Re:Waste of money unless your taxes are simple
on
Best Tax Programs?
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· Score: 1
H&R Block is not that bad. The initial training class is 66 hours of class (about the same contact time as two college classes), plus over 20 hours of pre-work training, tax updates, etc. And all these classes have tests that you have to pass.
After the first year, you have to have 24-30 hours (minimum) for rehire, plus that same 20+ hours of pre-work, tax update, and a few other courses that are required. This year, because of some significant changes in the tax laws, there were a couple more required classes.
No, it's not up to what you'd need for a CPA, but the training requirements are fairly stringent.
From what I hear, though, not all of the tax prep companies do provide that much training...
I remember reading the perfect solution to this problem... back in the early 50's, in one of those "Popular Science"-type magazines, they predicted that in a few years we would never have to worry about hurricanes again.
If a hurricane started to form, just set off an A-bomb or H-bomb inside the eye. This would disrupt the wind patterns and destroy the storm before it could do any damage.
Now, fifty-odd years later, they are still screwing around trying to predict the weather instead of implementing this simple and effective idea. Why don't they get with it?
Seems to me it's more like a store's competitor sending a bunch of guys with signs to walk back and forth on the public sidewalk in front of the store - except some of the signs are so big you can hardly see the store behind them.
Everyone is worried about "over the air", but a very large portion of cable TV is also still analog. Are the cable companies going to pick up this new digital stuff from satellite feeds or whatever and convert it to analog for the older sets??? Not bloody likely, they are going to want to soak you and me another $5-$10 PER MONTH PER SET for converter boxes for those old sets!
We have four sets right now, two of them fairly new, but not a damn one is digital-ready. In fact I finally just threw out another set that wasn't even cable ready - it had one rotary VHF channel selector knob and one rotary UHF channel selector knob but it still worked... sort of. And that's not even counting a bunch of VCR's, also strictly analog! We have one digital converter on one set, but nobody ever watches anything above channel 99 except BBCAmerica for Monty Python and Benny Hill, and the Music Choice Classical channel. Why the Hell aren't 99 channels enough?
I think that if the government wants us to switch from real television to this digital crap, they ought to subsidize the cost of digital converters so everybody can buy them for, say, $10 each for as many old sets as you have... I guess people on welfare should get them free!
A good time frame for killing analog TV would be at least ten years (maybe twenty) after every single new TV set sold was digital ready! Certainly no sooner, they have no business making TV sets we paid good money for obsolete!
This switch from analog to digital TV is just another damn government boondoggle that nobody needs and nobody wants! Write your congressperson and tell them to stop this, leave TV the way it is!
A few years back I worked on a 2-person project, and we thought about going to VC. I was in NY and sitting next to the server, the other person was in Ottawa on an ISDN line (barely faster than dialup). The impact on her of having to check in and check out files over the slow link would have killed her productivity, and her having those files tied up that long would have killed mine.
The tradeoff was that OCCASIONALLY we would both have made changes to the same file, and I would have to re-sync the files by hand - a nuisance, but it turned out better than using VC in this case.
Networking and connection speeds have gotten better since then, so it's less likely to be a problem today, but it could still happen.
One big problem of LCDs is the Resolution Lockin - if you try to use anything except the device's native resolution, the quality of the display degrades quite a bit. The manufacturers seem to want to cram the largest number of pixels onto the screen - at first thought, not unreasonable, but...
For those of us with somewhat less acute eyesight - due to age or other reasons - this manufacturer recommended resolution produces text and pictures that are too damn small!!
I run my 17 inch CRT at 800x600 to get comfortable viewing. Most 17 inch CRTs would not work well at this setting. You would need one that had 1600x1200 (if such existed at all, it would certainly be one of the more expensive ones) to be able to do 800x600 reasonably, and then I'm not sure how good it would look (still, probably better than trying to force a 1024x768 down to 800x600).
I intend to stick with CRTs as long as I can still get them, even if LCDs become as cheap or cheaper, because CRT's provide flexibility in setting the display the way I want it.
Doesn't work. Well, it didn't work on my Red Hat and in this case Debian ain't THAT much different.
First it complains it can't find Active-X, maybe my browser isn't configured properly (I'm not sure how I would configure Mozilla for Active-X!?!), and suggests I try the alternate method. This downloads a little file called "legitcheck.hta", which of course doesn't have a prayer of running on Linux. Dead end.
So apparently you have to at least be running Windoze in order to glom a copy of their free software. Didn't really want the software, just wanted to see what would happen. Really, I sort of expected a web-based checking tool rather than a download.
What was it - Cairo? Chicago? They ended up dumping them, and putting the "doable" stuff into their next "mainstream" product.
My guess is that WinFS was turning out to be one of those grand and glorious ideas that was falling short of "doable" - at least any time short of 2041.
Actually, Gnome 1.2 is pretty nice. I dunno what that "Nautilus" thing is (I thought Nautilus was one of those torture machine they have at the gym), but GMC makes a VERY nice file manager. And most of the rest of the stuff is pretty friendly, and reasonably fast, too. Did upgrade from the Enlightenment WM to the Sawfish WM, that's OK too. A few things break now and then, but I got the RedHat 7.0 complete with source, so I guess I COULD fix them if I really wanted to.
Problem, you can get "Camp Grenada", but you can't get such classics as "The Ballad of Harry Lewis" (I'm singing you a ballad of a great man of the cloth, his name was Harry Lewis and he worked for Irving Roth, he died while cutting velvet on a hot July the fourth, and his cloth goes shining on!) or "Sir Greenbaum" (In Sherwood Forest there dwelt a knight, who was known as the righteous Sir Greenbaum, and many dragons had felt the might, of the smite of the righteous Sir Greenbaum!)
Got it on vinyl, just gotta figure out how to get it to CD/MP3/OGG or whatever...
I read the article on LP-to-CD, and they keep talking about doing this in Goldwave and selecting that option in Goldwave...
Last time I looked, Goldwave was a Windoze program. Has that changed, is there version of Goldwave for Linux now? If not, obvious question, what software WOULD one use to do this job in Linux?
This is not academic, when packing to move from NY to FL, in spite of all I discarded, I kept several boxes of LP's, a couple of old turntables (may need some work or a new cartridge), and a couple of 60's-vintage amps.
Stuff you just can't get on CD, like 60's folk music (Chad Mitchell Trio, Limelighters,...) and some other 50's/60's stuff. But all the "labels" do is release ONE "best-of" album - ONE best of Tom Paxton, ONE best of Alan Sherman, and NONE of some of the other stuff - I'd gladly buy it if I could, but it AIN'T there!
Think about it for a minute... a new interface is never as intuitive as the old one you are used to, let alone more intuitive. Maybe, once you get used to it, it will be better, or maybe not... but it is going to take a fair investment in time and energy to figure out if moving ahead is good or bad, and a real pain to move back if you made a mistake.
Looking at the writeup, I saw only ONE improvement that I really, really want - the multi-line text tool. And the reviewer was careful to point out that other goodies (like a multi-COLOR text tool) were NOT implemented.
Personally, I'd be just as happy if someone would retrofit that new multi-line text tool into 1.2 and forget about the rest of it. I've taken the time to get used to right-click menus and floating toolbars and such, it wasn't that hard. So pardon me if I don't enthuse for changes that disrupt all the current users just to make things easier on a few newbies!
Clearly, as good citizens we must support this effort and do what we can to support it. Now, nobody ever reads those text warnings, they're just too dull. The FBI needs something eyecatching for this.
Therefore I have taken the initiative to create such a seal as a suggestion to the FBI, and give them full permission to use my image for this purpose.
No, SCO is a different case. Here is a user wanting to link a module to the kernel. As long as it is for his own use and he doesn't give it to anyone else, he is allowed to do this!
Remember RMS's original concept of "free" software. The so-called "viral" provisions of the GPL don't really kick in until you want to give the software to someone else, and then it just forces you to give away as much freedom as you got.
In any case, this has nothing to do with the ownership of the code, if I combine two pieces of code and redistribute, the original owners still own their pieces and I own whatever I contributed to the mixture. If one piece is GPL and the other not, it still does not effect the ownership (it may be a GPL violation, but that's a different issue).
I agree with the original assertion that a kernel developer has no business telling me what drivers I can or can't use for my personal use.
I have a driver for an ethernet card that I had to compile - the source came on a disk with the card. Once it was compiled I loaded it with "insmod" and it worked. To get it to come up automatically at boot time, I just created the "rc.modules" file with an "insmod" line in it and everything is fine. This is running on a 2.2 kernel (yes, 2.2, RedHat 7.0), and I really don't have much need to upgrade.
Now, how is this going to work for 2.6? First of all, NO F*CKING WAY would I even think of re-compiling the kernel - the machine is 180mHz (yes, that's 0.18gHz if you like that better!) and it would take a week. Compiling a small driver is fine, but nothing really big. It can stay a module with insmod forever and that's fine.
Second, I am not developing the driver, just using what the manufacturer provided, and I don't really want to figure out how to change it.
So, the article didn't really say, will there be any sort of "grandfathering" to allow you to just continue to "insmod" older drivers? Some sort of compatibility mode?
If not, it looks like there may be some pretty severe barriers to upgrading to 2.6, and really good reason to keep work going on 2.4 or 2.2 - minor fixes, security, etc., for those who don't need the grief of a major upgrade.
The machine running DivX had a phone line connection to CC.
Tap your own phone line, record a few dozen sessions, and pretty soon you can have the player phoning YOUR DRM server instead of CC's. Probably not done because it didn't last long enough to piss someone off to this level of effort.
If you build it with DRM, they will come... and CRACK IT!
You ever looked at the employment contract from that little company with the 3-letter name? It just about says they own the name you thought up for your kid! There was a big flap after the PC came out and everyone wanted to write software on their own time - NO WAY!!
I had been with the company a bit longer than many, and I checked my employment contract, and it said "ideas and inventions" instead of "everything". I figured a program was more an "expression" of an idea, and I went to the company lawyer, and they agreed that with my older contract, I did indeed own programs written on my own time, my own computer, and having no real relationship with my job assignment.
BUT even if I owned them, I couldn't sell them (not even as shareware) because the company sold software, so I would be competing with the company and thus it would be a conflict of interest. I could give them away as freeware (how generous of them), or I could hold them until I retired or otherwise left the company... how's the market for DOS programs nowadays?
Bootstraps are not simple. If you are extremely lucky it may go well, but more likely not. I got involved in one once - the worst thing is trying to get debugging info when almost nothing is up and running yet - especially NOT the display. And there was no BIOS either, I was running with an eprom plugged in and replacing the normal BIOS chip - nothing on it except the code I wrote.
Turned out about the only reliable thing I had was the speaker, and I had to make do with a collection of short beeps, long beeps, low-pitched beeps, high-pitched beeps, single beeps, double beeps... well, you get the idea.
It was murder! If you want to start simple, at least work on top of the BIOS, if not on top of a simple OS like DOS.
OK, what do I use to play this? Everything I have either doesn't work at all, or gives me a half-inch square image. I'd really like to see this, but I don't have much experience with videos and video formats. Help??
What is all this "Desktop" junk and all those stupid icons? And what is wrong with "Up"? We are dealing with a tree structure here, a nice clean file system, not the new "Micro$haft File System" that Uncle Bill is trying to foist off as part of "Long-Horny".
Why do these people try to brand good, working, interfaces as "legacy" and delete or mangle them?
The file selector on my Gnome Red Hat 7.0 system is clean, easy to use, and I find nothing "non-intuitive" about it.
Yeah, this thing totally hung my browser (Mozilla 1.21), it would not do anything!
I didn't check CPU utilization, but I did use "ps -Af" to see what was running. At first it has about 8 Java processes going, then it settled down to 3, with one of them defunct.
To recover, I had to do a "kill -9" on the Java processes, and that ended up also killing the browser. VERY ill-behaved!!!!
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H&R Block is not that bad. The initial training class is 66 hours of class (about the same contact time as two college classes), plus over 20 hours of pre-work training, tax updates, etc. And all these classes have tests that you have to pass.
...
After the first year, you have to have 24-30 hours (minimum) for rehire, plus that same 20+ hours of pre-work, tax update, and a few other courses that are required. This year, because of some significant changes in the tax laws, there were a couple more required classes.
No, it's not up to what you'd need for a CPA, but the training requirements are fairly stringent.
From what I hear, though, not all of the tax prep companies do provide that much training
I remember reading the perfect solution to this problem ... back in the early 50's, in one of those "Popular Science"-type magazines, they predicted that in a few years we would never have to worry about hurricanes again.
If a hurricane started to form, just set off an A-bomb or H-bomb inside the eye. This would disrupt the wind patterns and destroy the storm before it could do any damage.
Now, fifty-odd years later, they are still screwing around trying to predict the weather instead of implementing this simple and effective idea. Why don't they get with it?
Seems to me it's more like a store's competitor sending a bunch of guys with signs to walk back and forth on the public sidewalk in front of the store - except some of the signs are so big you can hardly see the store behind them.
Everyone is worried about "over the air", but a very large portion of cable TV is also still analog. Are the cable companies going to pick up this new digital stuff from satellite feeds or whatever and convert it to analog for the older sets??? Not bloody likely, they are going to want to soak you and me another $5-$10 PER MONTH PER SET for converter boxes for those old sets!
... sort of. And that's not even counting a bunch of VCR's, also strictly analog! We have one digital converter on one set, but nobody ever watches anything above channel 99 except BBCAmerica for Monty Python and Benny Hill, and the Music Choice Classical channel. Why the Hell aren't 99 channels enough?
... I guess people on welfare should get them free!
We have four sets right now, two of them fairly new, but not a damn one is digital-ready. In fact I finally just threw out another set that wasn't even cable ready - it had one rotary VHF channel selector knob and one rotary UHF channel selector knob but it still worked
I think that if the government wants us to switch from real television to this digital crap, they ought to subsidize the cost of digital converters so everybody can buy them for, say, $10 each for as many old sets as you have
A good time frame for killing analog TV would be at least ten years (maybe twenty) after every single new TV set sold was digital ready! Certainly no sooner, they have no business making TV sets we paid good money for obsolete!
This switch from analog to digital TV is just another damn government boondoggle that nobody needs and nobody wants! Write your congressperson and tell them to stop this, leave TV the way it is!
An even better hack would be to trick this thing into returning
127.0.0.1
for everybody
A few years back I worked on a 2-person project, and we thought about going to VC. I was in NY and sitting next to the server, the other person was in Ottawa on an ISDN line (barely faster than dialup). The impact on her of having to check in and check out files over the slow link would have killed her productivity, and her having those files tied up that long would have killed mine.
The tradeoff was that OCCASIONALLY we would both have made changes to the same file, and I would have to re-sync the files by hand - a nuisance, but it turned out better than using VC in this case.
Networking and connection speeds have gotten better since then, so it's less likely to be a problem today, but it could still happen.
One big problem of LCDs is the Resolution Lockin - if you try to use anything except the device's native resolution, the quality of the display degrades quite a bit. The manufacturers seem to want to cram the largest number of pixels onto the screen - at first thought, not unreasonable, but ...
For those of us with somewhat less acute eyesight - due to age or other reasons - this manufacturer recommended resolution produces text and pictures that are too damn small!!
I run my 17 inch CRT at 800x600 to get comfortable viewing. Most 17 inch CRTs would not work well at this setting. You would need one that had 1600x1200 (if such existed at all, it would certainly be one of the more expensive ones) to be able to do 800x600 reasonably, and then I'm not sure how good it would look (still, probably better than trying to force a 1024x768 down to 800x600).
I intend to stick with CRTs as long as I can still get them, even if LCDs become as cheap or cheaper, because CRT's provide flexibility in setting the display the way I want it.
Doesn't work. Well, it didn't work on my Red Hat and in this case Debian ain't THAT much different.
First it complains it can't find Active-X, maybe my browser isn't configured properly (I'm not sure how I would configure Mozilla for Active-X!?!), and suggests I try the alternate method. This downloads a little file called "legitcheck.hta", which of course doesn't have a prayer of running on Linux. Dead end.
So apparently you have to at least be running Windoze in order to glom a copy of their free software. Didn't really want the software, just wanted to see what would happen. Really, I sort of expected a web-based checking tool rather than a download.
What was it - Cairo? Chicago? They ended up dumping them, and putting the "doable" stuff into their next "mainstream" product.
My guess is that WinFS was turning out to be one of those grand and glorious ideas that was falling short of "doable" - at least any time short of 2041.
This story reminds me of the classic definition of "mixed Emotions" ... watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your new Cadillac!
Actually, Gnome 1.2 is pretty nice. I dunno what that "Nautilus" thing is (I thought Nautilus was one of those torture machine they have at the gym), but GMC makes a VERY nice file manager. And most of the rest of the stuff is pretty friendly, and reasonably fast, too. Did upgrade from the Enlightenment WM to the Sawfish WM, that's OK too. A few things break now and then, but I got the RedHat 7.0 complete with source, so I guess I COULD fix them if I really wanted to.
If it isn't BADLY broken, don't fix it.
Problem, you can get "Camp Grenada", but you can't get such classics as "The Ballad of Harry Lewis"
...
(I'm singing you a ballad of a great man of the cloth,
his name was Harry Lewis and he worked for Irving Roth,
he died while cutting velvet on a hot July the fourth,
and his cloth goes shining on!)
or "Sir Greenbaum"
(In Sherwood Forest there dwelt a knight,
who was known as the righteous Sir Greenbaum,
and many dragons had felt the might,
of the smite of the righteous Sir Greenbaum!)
Got it on vinyl, just gotta figure out how to get it to CD/MP3/OGG or whatever
I read the article on LP-to-CD, and they keep talking about doing this in Goldwave and selecting that option in Goldwave ...
...) and some other 50's/60's stuff. But all the "labels" do is release ONE "best-of" album - ONE best of Tom Paxton, ONE best of Alan Sherman, and NONE of some of the other stuff - I'd gladly buy it if I could, but it AIN'T there!
Last time I looked, Goldwave was a Windoze program. Has that changed, is there version of Goldwave for Linux now? If not, obvious question, what software WOULD one use to do this job in Linux?
This is not academic, when packing to move from NY to FL, in spite of all I discarded, I kept several boxes of LP's, a couple of old turntables (may need some work or a new cartridge), and a couple of 60's-vintage amps.
Stuff you just can't get on CD, like 60's folk music (Chad Mitchell Trio, Limelighters,
So what's the best way to do LP-to-CD in Linux?
Think about it for a minute ... a new interface is never as intuitive as the old one you are used to, let alone more intuitive. Maybe, once you get used to it, it will be better, or maybe not ... but it is going to take a fair investment in time and energy to figure out if moving ahead is good or bad, and a real pain to move back if you made a mistake.
Looking at the writeup, I saw only ONE improvement that I really, really want - the multi-line text tool. And the reviewer was careful to point out that other goodies (like a multi-COLOR text tool) were NOT implemented.
Personally, I'd be just as happy if someone would retrofit that new multi-line text tool into 1.2 and forget about the rest of it. I've taken the time to get used to right-click menus and floating toolbars and such, it wasn't that hard. So pardon me if I don't enthuse for changes that disrupt all the current users just to make things easier on a few newbies!
Clearly, as good citizens we must support this effort and do what we can to support it. Now, nobody ever reads those text warnings, they're just too dull. The FBI needs something eyecatching for this.
Therefore I have taken the initiative to create such a seal as a suggestion to the FBI, and give them full permission to use my image for this purpose.
You can see this image at FBI Anti-Piracy Seal
No, SCO is a different case. Here is a user wanting to link a module to the kernel. As long as it is for his own use and he doesn't give it to anyone else, he is allowed to do this!
Remember RMS's original concept of "free" software. The so-called "viral" provisions of the GPL don't really kick in until you want to give the software to someone else, and then it just forces you to give away as much freedom as you got.
In any case, this has nothing to do with the ownership of the code, if I combine two pieces of code and redistribute, the original owners still own their pieces and I own whatever I contributed to the mixture. If one piece is GPL and the other not, it still does not effect the ownership (it may be a GPL violation, but that's a different issue).
I agree with the original assertion that a kernel developer has no business telling me what drivers I can or can't use for my personal use.
I have a driver for an ethernet card that I had to compile - the source came on a disk with the card. Once it was compiled I loaded it with "insmod" and it worked. To get it to come up automatically at boot time, I just created the "rc.modules" file with an "insmod" line in it and everything is fine. This is running on a 2.2 kernel (yes, 2.2, RedHat 7.0), and I really don't have much need to upgrade.
Now, how is this going to work for 2.6? First of all, NO F*CKING WAY would I even think of re-compiling the kernel - the machine is 180mHz (yes, that's 0.18gHz if you like that better!) and it would take a week. Compiling a small driver is fine, but nothing really big. It can stay a module with insmod forever and that's fine.
Second, I am not developing the driver, just using what the manufacturer provided, and I don't really want to figure out how to change it.
So, the article didn't really say, will there be any sort of "grandfathering" to allow you to just continue to "insmod" older drivers? Some sort of compatibility mode?
If not, it looks like there may be some pretty severe barriers to upgrading to 2.6, and really good reason to keep work going on 2.4 or 2.2 - minor fixes, security, etc., for those who don't need the grief of a major upgrade.
If you build it with DRM, they will come
Try a "Slander of Title" suit, that seems to be quite popular nowadays!
You ever looked at the employment contract from that little company with the 3-letter name? It just about says they own the name you thought up for your kid! There was a big flap after the PC came out and everyone wanted to write software on their own time - NO WAY!!
... how's the market for DOS programs nowadays?
I had been with the company a bit longer than many, and I checked my employment contract, and it said "ideas and inventions" instead of "everything". I figured a program was more an "expression" of an idea, and I went to the company lawyer, and they agreed that with my older contract, I did indeed own programs written on my own time, my own computer, and having no real relationship with my job assignment.
BUT even if I owned them, I couldn't sell them (not even as shareware) because the company sold software, so I would be competing with the company and thus it would be a conflict of interest. I could give them away as freeware (how generous of them), or I could hold them until I retired or otherwise left the company
Bootstraps are not simple . If you are extremely lucky it may go well, but more likely not. I got involved in one once - the worst thing is trying to get debugging info when almost nothing is up and running yet - especially NOT the display. And there was no BIOS either, I was running with an eprom plugged in and replacing the normal BIOS chip - nothing on it except the code I wrote.
... well, you get the idea.
Turned out about the only reliable thing I had was the speaker, and I had to make do with a collection of short beeps, long beeps, low-pitched beeps, high-pitched beeps, single beeps, double beeps
It was murder! If you want to start simple, at least work on top of the BIOS, if not on top of a simple OS like DOS.
More likely Mr. Brown has his tongue up Bill's A$$!
OK, what do I use to play this? Everything I have either doesn't work at all, or gives me a half-inch square image. I'd really like to see this, but I don't have much experience with videos and video formats. Help??
What is all this "Desktop" junk and all those stupid icons? And what is wrong with "Up"? We are dealing with a tree structure here, a nice clean file system, not the new "Micro$haft File System" that Uncle Bill is trying to foist off as part of "Long-Horny".
Why do these people try to brand good, working, interfaces as "legacy" and delete or mangle them?
The file selector on my Gnome Red Hat 7.0 system is clean, easy to use, and I find nothing "non-intuitive" about it.
Leave it alone, dammit!!!!
Yeah, this thing totally hung my browser (Mozilla 1.21), it would not do anything! I didn't check CPU utilization, but I did use "ps -Af" to see what was running. At first it has about 8 Java processes going, then it settled down to 3, with one of them defunct.
To recover, I had to do a "kill -9" on the Java processes, and that ended up also killing the browser. VERY ill-behaved!!!!
I am not going to try it again!