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Comment Used the online version once and never again (Score 1) 237

I have used TaxCut for years and have had very few issues with it. The one year I tried the online variant of it was horrible. There was one particularly nasty bug that caused my return to be rejected twice before I had to go over the print out with a fine tooth comb. I found they were inserting a bogus figure into one of the fields instead of leaving it blank. I finally was able to work around the system to get the issue fixed, but it caused way more work and aggravation than it should have. I did try calling their "help" line, but the person on the other end was completely useless.

Comment Limited 3rd party support? (Score 1) 435

I use K9 on my older Android phone and it works great with my Gmail accounts. I use Thunderbird at home and it also works just as well. I have no issues with the way Gmail "Labels" messages. K9 and Thunderbird treat them as folders and shows me the messages I have flagged.

Comment Houston had Red Light Cameras (Score 1) 507

The City of Houston was doing this crap. Yellows that were so short there was no way to stop or you'd be in the middle of the intersection. A petition got the cameras on the ballot and they were defeated. The City was whining about safety, but there were several studies done at intersections in the city by independent auditors that found rear end accidents increased due to the shortened yellows and the RL cameras. From what I read the city was pulling in $2 - $3 million per year on the fines.

Comment Running my PI as an Asterisk PBX (Score 1) 212

Got my PI Monday and got it setup with Asterisk 11 and FreePBX 3 beta. The site raspberry-asterisk.org has a prebuilt image and from there you can easily update to the latest versions. This is going to be mainly for testing/playing at home, but I may deploy one to setup a small 4 DID/10 extenstion FreePBX install to supplement an old POTS pbx.

Submission + - How an Amazon engineer's slip-up started a 20-hour Netflix cock-up (theregister.co.uk)

iComp writes: "An Amazon engineer hit the wrong button on Christmas Eve, deleting critical data in its load balancers and ultimately knackering vid streaming biz Netflix for 20 hours.

The Netflix outage hit customers in the US, Canada and Latin America on 24 December, particularly those using games consoles and mobiles to watch films, while desktop Mac and PC users suffered time-outs and delays. A mistake at Netflix's hoster — Amazon Web Services — caused the downtime and Amazon's developer team worked through the night into Christmas morning to get the problems fixed by 8am 25 December."

Comment Off line storage (Score 5, Informative) 184

"Amazon is also facing criticism right now for allegedly shutting down a woman's account and remotely wiping her Kindle, then refusing to provide information about why it did so."

This is the exact reason why I strip the DRM from every Kindle book I buy and then store them in my own offline repository. Should Amazon ever decide to wipe my account I'll still have the books I purchased. The other advantage is I can use any e-reader I want w/o being locked to a Kindle.

Comment If you want to read... (Score 1) 415

If you want to read then get an e-reader. I have a Kindle for reading, not surfing the web, not checking email, etc. If I want to do something else besides read I pull out my phone or use my laptop. When reading with a tablet you'll end up getting distracted by new emails, something that pops into your head and you want to quickly look it up, but in reality you end up doing everything else except reading. With an e-reader you can focus on the book your reading and keep the distractions to a minimum.

Comment What I want... (Score 1) 660

A device with a 4" - 4.2" display, decent dual/quad core processor running around 1.2 - 1.5 Ghz, and the ability to obtain root on the device if I choose. I have no need to carry around a beast of a deivce with a 5" display or a device that so locked down that I can't unlock features the phone has, but the carrier decided to disable.

Comment It's called Time... (Score 2) 1134

I use the command line to save time.

Example, to transfer FSMO roles there are three places in the GUI that you have to go to vs via the command line I can easily execute the command to transfer roles and after every command I get the response to verify it successfully completed.

Another example, I have a PowerShell script and a batch script to install windows hotfixes on standalone non-internet connected machines in the field. I can install 100+ hotfixes onto a new station in 20 mins or so. Also the script queries the system for installed hotfixes and skips them if they are already installed which equates into a major time savings. Try doing that via the GUI and see how far you would get w/o accidently rebooting or just giving up cause it takes so long.

Comment Re:You can't rebroadcast Public airwaves (Score 1) 250

Over the years the FCC has granted to local stations the right to charge for their product. Cable companies pay about 1 cent per station (per household)* for the rights to rebroadcast local stations over their wires. This "Aereo" service may have to abide by the same rules.

*

Sounds fair to me, if they are sending 10 stations then they pay .10 cents per user to the content provider.

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