Adobe - The writing on the wall comes into view

On 09/01/2018 10:41 AM, pyotr filipivich wrote:

[snip]

I've been using TaxAct for many years. This latest version (2017)
will not work if you do not have the latest updated version of
Internet Explorer 11. Deal breaker, and the end of a satisfied
customer.

Does it actually require Internet Explorer? No Firefox, Chrome, or Opera.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"Jesus got stuck in the chimney flue. Jesus got stuck, we don't know
what to do. Now that virgin-born Jew is turning blue, Cause Jesus got
stuck in the flue."

On 09/01/2018 11:02 AM, nospam wrote:

[snip]

nope. it's under *your* control. you can upload/download at any time,
for any reason.

That's a VERY special cloud server. You can download even when the
company went out of business last year and the server has been
disassembled for months, and the hard drives recycled.

it's possible that internet access might be interrupted, however, it's
also possible (and more likely) than the local hard drive fails or is
damaged due to fire/flood/etc.

I find human action (like what can happen with a cloud server) to be
something very different than a natural incident (fire/flood/etc.).
People are different and that doesn't make either position any better or
worse.

Of course whichever ONE is better, both are even better than either.

[snip]

One thing I remember from years ago, is to have at least TWO backups (on
different media). People often don't seem to know that anymore. You
could add an offsite backup (but be sure to consider the restore
process. You don't have a backup if you can't restore).

yep.

And I would add, at least one backup (obviously not always the same one)
offline at ALL times.

it's called the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two different mediums,
with one offsite.

It was more recently that I heard 3-2-1, and cloud backup was a
possibility, but yes.

that's a good starting point, however, the more valuable the data, the
more copies there should be.

Yes. Also, at least one backup that can be restored quickly on a new
hard drive (no software installation first). It's likely when you really
need a backup, it's when you really want to use the PC.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"Jesus got stuck in the chimney flue. Jesus got stuck, we don't know
what to do. Now that virgin-born Jew is turning blue, Cause Jesus got
stuck in the flue."

In article , Mark Lloyd
wrote:

nope. it's under *your* control. you can upload/download at any time,
for any reason.

That's a VERY special cloud server. You can download even when the
company went out of business last year and the server has been
disassembled for months, and the hard drives recycled.

straw man.

amazon is still very much in business, soon to become the second
trillion dollar company, and showing *no* indication whatsoever of
going out of business any time soon. aws is *extremely* reliable.

google, microsoft, apple, dropbox, backblaze, carbonite and many others
aren't about to go out of business either any time soon.

On 9/1/2018 10:31 AM, nospam wrote:
In article , Mayayana
wrote:

Personally I don't get the tax products. As a
self-employed person it would cost me $100 to
have TaxAct do my taxes, at very little cost to
them. Almost all profit. Since it's online they don't
even have to box a CD. Wouldn't it be cheaper to
have a real person at H&R Block?

no.

h&r block charges $125 for a typical return, $350 (and up) for
self-employed and corporate/llc returns:
http://www.taxserviceprices.com/hr-block-prices/

that's less than what a real accountant would charge.

if you do it yourself, it's $111.98 for self-employed.


I do my own taxes. I download the tax forms from the IRS and California
Franchise Tax Board Web sites. These are "fillable" PDF files. Then I
update last year's spreadsheets based on those forms. I copy the
spreadsheet results to the forms. All it costs me is paper, toner, and
postage.

I am also an AARP TaxAide volunteer, doing personal taxes for free at a
local recreation center. Many of the returns I do there are far more
complicated than my own, but my income and taxes are generally higher.

--
David E. Ross
http://www.rossde.com

Too often, Twitter is a source of verbal vomit. Examples include Donald
Trump, Roseanne Barr, and Elon Musk.

"David E. Ross" wrote

| if you do it yourself, it's $111.98 for self-employed.
|
|
| I do my own taxes. I download the tax forms from the IRS and California
| Franchise Tax Board Web sites. These are "fillable" PDF files. Then I
| update last year's spreadsheets based on those forms. I copy the
| spreadsheet results to the forms. All it costs me is paper, toner, and
| postage.
|

That's the same that I do. I didn't get what the
$111.98 was supposed to be.
If you do it every year and your situation doesn't
change a lot then there's not a lot to deal with,
other than adding up the numbers for deductions,
income, etc.

In my experience, people who go to accountants
usually do it for one of two reasons:

1) Because it allows them to cheat without being
under suspicion.

2) They just don't deal with math.

On 09/01/2018 06:53 PM, Wolf K wrote:
On 2018-09-01 18:26, nospam wrote:
In article , Mark Lloyd
wrote:

nope. it's under *your* control. you can upload/download at any time,
for any reason.

That's a VERY special cloud server. You can download even when the
company went out of business last year and the server has been
disassembled for months, and the hard drives recycled.

straw man.

Satire, actually.

Yes.

[...]


--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"Jesus got stuck in the chimney flue. Jesus got stuck, we don't know
what to do. Now that virgin-born Jew is turning blue, Cause Jesus got
stuck in the flue."

"Mayayana" on Sat, 1 Sep 2018 13:08:31 -0400
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
"pyotr filipivich" wrote

| I've been using TaxAct for many years. This latest version (2017)
| will not work if you do not have the latest updated version of
| Internet Explorer 11. Deal breaker, and the end of a satisfied
| customer.

They do say they accept other browsers, though.

Maybe so, but I did not want to fight with the software.

Personally I don't get the tax products. As a
self-employed person it would cost me $100 to
have TaxAct do my taxes, at very little cost to
them. Almost all profit. Since it's online they don't
even have to box a CD. Wouldn't it be cheaper to
have a real person at H&R Block?

I think it usually takes me about 3-4 hours to
get my records together, do the math, and fill out
the forms. Since I have last year to work from
it's not a big job. The worst part is the MA state
forms, which are not editable PDFs! I end up doing
screenshots, opening those in Paint Shop Pro,
using the text tool to fill them out, then putting
them back into the PDF.

That's a pain, but most of the work is stuff
I'd have to do anyway, even if I paid someone
to do my taxes. They'd be charging me $100 just
to do the math and look up possible deductions.


Ten years ago, it made sense. The last couple years - why am I
doing this?
--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?

"Mayayana" on Sat, 1 Sep 2018 21:25:22 -0400
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
"David E. Ross" wrote

| if you do it yourself, it's $111.98 for self-employed.
|
|
| I do my own taxes. I download the tax forms from the IRS and California
| Franchise Tax Board Web sites. These are "fillable" PDF files. Then I
| update last year's spreadsheets based on those forms. I copy the
| spreadsheet results to the forms. All it costs me is paper, toner, and
| postage.
|

That's the same that I do. I didn't get what the
$111.98 was supposed to be.
If you do it every year and your situation doesn't
change a lot then there's not a lot to deal with,
other than adding up the numbers for deductions,
income, etc.

In my experience, people who go to accountants
usually do it for one of two reasons:

1) Because it allows them to cheat without being
under suspicion.

2) They just don't deal with math.

Friend was an "Enrolled IRS agent", meaning they got the IRS
training. So she knew what the IRS was doing, looking for, etc, and
so forth.
Which meant that she knew what was legal, expected and all that.
Do not ask her to fudge the numbers, she was not going to be
associated with any such foolishness.

For most people, you get your w2, the reports from the bank on
your mortgage and interest, and you're done.

It's when you get involved with out of state, out of country,
capital gains, the other "interesting" stuff which requires
accountants and or lawyers, that is when you need a tax accountant who
knows the rules of that game.

--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?

"pyotr filipivich" wrote

| That's a pain, but most of the work is stuff
| I'd have to do anyway, even if I paid someone
| to do my taxes. They'd be charging me $100 just
| to do the math and look up possible deductions.
|
|
| Ten years ago, it made sense. The last couple years - why am I
| doing this?

Especially if you've already done it once.
Unless you've made big changes you should be
able to just check updates and then use last
year's forms for guidance. There used to be more
things that one could deduct, like charitable,
medical, political, etc. These days, and all the
more so in the coming year with Donald's
excellent millionaire adventure tax plan, most
people won't itemize. But I guess if you're
collecting rent from tenants in your property
in Mexico while also paying child support and
investing in solar projects, then you might
need some help.

In article , Mayayana
wrote:


In my experience, people who go to accountants
usually do it for one of two reasons:

1) Because it allows them to cheat without being
under suspicion.

no.

just because an accountant prepared a return doesn't make it immune
from being audited.

also, accountants have *far* too much to risk to deliberately cheat on
a client's tax return.

2) They just don't deal with math.

no. computers do the math.

a key reason is because accountants understand the tax code a lot
better than most people do, which helps avoid costly mistakes, and the
more complex the return is, the bigger chance a non-pro might make a
mistake. they can also make suggestions going forward to reduce your
tax burden in future years.

in other words, it can cost more to *not* use an accountant.

another reason is preparing tax returns is not something most people
enjoy (except for accountants), so by having someone else do it, they
have more time to do something more enjoyable.

On Fri, 31 Aug 2018 22:31:28 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , David E. Ross
wrote:

the difference is that a cloud service will have multiple redundant
copies in their data centers with multiple redundant data centers.

while not impossible (nothing is 100%), the chances that all copies in
all data centers are destroyed and the service itself disappears
without a trace is much less than the chance of your single hard drive
failing, or destroyed to fire or flood, or stolen.

Do you not remember what happened to Megaupload?

Then there was http://fortune.com/2017/03/02/amazon-cloud-outage/

do you not know why it was shut down? it was intended for hosting and
distributing pirated content, not long term storage.

amazon, google, microsoft, apple, dropbox, adobe and other cloud
services aren't going to suddenly disappear without a trace.

some services have shut down, but they've announced it *before* it
happened and gave users ample time to move their data elsewhere.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

Then there was http://fortune.com/2017/03/02/amazon-cloud-outage/

nothing is perfect, and despite the outage, no data was lost.

hard drives can and do fail. good luck if you have seagate or western
digital drives from a few years ago, notably the 1.5 and 3tb
capacities:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-co.../drive-stats-2
016-q1-failure-by-mfg.jpg
https://images.techhive.com/images/a...efailures-1006
42845-large.jpg

nospam wrote:
In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:
Then there was http://fortune.com/2017/03/02/amazon-cloud-outage/

nothing is perfect, and despite the outage, no data was lost.

hard drives can and do fail. good luck if you have seagate or western
digital drives from a few years ago, notably the 1.5 and 3tb
capacities:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-co.../drive-stats-2
016-q1-failure-by-mfg.jpg
https://images.techhive.com/images/a...efailures-1006
42845-large.jpg

My experience is, that modern drives give plenty of
hints, before they die on you. If you were hoping to
scare people, good luck with that.

It's not like back in the Maxtor 40GB days, where the
time from "first click" to "dead" was 24 hours or less.
I lost two of those Maxtor 40GB drives. I was doing
data recovery on one of them, when it croaked right
in front of me.

And it's been a while since one of those "firmware brickage"
events has shown up on hard drives. Those are pretty nasty.

But for wear and tear problems on modern drives, you
can notice things going south on you, before it's too late.
In some cases, there are no signs in SMART, but running
HDTune benchmark tells you all you need to know. (A 50GB
wide "flat spot" in the response curve means "replace me now".)

And how do you know to run HDTune ? Well, you notice that
trivial ops in your OS seem "awfully" slow. And that's when
it's time to bring out HDTune, for a quick test.

Paul

On 2018-09-01, nospam wrote:
the difference is that a cloud service will have multiple redundant
copies in their data centers with multiple redundant data centers.

The so-called "cloud" is really marketing babble for a return to the
way we did computing 40-50 years ago, where you had terminals accessing
remote servers where data and applications were actually stored.

When you rely on the "cloud" you lose control of your data. You don't
know where it is being kept, how it is being backed up, how many copies
there are, where it will be copied to, who will have access to it under
what conditions, or even if you will have access to it at any specific
point in the future. I'm just not willing to trust Microsoft, Google, etc.
with my stuff.

--
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On 9/1/2018 9:34 PM, Roger Blake wrote:

When you rely on the "cloud" you lose control of your data. You don't
know where it is being kept, how it is being backed up, how many
copies there are, where it will be copied to, who will have access to
it under what conditions, or even if you will have access to it at
any specific point in the future. I'm just not willing to trust
Microsoft, Google, etc. with my stuff.

I use the cloud (Google Drive) as a backup for my local files. That way
if I lose them in some calamity (such as a house fire) they can be
replaced. And likewise in the unlikely event that the cloud fails I
still have my local files. I also encrypt my sensitive files in case
some Google employee should decide to pick me out of the other hundreds
of millions of customers to spy on...