Seconding TaxAct. Cheapest and best. Does not phone home, as far as I know. It's the only reason I still have to have a virtualbox Windows taking up space on my drive.
I've been looking for a reliable, complete FOSS alternative for years. I think, as others have said, it doesn't exist because nobody (me included if I knew how!) would do that kind of tedium for free.
Interesting. I'm a biologist, and had no idea that the filesystem thingy was down to Bitfrost. I'm very impressed with the kinds of things Bitfrost let people do. Just for starters, preventing every early OLPC from winding up on the black market. It would have been nice if they could have wrapped that around a familiar-looking filesystem that was more than a jumble of recently accessed stuff.
I own one of the first OLPCs. The problem isn't Linux. (I hate to think of Win XP running in 256MB system, 1GB storage.) The problem is the whole philosophy of "it's not a computer, it's an education tool." (Or however they put it.)
No. A computer is whatever the user wants it to be. If you try to make that difficult, it'll fail sooner or later. The less money behind it, the sooner.
The educational philosophy they were pushing works for some subjects, some of the time. But they should have made it easy to use the OLPCs any way people wanted much earlier. It was only some time last year that a simple desktop switcher (sugar - gnome) was included with the basic OS. For me, at least, not having an ordinary filesystem available was a showstopper. I'd been dualbooting debian since the beginning, but all the trial and error to accomplish that isn't something a lot of teachers would do. But initially, for the first four years!, there was a lot of resistance to just giving people a familiar interface.
Then there were the hardware limitations. Even for Linux, at least the Fedora they're using, 256MB is barely enough to breathe. The keyboard takes a lot of getting used to. I'm not sure they ever got the expanded touchpad working.
So, like I said, nice idea, but they should have put more effort into improving hardware, providing the software people want, better distribution so they had a larger community of enthusiasts to write code for the project and help on (better organized!) forums, and kept their goofy educational philosophy for the people who wanted it.
I'm a biologist and I watched the whole evolution of PCR and the mad scramble to patent every bit of human DNA with stunned disbelief. Did the legal beagles not understand that they were allowing the equivalent of patenting somebody else's books in a library?
Apparently, they didn't.
But, after a generation or so, and a festering swamp of patents, the truth seems to be dawning on them. I shall watch our future progress with considerable interest.
If you're comfortable with Debian, just go for straight Debian. A nice stable outfit who does a good job of respecting the user's time.
If regular Debian is a bit hard, like it was for noobie me, then Linux Mint Debian (lmde, different from Linux Mint Ubuntu) is a great alternative. So far, nobody trying to shove idiotic UIs down my throat that might be the bees knees on smartphones, but I'm using a core i7 with a big screen, thank you very much.
(About that, by the way. These aren't stone adzes or something. We're talking about computers with plenty of memory. Why aren't there several UIs the user can choose from, based on what works for their platform? I mean, really. Why not? I gather that's what KDE is aiming for, but they need to hurry up and get there. They seem to be our only advanced GUI hope right now.)
Google, Amazon, the majority of servers, the list could go on forever, all wouldn't exist without linux. Apple strapped on the rocket engine known as BSD, but I'd be surprised if BSD is being paid by them. That doesn't seem like Apple's style.
Linux is adding unmeasurable value. All it needs is a different model of how creativity is rewarded.
We should be censusing usage and paying creators. The more your product was used or enjoyed, the more you'd get paid. In that world, linux wouldn't have a thing to worry about. (And, yeah, I know the nitty gritty of censusing and paying out is really complicated and it could never work perfectly. But it could work well enough to funnel a lot more of the rewards to the actual coders, writers, artists, musicians, than the few measly percent the current system does.)
It's called user control and privacy. 99.95% of people don't care about that too much, but every Megaupload that happens inches people a bit closer to realizing that no control is maybe not all that free.
It's interesting that the Department of Defense in the US is using more and more open source software, even while lots of people are saying "My data? Who cares?" Once control is worth something to you, there's no real alternative, ultimately, to FOSS. Or writing your own custom software.
Exactly! And it's not even difficult to make the chain of links explicit or to give people the environment they want. There's software for the first one, which should just be standard and automatic everywhere. And there's also a solution for the second issue. Slashdot has been using it for years. Give people the option to see different levels of grossness. If I want my world squeaky clean, I have my settings at "5." Or, at the other end, at "0." No censorship involved, and yet people can control at least that part of their own world.
Of course, that would require the big 4 browsers and the big search engines to cooperate in open source, transparent rating/moderation schemes, and everyone who puts anything on the web to be at least vaguely honest in their initial self-rating for where they fit in the scheme of things. And, yeah, I know, what are the chances of that?
"I used to work for a large magazine and their printing and postage costs are insane."
Okay. OT, I know, but I've figured this was the case. So why aren't their non-print subscription costs insanely less? I don't get it. And I don't see something else making up the difference. Server costs? Not bloody likely. Super-highly paid web designers? Yeah, right.
Reduce the friction. Get rid of it entirely. Then count the usage levels of any given work. (Yeah, yeah, I know That's not simple, but it would be a whole lot more straightforward than the current mess.) Then pay the artists / authors / coders / whatever based on how much their work is used or enjoyed.
Then the reduced friction would be in everyone's interest, both the users' and the creators'.
Of course, the publishers would still go fairly extinct. Is that a problem?
I mean how refreshing would it have been for them to say "We make money from ads and searches and Mozilla brings us more revenue, what's to understand?' and left it at that?
Seconded, thirded, fourthed. Bloody Mobius-stripped! If MSFT-Bing wasn't around to snap at GOOG's heels, the world's internet advertising agency would love to make Firefox die. If most traffic went through Chrome, they could finally get serious with tracking. And when the/. crowd cried foul it wouldn't matter. There'd be nowhere else to go.
You know, in the high and far off times, toasters used to be two panels of heating elements and two covers with hinges at the bottom. You kept it on the table. Bread went in, toasted on one side while you ate other things or sipped coffee. You were right there, so very easy to keep an eye on it. Actually, a nose. You could smell the nice toasty aroma when it was time to flip the bread and start the other side. Never any problems. Even better than a grill (unless you're talking about one of those electric, tabletop things). My grandmother had one those toasters, and if I saw one at a garage sale, I'd probably pay whatever they wanted for it.
Selecting options on install, with a default to block everything, would be the way I'd want them to go too. My comment a bit earlier was just to say that you couldn't really call it loss of control when you have the option to customize a complete block. More inconvenient, but not less control.
I guess part of it is that I feel such a deep debt to Adblock for making the web usable this last decade that I'm willing to cut them a lot of slack.
Let me tell you the story of me and my $35 toaster. You know the old joke about "they can land someone on the Moon, but they can't make a toaster that doesn't burn the bread"? It's totally true. After many years, I shouted, "Enough!"
I researched toasters. (Yeah, I know. I must not have enough to do.) After a couple of hours crawling all over everywhere, reading negative reviews first, evaluating positive ones for whether there was anything interesting or useful said, etc., etc., etc., I settled on one. Kind of expensive, but you have to remember I was really sick of burned toast.
And, damn if the thing doesn't work! So, if you're crazy enough, you can actually make the system function (sometimes). I agree that most people aren't going to or don't do any of that. But if I'd driven to the mall and picked from the available, normal, bread-burning toasters, that would have taken a couple of hours, too. And cost gas money.
Come on, now. You merely have to go into options and select total block. That strikes me as "having control." It's just a teensy bit less convenient. So long as they don't run away with it, and wind up with an add-on that requires an hour of customizing, I kinda want to say, "Get over it."
Re:HA! that's a condescending comment!
on
The Condescending UI
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Exactly. And a commenter who shows so little understanding of what condescension is doesn't inspire me to believe that they'd have a clue about which UIs condescend.
Just for the record, I'm a user who completely agrees with the post. Make it easy for me to customize the UI to suit my workflow = Not Condescending. Shove big shiny buttons at me that mean my work takes more clicks to accomplish = Condescending. (Why, yes, I do hate Unity. Why do you ask?)
Seriously. The OP may want to climb into comments and explain his point. What takes more time to do? What takes less (if anything)? How would it be if you didn't have the extra keyboard? That seems to me to make it a de facto laptop, so you're not really using a "tablet as your primary computer." Or do you not use the keyboard much? Is it more or less convenient to have a separate keyboard? Etc., etc., etc.
Nice to see them trying to bring G3 back to the usability levels of G2. They have a ways to go, but hey, at least they started. The more usable desktops we have to choose from, the better.
Actually, no. EULAs, TOS, whatever, which contravene actual laws, are invalid. You couldn't, for instance, bury a clause in a sale contract stipulating that by signing the buyer had agreed to be your slave. Or, you could, but it wouldn't hold up in court.
And that's the problem. Very few of us have the money, energy, or time to fight all the bullshit contracts we have to sign. So they haven't (yet) been thrown out of court. That doesn't change the fact that they're garbage.
I have an N900, mainly because I wanted a handheld computer, not a smartphone. If your requirements are light on the phone-iness of it all, then I recommend the N900 highly. I have all my work, music, etc, synced via bluetooth from my laptop. If I'm stuck for a few hours at an airport or somewhere, it's never a problem. It hops onto wifi networks seamlessly. I use it mainly as a voip phone over wifi, but it switches seamlessly to your cell carrier when wifi is out of range. So my phone bill is about $8 per month. And, afaik, no tracking, marketing, harvesting garbage at all. As somebody else said about Win phones, two or three people have N900s in the US, so no malware problems either.
Slashdot Mirror
Seconding TaxAct. Cheapest and best. Does not phone home, as far as I know. It's the only reason I still have to have a virtualbox Windows taking up space on my drive.
I've been looking for a reliable, complete FOSS alternative for years. I think, as others have said, it doesn't exist because nobody (me included if I knew how!) would do that kind of tedium for free.
Interesting. I'm a biologist, and had no idea that the filesystem thingy was down to Bitfrost. I'm very impressed with the kinds of things Bitfrost let people do. Just for starters, preventing every early OLPC from winding up on the black market. It would have been nice if they could have wrapped that around a familiar-looking filesystem that was more than a jumble of recently accessed stuff.
I own one of the first OLPCs. The problem isn't Linux. (I hate to think of Win XP running in 256MB system, 1GB storage.) The problem is the whole philosophy of "it's not a computer, it's an education tool." (Or however they put it.)
No. A computer is whatever the user wants it to be. If you try to make that difficult, it'll fail sooner or later. The less money behind it, the sooner.
The educational philosophy they were pushing works for some subjects, some of the time. But they should have made it easy to use the OLPCs any way people wanted much earlier. It was only some time last year that a simple desktop switcher (sugar - gnome) was included with the basic OS. For me, at least, not having an ordinary filesystem available was a showstopper. I'd been dualbooting debian since the beginning, but all the trial and error to accomplish that isn't something a lot of teachers would do. But initially, for the first four years!, there was a lot of resistance to just giving people a familiar interface.
Then there were the hardware limitations. Even for Linux, at least the Fedora they're using, 256MB is barely enough to breathe. The keyboard takes a lot of getting used to. I'm not sure they ever got the expanded touchpad working.
So, like I said, nice idea, but they should have put more effort into improving hardware, providing the software people want, better distribution so they had a larger community of enthusiasts to write code for the project and help on (better organized!) forums, and kept their goofy educational philosophy for the people who wanted it.
I'm a biologist and I watched the whole evolution of PCR and the mad scramble to patent every bit of human DNA with stunned disbelief. Did the legal beagles not understand that they were allowing the equivalent of patenting somebody else's books in a library?
Apparently, they didn't.
But, after a generation or so, and a festering swamp of patents, the truth seems to be dawning on them. I shall watch our future progress with considerable interest.
If you're comfortable with Debian, just go for straight Debian. A nice stable outfit who does a good job of respecting the user's time.
If regular Debian is a bit hard, like it was for noobie me, then Linux Mint Debian (lmde, different from Linux Mint Ubuntu) is a great alternative. So far, nobody trying to shove idiotic UIs down my throat that might be the bees knees on smartphones, but I'm using a core i7 with a big screen, thank you very much.
(About that, by the way. These aren't stone adzes or something. We're talking about computers with plenty of memory. Why aren't there several UIs the user can choose from, based on what works for their platform? I mean, really. Why not? I gather that's what KDE is aiming for, but they need to hurry up and get there. They seem to be our only advanced GUI hope right now.)
Google, Amazon, the majority of servers, the list could go on forever, all wouldn't exist without linux. Apple strapped on the rocket engine known as BSD, but I'd be surprised if BSD is being paid by them. That doesn't seem like Apple's style.
Linux is adding unmeasurable value. All it needs is a different model of how creativity is rewarded.
We should be censusing usage and paying creators. The more your product was used or enjoyed, the more you'd get paid. In that world, linux wouldn't have a thing to worry about. (And, yeah, I know the nitty gritty of censusing and paying out is really complicated and it could never work perfectly. But it could work well enough to funnel a lot more of the rewards to the actual coders, writers, artists, musicians, than the few measly percent the current system does.)
It's called user control and privacy. 99.95% of people don't care about that too much, but every Megaupload that happens inches people a bit closer to realizing that no control is maybe not all that free.
It's interesting that the Department of Defense in the US is using more and more open source software, even while lots of people are saying "My data? Who cares?" Once control is worth something to you, there's no real alternative, ultimately, to FOSS. Or writing your own custom software.
Not that your main point is wrong... but you talk as if no geeks are women. That's obnoxious. People are self-centered, y'know?
Exactly! And it's not even difficult to make the chain of links explicit or to give people the environment they want. There's software for the first one, which should just be standard and automatic everywhere. And there's also a solution for the second issue. Slashdot has been using it for years. Give people the option to see different levels of grossness. If I want my world squeaky clean, I have my settings at "5." Or, at the other end, at "0." No censorship involved, and yet people can control at least that part of their own world.
Of course, that would require the big 4 browsers and the big search engines to cooperate in open source, transparent rating/moderation schemes, and everyone who puts anything on the web to be at least vaguely honest in their initial self-rating for where they fit in the scheme of things. And, yeah, I know, what are the chances of that?
(P.S. I know some are free. I'm talking about the ones that aren't.)
"I used to work for a large magazine and their printing and postage costs are insane."
Okay. OT, I know, but I've figured this was the case. So why aren't their non-print subscription costs insanely less? I don't get it. And I don't see something else making up the difference. Server costs? Not bloody likely. Super-highly paid web designers? Yeah, right.
Oh, and get the money to pay the creators from a small fee, 0.1%?, on paper, drives, sdcards, anything used to store and use the works in question.
Reduce the friction. Get rid of it entirely. Then count the usage levels of any given work. (Yeah, yeah, I know That's not simple, but it would be a whole lot more straightforward than the current mess.) Then pay the artists / authors / coders / whatever based on how much their work is used or enjoyed.
Then the reduced friction would be in everyone's interest, both the users' and the creators'.
Of course, the publishers would still go fairly extinct. Is that a problem?
I mean how refreshing would it have been for them to say "We make money from ads and searches and Mozilla brings us more revenue, what's to understand?' and left it at that?
/. crowd cried foul it wouldn't matter. There'd be nowhere else to go.
Seconded, thirded, fourthed. Bloody Mobius-stripped! If MSFT-Bing wasn't around to snap at GOOG's heels, the world's internet advertising agency would love to make Firefox die. If most traffic went through Chrome, they could finally get serious with tracking. And when the
You know, in the high and far off times, toasters used to be two panels of heating elements and two covers with hinges at the bottom. You kept it on the table. Bread went in, toasted on one side while you ate other things or sipped coffee. You were right there, so very easy to keep an eye on it. Actually, a nose. You could smell the nice toasty aroma when it was time to flip the bread and start the other side. Never any problems. Even better than a grill (unless you're talking about one of those electric, tabletop things). My grandmother had one those toasters, and if I saw one at a garage sale, I'd probably pay whatever they wanted for it.
Selecting options on install, with a default to block everything, would be the way I'd want them to go too. My comment a bit earlier was just to say that you couldn't really call it loss of control when you have the option to customize a complete block. More inconvenient, but not less control.
I guess part of it is that I feel such a deep debt to Adblock for making the web usable this last decade that I'm willing to cut them a lot of slack.
Back in Stone Age, we had one, two, many! words. Plenty for Ogg. Who need more?
Let me tell you the story of me and my $35 toaster. You know the old joke about "they can land someone on the Moon, but they can't make a toaster that doesn't burn the bread"? It's totally true. After many years, I shouted, "Enough!"
I researched toasters. (Yeah, I know. I must not have enough to do.) After a couple of hours crawling all over everywhere, reading negative reviews first, evaluating positive ones for whether there was anything interesting or useful said, etc., etc., etc., I settled on one. Kind of expensive, but you have to remember I was really sick of burned toast.
And, damn if the thing doesn't work! So, if you're crazy enough, you can actually make the system function (sometimes). I agree that most people aren't going to or don't do any of that. But if I'd driven to the mall and picked from the available, normal, bread-burning toasters, that would have taken a couple of hours, too. And cost gas money.
Come on, now. You merely have to go into options and select total block. That strikes me as "having control." It's just a teensy bit less convenient. So long as they don't run away with it, and wind up with an add-on that requires an hour of customizing, I kinda want to say, "Get over it."
Exactly. And a commenter who shows so little understanding of what condescension is doesn't inspire me to believe that they'd have a clue about which UIs condescend.
Just for the record, I'm a user who completely agrees with the post. Make it easy for me to customize the UI to suit my workflow = Not Condescending. Shove big shiny buttons at me that mean my work takes more clicks to accomplish = Condescending. (Why, yes, I do hate Unity. Why do you ask?)
Seriously. The OP may want to climb into comments and explain his point. What takes more time to do? What takes less (if anything)? How would it be if you didn't have the extra keyboard? That seems to me to make it a de facto laptop, so you're not really using a "tablet as your primary computer." Or do you not use the keyboard much? Is it more or less convenient to have a separate keyboard? Etc., etc., etc.
Hah. You beat me to it. Exactly what I was going to say.
Nice to see them trying to bring G3 back to the usability levels of G2. They have a ways to go, but hey, at least they started. The more usable desktops we have to choose from, the better.
Actually, no. EULAs, TOS, whatever, which contravene actual laws, are invalid. You couldn't, for instance, bury a clause in a sale contract stipulating that by signing the buyer had agreed to be your slave. Or, you could, but it wouldn't hold up in court.
And that's the problem. Very few of us have the money, energy, or time to fight all the bullshit contracts we have to sign. So they haven't (yet) been thrown out of court. That doesn't change the fact that they're garbage.
I have an N900, mainly because I wanted a handheld computer, not a smartphone. If your requirements are light on the phone-iness of it all, then I recommend the N900 highly. I have all my work, music, etc, synced via bluetooth from my laptop. If I'm stuck for a few hours at an airport or somewhere, it's never a problem. It hops onto wifi networks seamlessly. I use it mainly as a voip phone over wifi, but it switches seamlessly to your cell carrier when wifi is out of range. So my phone bill is about $8 per month. And, afaik, no tracking, marketing, harvesting garbage at all. As somebody else said about Win phones, two or three people have N900s in the US, so no malware problems either.