear. If you don’t feel pain when you crack them, then you probably don’t need to worry.

Here’s what happens to your knuckles when you crack them | Vox

via Lifehacker
Why Your Knuckles Make That Popping Sound When You Crack Them

via TechCrunch
Looking to become the “OS” for financial services OpenFin raises $15 million

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a great resource for consumers, but its days may be numbered. Take advantage of one of its best features while you still can: it has a massive database of detailed complaints from bank and credit union customers.

The database has given customers a platform to complain about their experiences with financial institutions and according to the CFPB’s website, here’s how it works:

Each week we send thousands of consumers’ complaints about financial products and services to companies for response. Those complaints are published here after the company responds or after 15 days, whichever comes first. By adding their voice, consumers help improve the financial marketplace.

Financial institutions don’t like this, of course, because they say there’s no guarantee the complaints are accurate (even though there is a field for the company’s response, and 97% of complaints get a response). Basically, if you’re a bank that takes advantage of customers, you probably don’t like this database, because it gives those customers a platform to call you out.

For a consumer, though, it’s a pretty valuable platform to see what potential issues you might have. Customer narratives, like the one below, help tip off the CFPB to illegal business practices, like the whole Wells Fargo fiasco last year. Thanks to the CFPB and their database, Wells Fargo put a stop to opening unauthorized accounts. Even better, they were forced to refund customers the fees they racked up in those unauthorized accounts.

With the database in danger of disappearing, it’s a good time to take advantage of it if you haven’t already. If you’re thinking of switching banks or credit unions, research the information while you still can. You can download the data, too.

Consumer Complaint Database | CFPB

via Lifehacker
Research the CFPB’s Massive Database of Customer Complaints While You Still Can

Linus Torvalds believes the technology industry’s celebration of innovation is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving. From a report on The Register: The term of art he used was more blunt: "The innovation the industry talks about so much is bullshit," he said. "Anybody can innovate. Don’t do this big ‘think different’… screw that. It’s meaningless. Ninety-nine per cent of it is get the work done." In a deferential interview at the Open Source Leadership Summit in California on Wednesday, conducted by Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Torvalds discussed how he has managed the development of the Linux kernel and his attitude toward work. "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details." Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via Slashdot
Linus Torvalds: Talk of Tech Innovation is Bullshit. Shut Up and Get the Work Done

In what archaeologists are calling the “find of a lifetime,” a horde of Late Bronze Age weapons has been discovered at a Scottish construction site. Among the items found is a gold-decorated spearhead, and a 3,000-year-old bronze sword in remarkably good condition.

The artifacts were found during an archaeological evaluation on a field in Carnoustie, Scotland prior to the construction of two of soccer fields. The firm commissioned to do the work, GUARD Archaeology, says the hoard of ancient metalworks is a “rare and internationally significant discovery.” The items were found in a pit close to a Bronze Age Settlement currently being excavated by the archaeologists.

The spearhead was found next to a bronze sword, a pin, and sheath fittings. All items, which are dated to around 3,000 years old, are archaeologically significant, but the presence of the gold-decorated spearhead is exceptional.

“The earliest Celtic myths often highlight the reflectivity and brilliance of heroic weapons,” explained Blair in an interview with the BBC. “Gold decoration was probably added to this bronze spearhead to exalt it both through the material’s rarity and its visual impact.”

Other exceptional finds include well-preserved organic remains, for instance, a leather and wooden sheath that enveloped the sword. It’s considered the best preserved Late Bronze Age sheath ever found in Britain. The archaeologists also found fur skin wrapped around the spearhead, and textile around the pin and sheath. Organic items like this rarely survive for so long in the ground.

Based on the archaeological evidence, it appears that humans lived on this particular spot for an exceptionally long time. The excavation revealed the largest Neolithic hall so far found in Scotland, a building dating to around 4,000 BC. This structure, write the researchers, “may have been as old to the people who buried the weapon hoard, as they are to us.”

Whoa. Let that sink in for a minute…

Along with the weapons horde, the GUARD team has uncovered around 1,000 archaeological features in the area, including a dozen Bronze Age semi-circular houses, a pair of long Neolithic-era dwellings, and various broken pots and artifacts. It’s not clear if this site was occupied continuously for thousands of years, or if the settlements were separated in time by many centuries.

Regardless, it doesn’t appear that the local kiddies will be playing soccer on these ancient fields any time soon.

[GUARD Archaeology]

via Gizmodo
This 3,000-Year-Old Bronze Age Sword Is Absolutely Incredible