Tag Archives: software

Effect of Colorado’s Sales & Use Tax on purchases from Arca Noae

If you are a resident of Colorado, or your business is located in Colorado, a recent Tenth Circuit decision Portable Document Format concerning the requirement for out-of-state retailers to notify you of your responsibility to report and remit use tax to the State may have caught your eye. The Court has held that this requirement is constitutional and remanded further proceedings to a lower court. (See more, here.)

While it is not Arca Noae’s position to provide any kind of tax advice, we can provide links to various Colorado Department of Revenue documents to help clarify the nature of transactions between Arca Noae and you.

FYI Sales 89 Portable Document Format defines standardized computer software as:

  • Computer software, including prewritten upgrades that is not designated or developed to the specifications of a specific purchaser.
  • Computer software designed and developed to the specifications of a specific purchaser but then sold to another purchaser.
  • Software that is modified or enhanced even if such modification or enhancement is designed and developed to the specification of a purchaser.

This would generally describe software offerings provided by Arca Noae as available from our online store. Further, the above FYI states:

SALES TAX ON COMPUTER SOFTWARE ON OR AFTER JULY 1, 2012
Computer software will be subject to sales or use tax if it meets all of the following criteria:

  • The software is pre-packaged for repeated sale or license;
  • The use of the software is governed by a tear-open non-negotiable license agreement;
  • The software is delivered to the customer in a tangible medium. Software is not delivered to the customer in a tangible medium if it is provided through an application service provider, delivered by electronic software delivery, or transferred by load and leave software delivery.

Mandatory maintenance agreements. Charges for maintenance agreements that the retailer requires buyers to purchase as part of their purchase of taxable computer software are subject to sales tax, regardless of whether the charge for the maintenance agreement is separately stated on the customer’s invoice or maintenance contract.

Optional maintenance agreements. Charges for maintenance agreements that the buyer has the option to purchase as part of a purchase of taxable computer software are not subject to tax if the maintenance charges are separately stated on the customer’s invoice. […]

Currently, all Arca Noae software and subscription content licensing sold through our online store is delivered by electronic software delivery, only, and not on tangible media. As of this writing, Arca Noae does not ship physical goods anywhere in the world.

Further concerns should be directed toward either the Colorado Department of Revenue or your tax professional.

DFSee version 13

Checked your disk lately?

Mysterious boot problems can be caused by a variety of things from failing hardware to software misconfiguration. Besides regular file backups, saving your disk partitioning can be a big help during recovery (or reconstruction onto a new drive). Fixing an odd problem, such as the once-in-a-lifetime file with an impossible character in the name which just won’t delete, is also possible with a good disk tool. Moving to a new disk to gain more space? You’ll need something to carve that room into something useful and transfer your data.

Luckily, we have just the thing: DFSee, the Swiss Army knife of disk utilities. DFSee runs on a variety of platforms, so if you need to boot from “something else” to fix your OS/2 system, you may. (Likewise, you may boot from OS/2 or eCS to fix your other OS.)

DFSee, now at version 13, now has full support for GPT partitioning schemes, compatible with current systems on the market today. It has an amazing array of features, including:

  • View, analyze, edit and fix partition tables
  • Support for GPT partitioning schemes (as mentioned above), including move, copy, and resize
  • Browse, analyze and fix various filesystems
  • Undelete files
  • Replacement for FDISK and LVM (Logical Volume Manager) tools
  • Clone, backup and restore partitions or filesystems
  • Split large images in smaller pieces suitable for burning to CD or DVD
  • Hex editor
  • Scriptable recovery

and, of course, that world-famous support from the developer, Jan van Wijk and Fsys Software.

Bootable media DFSee is installable to a local partition or may be run from a bootable CD or USB stick, which makes it especially handy for real rescue operations.

If you’ve never licensed a copy of DFSee, now is the time to do so. If you have an older version (even a very old version), an upgrade is only a few clicks away, and if you have a license for version 12, we have an even better deal on an upgrade.

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Review the full feature list at DFSee.com, and stop into our store to license your copy today.

Arca Noae at Warpstock Europe 2015

Our own David Azarewicz and Lewis Rosenthal will be presenting at this year’s Warpstock Europe, in Munch, Germany, June 6-7. This will be a rare opportunity to hear from two of the Company’s principals about what Arca Noae is presently doing, and what is planned for the future.

You may find out more about their discussion topics on the Warpstock Europe 2015 Presentations page.

In addition, Steven Levine will be presenting via Skype. You may find out more about Steven’s planned discussion on the above Presentation page, as well.

The UEFI Forum

Arca Noae joins the UEFI Forum as an Adopting Member

For immediate release:

Leesburg, Virginia, USA

Arca Noae, LLC, a Delaware-based Limited Liability Company, is pleased to announce their membership in the UEFI Forum.

The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) specification defines a new model for the interface between personal-computer operating systems and platform firmware. The interface consists of data tables that contain platform-related information, plus boot and runtime service calls that are available to the operating system and its loader. Together, these provide a standard environment for booting an operating system and running pre-boot applications. Essentially, this layer provides a replacement for the traditional BIOS, and is the future of small computing architecture.

The UEFI Forum is a clearinghouse for all current, related documents pertaining to UEFI, the UEFI specification, and its adoption by manufacturers and software developers.

In addition, the UEFI Forum performs a similar function for ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface). Arca Noae develops and maintains the current ACPI implementation for the OS/2 and eComStation platform.

Arca Noae is committed to running OS/2 on current hardware. UEFI, like ACPI, is a continuation of the trend to move more functions from the BIOS to the operating system. Arca Noae is looking into how this new technology can be supported under OS/2 in the future.

End of press release.

Current happenings

While our blog posts have been infrequent, our developers, beta testing, and translation teams have been quite busy the past few weeks. Here are some highlights of what’s been going on behind the scenes at Area Noae:

  • USB: Work is continuing on various USB problems, including the “hub-attached devices” issue.
  • Graphical update utility (YUMIE): We have been through several more test versions in the past few weeks, and with the help from our friends working on YUM and Python (more on this, below), we are getting closer to a release date, with much of our planned functionality for version 1.0 in place.
  • Graphical update utility (YUMIE): National Language Support is planned for English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Finnish, Korean, and Japanese, and translators for these languages are engaged and working. We are also hopeful for more languages, such as Russian, Chinese, and Swedish, and continue to seek willing translators.
  • Outside projects: Arca Noae continues to support the efforts of our strategic partner, bww bitwise works, GmbH, and their excellent work on Firefox and OpenOffice, as well as the ever-growing list of ported applications and tools available from the Netlabs repositories. Our work has intersected theirs regarding the YUMIE project (see above), and they have been extremely responsive to our reports and update requests, enabling us to move forward without delay.
  • Arca Noae web services: Thanks to the tireless efforts of Paul Smedley and Steven Levine, our web platform grows more stable and robust. We have implemented a number of recent updates to the Apache web server software, including current OpenSSL technology to safeguard our subscribers’ data while communicating with us over the web.
  • Arca Noae in the news: Look for an upcoming announcement about some new strategies for the Company, and an association with a familiar name.

If you haven’t purchased a subscription for the Arca Noae drivers and software package, now is the time.

New store items: bww bitwise works GmbH sponsoring and InJoy Firewall

Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of InJoy Firewall, the premier firewall and VPN solution for OS/2, eComStation, Windows, and Linux in our online store. All three licensing options (Personal, Professional, and Enterprise) are available, in all user counts.

In addition, sponsoring bww bitwise works GmbH has never been easier. bww bitwise works is responsible for the ongoing work on the Firefox port for OS/2, Qt, Java, and so many more bits and pieces which make it possible for others to build great software for the platform. 100% of the net proceeds of your sponsoring go to funding this important work.

bww bitwise works GmbH is an Arca Noae strategic partner.