In my area, the local school district has a full height antenna for their broadcasts. They're not at the same power as the big stations, but they're sure not struggling to be heard unless you're up in the mountains. The college stations are all high power with rebroadcast towers for a hundred miles or so.
Nobody is struggling to be heard, because the bandwidth is managed by the FCC, and schools have an easy time getting licenses.
If you put a big amp on a software radio and interfere with something... the FCC 50 miles away has your approximate location already flagged. If you do it repeatedly in a way that is predictable, they'll drive their truck out which can pinpoint the exact apartment you're in fairly easily. They don't need to drive around in circles for that; by the time they're in town, they already know exactly where you are. If you were going to the effort to power up at high power and interfere with stuff, and then power down, their standard spectrum monitoring already tells them what city block you're on. Probably you have a few neighbors who could hear you over their stereo (because you wouldn't have a well-tuned antenna) and would tell them who it was. Sometimes they do have to investigate that way to shut down CBers who cause problems.
The reality is that pirate stations mostly do know they're doing; they don't do fancy engineering studies, but they do keep track of their output power, what they can receive on nearby frequencies from their broadcast location, etc. Generally because they understand how easy it is to triangulate location from a broadcast signal.
Where oh where would we be without the government to protect us?
In my community they're about 50 miles away, and if a less sarcastic person calls them up and makes a complaint, they drive their truck out and confiscate lots of equipment.
I don't think anybody has ever complained about pirate radio, though, because there is enough available bandwidth that they're not stepping on the toes of the licensed stations. But they certainly come out here frequently to deal with CD radio enthusiasts running 1000W amps and bleeding over onto people's telephones and home stereos.
If indeed you were to part a station right next to a licensee and cause a problem, they would roll up and protect that licensee.
Without them, these same idiots I mentioned above with their black market amplifiers would stomp on every signal on every available band. They'd use it to tunnel their phone calls and shop security video if they could, because internet is for nerds and they're not nerds.
OK, but that just shows you didn't understand my comment. The "what are you getting on about" is the part you're supposed to work through, all the way to "oh I understand what he's saying," before you "WAT"[sic] and spam a google search result as if it contradicts me.
Also, a Wat is a Buddhist temple. It is not a spelling of the word what. You're not on twitter.
There was no bluff to call; and you didn't say anything. Get a grip. Review the thread if you need to. You wanted to challenge that professionals even can use the tools that they use, and that's just an impossible argument to attempt. And then you couldn't even figure out which tool they can't use, as your way of proving the quality of your use case analysis.
The tool is not named google. But google is the tool that you should be using to try to find your answer. But really, you should already know it before saying the things above; if you don't already know which tool I'm talking about, you have no idea if the things you said are true.
Anyone who gets information from Wikipedia and tries to use it in actual conversation with other people who's knowledge comes from a source other than Wikipedia will find himself losing friends, credibility, and/or freedom from psychiatric care REAL quick.
So, which encyclopedia do you use that is better? L O L
I grew up with Britannica in the house, the most expensive thing my family owned. (it was worth more than our car!) And it was good, compared to the ones at school. But it had a lot of flaws; it wasn't actually an authoritative source of information about anything at all. It was just a good starting point. Wikipedia is better in every way.
Haters hate, but information isn't emotional; reading information while feeling emotions doesn't make that information emotional. The information is the same, it doesn't care.
Go beyond giving yourself hints next time. Attempt to complete thoughts.
The way I look at it, (and this comes up every election cycle to some degree) when voter turnout in the primary is under 15% in a State, and yet there are candidates that are literally filling up stadiums with crowds... only a small percentage of the people waving signs at those events are even voters! But if you can turn out crowds, the media will count that as being something.
Many of them won't even know what day the general election is being held until they hear about the results the next day. Then they'll moan about a bunch of irrelevant stuff, "something something two parties something something."
They start with 2003, then they skip straight to 2007. And none of it is what they claim it is. If they'd started with the Clipper Chip they'd actually have right there the vast majority of events that include "[trying] to restrict citizens' access to strong encryption," because that was the only significant attempt.
The horse shit is so deep, they even claim that the FBI being called to testify in front of Congress is somehow relevant. People who pay any sort of loose attention to public events in Washington understand that there are hearings on everything, and government employees have to testify when asked. They'll be asked stupid questions, and their answers will be misrepresented by the press; as in this case.
And no, internet surveillance is not the same thing as trying to take away my encryption. Uhm, duh? Words, do they mean shit, or not?
Even in Lord of the Flies they were able to create various operating structures at different times.
Some people seem to think structure is somehow external to the human experience, without understanding that is not only internal but a strong, deep trait.
They are big, therefore they have structure.
Were they small, they would also have structure.
Were they one person doing the whole thing, they would have structure. But the word "bureaucracy" wouldn't apply. It might not matter that much; I doubt even 50% of the wikipedia editors could accurately define bureaucracy! And less that 5% would open a dictionary if somebody claimed they're using it wrong when complaining about the leadership.
I find it hilarious, because calling it a "bureaucracy" is like saying, "the sun rises." It is just a statement of fact that flows directly from it being large, and requiring processes.
I'll give the young haters a hint: bureaucracy is a word, and it can be looked up in the dictionary. It is not a pejorative bad word. It is a word, with meaning. A neutral, descriptive word, that is neither good nor bad.
If you read/watch the news, when a politician is against an agency action they describe the people making the decision as "bureaucrats." When the same people are taking an action they approve of, they're "non-partisan career professionals" according to the same person.;)
Right, the tools I use don't exist, because you don't know about them!
Magical thinking at a whole new level.
You really underscore why I'm not interested in playing school-marm on command for you; you're not interested in the subject, and you've already decided that proprietary software is a magic spell.
There is a whole world of no-true-scotsman behind the word "equivalent" as you use it above. In the same way, proprietary software doesn't offer any equivalent to any of the open source tools.
Even Photoshop can't provide an equivalent plugin system to GIMP. Oh, well, it can, but only if you choose definitions of "equivalent" that include both! Gosh. What if we only used meanings of the word that implied professionals can get their work done? Then it would turn out that you're just full of shit; how would you know that a tool you've never heard of (the most popular open tool for the job being discussed) can or can't get a job done? Surely after being told that professionals use it, you'd know? Oh, no, even then you wouldn't know, because you choose not to know shit.
You're not an EE, you don't know what the tools of the trade are, and you're able to engage in very basic critical thinking. You're just some bullshit on the internet.
Revit is proprietary, right? If you're interested in the FLOSS answer, it is don't give up your freedom in the first place; use a complete stack that respects your freedom.
If you already have a specific contract (or your employer does) that forces you to use proprietary software, and you're OK with that, then my advice is just use whatever is normal for you.
If you come to a place where you want to avoid the pains and restrictions and liabilities of that way of doing things, then change completely to freedom-respecting software, and don't worry about bidding on contracts that mandate use of specific packages.
Another point I'd like to make is that in work flows based on open tools, we don't value "seamlessness." We value the seams; those are the places where the automation happens! Those are where we attach hooks to do whatever it is we want to achieve. With "seamless" proprietary workflows, you just have to follow the cattle guards to wherever they take you, and rely on the good people at the software vendor to have not only anticipated your needs, but also decided that all your needs were important enough to include. Or just, do things their way.
With a seam, I can write a filter of some sort in a few hours to do something that otherwise might require waiting three years for the vendor to add it as a feature.
Use google, find the one that EE's are using, and then you'll be ready to talk about it.
There is one. Or is this a no-true-Scotsman with moving goalposts where no actual board will be complex enough for you?
We design our boards, and they come back from the fab, same as with what you use. Your proprietary software is not a magic spell that enables you to do things that FLOSS users aren't doing. Everybody is doing the same things, with different tools. KiCad is not the main professional tool in use, it is the main hobbyist tool. So it is a specious point.
Just like, the tools I use would be "too difficult" for a lot of KiCad or Eagle users, but are not actually difficult at all. That you mention Eagle is hilarious, of course.
Start from the knowledge that other EEs are using FLOSS tools. There is no reason to have false presumptions going in. Knowing that, you don't have to wonder something silly like, "gosh are all their boards 1 or 2 layers?
If you don't know what the tool is, and you're skeptical that whatever it is can do work, then you're simply ignorant of something that you don't actually care about. There is no reason or benefit to tell you what it is, but it may benefit you to know that options exist and professionals use them. If you were interested, maybe it would be a different conversation.
I personally have no doubt that the engineers, including ones working in large teams, who use open source EDA tools are not merely country bumpkins who are unable to come up with a work flow. Which is what you seem to imply.
I also have no doubt that whatever proprietary work flow you're locked into would cause difficultly to change. Other ways of doing things would be different, and you're already invested in the way you are already doing things. But that is circular, and tells nobody anything about what it would be like using different tools.
It is the same nonsense people were saying in the 90s, and it was already disproven for decades back then.
In the phrase, "I highly doubt that there are FOSS alternatives that can handle that kind of workflow without extreme discipline of the users" what the fuck do you mean by the word "handle?" Is that some kind of machismo no-true-scotsman bullshit, or do you think the CPU cores of the machines would overheat, or do you think the software would simply core dump if it had to do Real Manly Work? Because it sure as fuck doesn't sound like an actual technical problem.
Fortunately, though, you don't "do CAD" and don't actually have a clue about what you're claiming to have a clue about. So I won't have to wonder, "gosh, when I check my files into revision control so others have access to them, will the sky fall because I used CAD software to generate them?!" I also won't have to worry that maybe my automated documentation system isn't documenting anything, because the license might not be wearing the right type of fancy shoes.
And did you know that there is a thing called GNU Octave that is mostly compatible with matlab? Luckily I don't have to touch that shit, I use R, which is the open source version of S. Notice a pattern? For every proprietary thing that Important People have a Very Important Workflow based on, there is an open source alternative? Funny how that works. I wonder why it is that way? You don't wonder about that, though, because you don't even know about it.
And BTW, 10^3 is a pretty lame way to try to look smart. It is a fairly small round number. You can just say 1000.
You're trying to get pedantic, but you're under-thinking it. If most cows see grass only at the very end of their lives, right before they're slaughtered, then it remains true at any time that most cows have never even seen grass.
But the more important thing is that you try to get pedantic about the literal words, instead of trying to understand the meaning of what was said, and respond to that. Or to put it another way, you can't worry about semantics without worrying about meaning.
I grew up eating only home-made whole wheat bread, (raised by "health-food-hippies") and the store bread was so different that it didn't even taste like bread to me... and what I ate didn't taste like bread to my friends! Luckily in my region most of the wheat is high protein, so the local smaller bakeries aren't motivated to use Chorleywood process other than in the "crusty" European-style breads. I can find a good traditional bread, but it takes some work and attention. Obviously for people who buy only the cheapest couple brands, they only get the most processed forms.
I still make a lot of my own bread, and I can go from flour to a finished (unsliced) loaf in three-and-a-half hours, too, but I'm only growing a small amount of yeast for my hippy loaf, or what Europeans might call a "mountain loaf." Difference is that I use a regular bread pan.
Sorry to reply twice, but I wanted to tell a funny short story about my taxes this year.
I decided to use one of the "free" options other than the fillable forms... big mistake! I went through their whole step by baby-step process, in the end provided the exact same information as the real form, in the same order, was asked a question in every place where the instructions instruct me to do one thing or another, and at the very end right before submitting it they pissed me off so bad with their bait-and-switch, click "free" 17 times nonsense that instead of making that last click, I wrote them an angry message demanding they delete my account, and just re-entered the same information into the raw form.
I'll never try to use "tax software" again, even when it's web-based. What a total pain in the ass. Taxes aren't even hard, if that is hard to understand my own code would never run. If I was so rich and trying so hard to avoid paying my taxes as to make it complicated... I'd hire a professional.
Business taxes... if you're used to reading the manual before you do a thing, and you were recording the correct things on a day-to-day basis, then it is the same there are just more instructions to follow. If you can't do it right on your own... you didn't do it right using the software, either. You either have to step through that same decision tree one way or another, or hire somebody else to.
App guy, look up "fiat currency." All you did is trade money for money. You should write a new app, App Money! You can app it wherever apps app, right?
Only works if you don't require any specialty software whatsoever, which is practically nobody. Anything specialized, like CAD tools, EDA tools,[blah blah blah]
Hilarious, some of the most important software I use in my work is the EDA and CAD tools.
What makes you think that people with software freedom don't have software? What makes you think that proprietary software gives you access to something nobody else does?
"Specialized vertical market applications" like Tow Truck 2000, and shit. You don't have to buy that stuff to work in those industries. Software isn't Harry Potter magic spells, that proprietary software isn't a special sauce that enables work in those industries; it is just one way to organize your workflow.
The examples where you really need special software are rare; they certainly don't include EDA or CAD. But if I wanted to be in the business of selling weather forecasts, I'd need specific software because humans can't predict the weather and there are very few engineers working in that field. Anything engineering-related, of course, has FLOSS alternatives already, and generally can be done without even using computers.
Like in the 90s when people told us we "had to" have Microsoft Office, and kept repeating it even after we pointed out that we use something else... successfully. Or when people insist you "have to" use an IDE to write code, because more people use them than don't.
If I was in a field where everybody is totally locked in to proprietary crap software in the whole "specialized vertical market," then I'd be in the perfect position to totally disrupt that market by offering a FLOSS alternative. That is the business reality in the real world; choices exist.
Slashdot Mirror
In my area, the local school district has a full height antenna for their broadcasts. They're not at the same power as the big stations, but they're sure not struggling to be heard unless you're up in the mountains. The college stations are all high power with rebroadcast towers for a hundred miles or so.
Nobody is struggling to be heard, because the bandwidth is managed by the FCC, and schools have an easy time getting licenses.
If you put a big amp on a software radio and interfere with something... the FCC 50 miles away has your approximate location already flagged. If you do it repeatedly in a way that is predictable, they'll drive their truck out which can pinpoint the exact apartment you're in fairly easily. They don't need to drive around in circles for that; by the time they're in town, they already know exactly where you are. If you were going to the effort to power up at high power and interfere with stuff, and then power down, their standard spectrum monitoring already tells them what city block you're on. Probably you have a few neighbors who could hear you over their stereo (because you wouldn't have a well-tuned antenna) and would tell them who it was. Sometimes they do have to investigate that way to shut down CBers who cause problems.
The reality is that pirate stations mostly do know they're doing; they don't do fancy engineering studies, but they do keep track of their output power, what they can receive on nearby frequencies from their broadcast location, etc. Generally because they understand how easy it is to triangulate location from a broadcast signal.
Where oh where would we be without the government to protect us?
In my community they're about 50 miles away, and if a less sarcastic person calls them up and makes a complaint, they drive their truck out and confiscate lots of equipment.
I don't think anybody has ever complained about pirate radio, though, because there is enough available bandwidth that they're not stepping on the toes of the licensed stations. But they certainly come out here frequently to deal with CD radio enthusiasts running 1000W amps and bleeding over onto people's telephones and home stereos.
If indeed you were to part a station right next to a licensee and cause a problem, they would roll up and protect that licensee.
Without them, these same idiots I mentioned above with their black market amplifiers would stomp on every signal on every available band. They'd use it to tunnel their phone calls and shop security video if they could, because internet is for nerds and they're not nerds.
OK, but that just shows you didn't understand my comment. The "what are you getting on about" is the part you're supposed to work through, all the way to "oh I understand what he's saying," before you "WAT"[sic] and spam a google search result as if it contradicts me.
Also, a Wat is a Buddhist temple. It is not a spelling of the word what. You're not on twitter.
There was no bluff to call; and you didn't say anything. Get a grip. Review the thread if you need to. You wanted to challenge that professionals even can use the tools that they use, and that's just an impossible argument to attempt. And then you couldn't even figure out which tool they can't use, as your way of proving the quality of your use case analysis.
The tool is not named google. But google is the tool that you should be using to try to find your answer. But really, you should already know it before saying the things above; if you don't already know which tool I'm talking about, you have no idea if the things you said are true.
Anyone who gets information from Wikipedia and tries to use it in actual conversation with other people who's knowledge comes from a source other than Wikipedia will find himself losing friends, credibility, and/or freedom from psychiatric care REAL quick.
So, which encyclopedia do you use that is better? L O L
I grew up with Britannica in the house, the most expensive thing my family owned. (it was worth more than our car!) And it was good, compared to the ones at school. But it had a lot of flaws; it wasn't actually an authoritative source of information about anything at all. It was just a good starting point. Wikipedia is better in every way.
Haters hate, but information isn't emotional; reading information while feeling emotions doesn't make that information emotional. The information is the same, it doesn't care.
Go beyond giving yourself hints next time. Attempt to complete thoughts.
The way I look at it, (and this comes up every election cycle to some degree) when voter turnout in the primary is under 15% in a State, and yet there are candidates that are literally filling up stadiums with crowds... only a small percentage of the people waving signs at those events are even voters! But if you can turn out crowds, the media will count that as being something.
Many of them won't even know what day the general election is being held until they hear about the results the next day. Then they'll moan about a bunch of irrelevant stuff, "something something two parties something something."
Kim Jong-Il died December 17, 2011. You might want to update your spam macros.
They start with 2003, then they skip straight to 2007. And none of it is what they claim it is. If they'd started with the Clipper Chip they'd actually have right there the vast majority of events that include "[trying] to restrict citizens' access to strong encryption," because that was the only significant attempt.
The horse shit is so deep, they even claim that the FBI being called to testify in front of Congress is somehow relevant. People who pay any sort of loose attention to public events in Washington understand that there are hearings on everything, and government employees have to testify when asked. They'll be asked stupid questions, and their answers will be misrepresented by the press; as in this case.
And no, internet surveillance is not the same thing as trying to take away my encryption. Uhm, duh? Words, do they mean shit, or not?
Even in Lord of the Flies they were able to create various operating structures at different times.
Some people seem to think structure is somehow external to the human experience, without understanding that is not only internal but a strong, deep trait.
They are big, therefore they have structure.
Were they small, they would also have structure.
Were they one person doing the whole thing, they would have structure. But the word "bureaucracy" wouldn't apply. It might not matter that much; I doubt even 50% of the wikipedia editors could accurately define bureaucracy! And less that 5% would open a dictionary if somebody claimed they're using it wrong when complaining about the leadership.
I find it hilarious, because calling it a "bureaucracy" is like saying, "the sun rises." It is just a statement of fact that flows directly from it being large, and requiring processes.
I'll give the young haters a hint: bureaucracy is a word, and it can be looked up in the dictionary. It is not a pejorative bad word. It is a word, with meaning. A neutral, descriptive word, that is neither good nor bad.
If you read/watch the news, when a politician is against an agency action they describe the people making the decision as "bureaucrats." When the same people are taking an action they approve of, they're "non-partisan career professionals" according to the same person. ;)
Right, the tools I use don't exist, because you don't know about them!
Magical thinking at a whole new level.
You really underscore why I'm not interested in playing school-marm on command for you; you're not interested in the subject, and you've already decided that proprietary software is a magic spell.
There is a whole world of no-true-scotsman behind the word "equivalent" as you use it above. In the same way, proprietary software doesn't offer any equivalent to any of the open source tools.
Even Photoshop can't provide an equivalent plugin system to GIMP. Oh, well, it can, but only if you choose definitions of "equivalent" that include both! Gosh. What if we only used meanings of the word that implied professionals can get their work done? Then it would turn out that you're just full of shit; how would you know that a tool you've never heard of (the most popular open tool for the job being discussed) can or can't get a job done? Surely after being told that professionals use it, you'd know? Oh, no, even then you wouldn't know, because you choose not to know shit.
You're not an EE, you don't know what the tools of the trade are, and you're able to engage in very basic critical thinking. You're just some bullshit on the internet.
Revit is proprietary, right? If you're interested in the FLOSS answer, it is don't give up your freedom in the first place; use a complete stack that respects your freedom.
If you already have a specific contract (or your employer does) that forces you to use proprietary software, and you're OK with that, then my advice is just use whatever is normal for you.
If you come to a place where you want to avoid the pains and restrictions and liabilities of that way of doing things, then change completely to freedom-respecting software, and don't worry about bidding on contracts that mandate use of specific packages.
Another point I'd like to make is that in work flows based on open tools, we don't value "seamlessness." We value the seams; those are the places where the automation happens! Those are where we attach hooks to do whatever it is we want to achieve. With "seamless" proprietary workflows, you just have to follow the cattle guards to wherever they take you, and rely on the good people at the software vendor to have not only anticipated your needs, but also decided that all your needs were important enough to include. Or just, do things their way.
With a seam, I can write a filter of some sort in a few hours to do something that otherwise might require waiting three years for the vendor to add it as a feature.
Use google, find the one that EE's are using, and then you'll be ready to talk about it.
There is one. Or is this a no-true-Scotsman with moving goalposts where no actual board will be complex enough for you?
We design our boards, and they come back from the fab, same as with what you use. Your proprietary software is not a magic spell that enables you to do things that FLOSS users aren't doing. Everybody is doing the same things, with different tools. KiCad is not the main professional tool in use, it is the main hobbyist tool. So it is a specious point.
Just like, the tools I use would be "too difficult" for a lot of KiCad or Eagle users, but are not actually difficult at all. That you mention Eagle is hilarious, of course.
Start from the knowledge that other EEs are using FLOSS tools. There is no reason to have false presumptions going in. Knowing that, you don't have to wonder something silly like, "gosh are all their boards 1 or 2 layers?
If you don't know what the tool is, and you're skeptical that whatever it is can do work, then you're simply ignorant of something that you don't actually care about. There is no reason or benefit to tell you what it is, but it may benefit you to know that options exist and professionals use them. If you were interested, maybe it would be a different conversation.
blah blah blah "doubt."
That's all you said.
I personally have no doubt that the engineers, including ones working in large teams, who use open source EDA tools are not merely country bumpkins who are unable to come up with a work flow. Which is what you seem to imply.
I also have no doubt that whatever proprietary work flow you're locked into would cause difficultly to change. Other ways of doing things would be different, and you're already invested in the way you are already doing things. But that is circular, and tells nobody anything about what it would be like using different tools.
It is the same nonsense people were saying in the 90s, and it was already disproven for decades back then.
In the phrase, "I highly doubt that there are FOSS alternatives that can handle that kind of workflow without extreme discipline of the users" what the fuck do you mean by the word "handle?" Is that some kind of machismo no-true-scotsman bullshit, or do you think the CPU cores of the machines would overheat, or do you think the software would simply core dump if it had to do Real Manly Work? Because it sure as fuck doesn't sound like an actual technical problem.
Fortunately, though, you don't "do CAD" and don't actually have a clue about what you're claiming to have a clue about. So I won't have to wonder, "gosh, when I check my files into revision control so others have access to them, will the sky fall because I used CAD software to generate them?!" I also won't have to worry that maybe my automated documentation system isn't documenting anything, because the license might not be wearing the right type of fancy shoes.
And did you know that there is a thing called GNU Octave that is mostly compatible with matlab? Luckily I don't have to touch that shit, I use R, which is the open source version of S. Notice a pattern? For every proprietary thing that Important People have a Very Important Workflow based on, there is an open source alternative? Funny how that works. I wonder why it is that way? You don't wonder about that, though, because you don't even know about it.
And BTW, 10^3 is a pretty lame way to try to look smart. It is a fairly small round number. You can just say 1000.
You're trying to get pedantic, but you're under-thinking it. If most cows see grass only at the very end of their lives, right before they're slaughtered, then it remains true at any time that most cows have never even seen grass.
But the more important thing is that you try to get pedantic about the literal words, instead of trying to understand the meaning of what was said, and respond to that. Or to put it another way, you can't worry about semantics without worrying about meaning.
That's why each campaign hires software consultants to write them a custom app that they can "trust."
lol Most cows have never even seen grass. Some have, sure. Mostly dairy cows, though.
forking gnucash is silly, that is personal budget software, not resource management.
There are indeed other ways of doing things than buying proprietary software licenses. This idea that we're crippled is absurd.
If your software license works for you, nobody is asking you to switch.
Right, if you read the complaints carefully, they come down to words like "smoothly."
Don't know, don't care. It is probably true. My software has a square jaw and a slight speech impediment. It doesn't bother me.
I grew up eating only home-made whole wheat bread, (raised by "health-food-hippies") and the store bread was so different that it didn't even taste like bread to me... and what I ate didn't taste like bread to my friends! Luckily in my region most of the wheat is high protein, so the local smaller bakeries aren't motivated to use Chorleywood process other than in the "crusty" European-style breads. I can find a good traditional bread, but it takes some work and attention. Obviously for people who buy only the cheapest couple brands, they only get the most processed forms.
I still make a lot of my own bread, and I can go from flour to a finished (unsliced) loaf in three-and-a-half hours, too, but I'm only growing a small amount of yeast for my hippy loaf, or what Europeans might call a "mountain loaf." Difference is that I use a regular bread pan.
Sorry to reply twice, but I wanted to tell a funny short story about my taxes this year.
I decided to use one of the "free" options other than the fillable forms... big mistake! I went through their whole step by baby-step process, in the end provided the exact same information as the real form, in the same order, was asked a question in every place where the instructions instruct me to do one thing or another, and at the very end right before submitting it they pissed me off so bad with their bait-and-switch, click "free" 17 times nonsense that instead of making that last click, I wrote them an angry message demanding they delete my account, and just re-entered the same information into the raw form.
I'll never try to use "tax software" again, even when it's web-based. What a total pain in the ass. Taxes aren't even hard, if that is hard to understand my own code would never run. If I was so rich and trying so hard to avoid paying my taxes as to make it complicated... I'd hire a professional.
Business taxes... if you're used to reading the manual before you do a thing, and you were recording the correct things on a day-to-day basis, then it is the same there are just more instructions to follow. If you can't do it right on your own... you didn't do it right using the software, either. You either have to step through that same decision tree one way or another, or hire somebody else to.
App guy, look up "fiat currency." All you did is trade money for money. You should write a new app, App Money! You can app it wherever apps app, right?
Only works if you don't require any specialty software whatsoever, which is practically nobody. Anything specialized, like CAD tools, EDA tools,[blah blah blah]
Hilarious, some of the most important software I use in my work is the EDA and CAD tools.
What makes you think that people with software freedom don't have software? What makes you think that proprietary software gives you access to something nobody else does?
"Specialized vertical market applications" like Tow Truck 2000, and shit. You don't have to buy that stuff to work in those industries. Software isn't Harry Potter magic spells, that proprietary software isn't a special sauce that enables work in those industries; it is just one way to organize your workflow.
The examples where you really need special software are rare; they certainly don't include EDA or CAD. But if I wanted to be in the business of selling weather forecasts, I'd need specific software because humans can't predict the weather and there are very few engineers working in that field. Anything engineering-related, of course, has FLOSS alternatives already, and generally can be done without even using computers.
Like in the 90s when people told us we "had to" have Microsoft Office, and kept repeating it even after we pointed out that we use something else... successfully. Or when people insist you "have to" use an IDE to write code, because more people use them than don't.
If I was in a field where everybody is totally locked in to proprietary crap software in the whole "specialized vertical market," then I'd be in the perfect position to totally disrupt that market by offering a FLOSS alternative. That is the business reality in the real world; choices exist.
[same as before computers but]... on a computer.
They don't have a special doohickey that enables those things. Though spreadsheets are pretty awesome compared to a ledger and a calculator.