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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.

Books

Book Review: Testing Cloud Services: How To Test SaaS, PaaS & IaaS 45

benrothke writes "David Mitchell Smith wrote in the Gartner report Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing last year that while clearly maturing and beyond the peak of inflated expectations, cloud computing continues to be one of the most hyped subjects in IT. The report is far from perfect, but it is accurate in the sense that while cloud computing is indeed ready for prime time, the hype with it ensures that too many firms will be using it with too much hype, and not enough reality and detailed requirements. While there have been many books written about the various aspects of cloud computing, Testing Cloud Services: How to Test SaaS, PaaS & IaaS is the first that enables the reader to successfully make the transition from hype to actuality from a testing and scalability perspective." Read on for the rest of Ben's review.
Transportation

Flying Bicycle Is Real, Takes First Flight 123

colinneagle writes "Bringing us one step closer to the hover-boards and flying cars that mid-20th century pop culture had predicted we would have by the year 2000, three Czech companies have come together to develop a functional flying bicycle. Designed by Technodat, Evektor, and Duratec, the flying bicycle weighs a little more than 187 lbs and limits its takeoff weight to about 350 lbs, according to a report from Polish bicycle news site Biketrendy. The report claims the bicycle, which is still just a prototype, is capable of staying in the air for about six minutes, although the companies working on the project hope to extend that to 50 minutes and top speeds of about 30 miles per hour. Currently, the fans propelling the bicycle are powered by a 50Ah battery."

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.

Earth

$1 Billion Mission To Reach the Earth's Mantle 267

black6host writes "Humans have reached the moon and are planning to return samples from Mars, but when it comes to exploring the land deep beneath our feet, we have only scratched the surface of our planet. This may be about to change with a $1 billion mission to drill 6 km (3.7 miles) beneath the seafloor to reach the Earth's mantle — a 3000 km-thick layer of slowly deforming rock between the crust and the core which makes up the majority of our planet — and bring back the first ever fresh samples."
The Internet

.xxx Registrar To Launch Pr0n Search Engine 149

angry tapir writes "The company behind the .xxx top-level domain plans to launch a search engine in an effort to drive more traffic to .xxx websites and give pornography fans a more satisfying search experience. ICM Registry, which operates the 9-month-old .xxx TLD, is scheduled to launch Search.xxx this week, said Stuart Lawley, ICM's CEO. The new search engine will give users a more streamlined searching process, help protect them from viruses and malware and help guard their privacy, he said. The search engine has cataloged 21 million webpages from .xxx sites, he said. 'It's porn, only porn, all porn,' he said. 'There's as much porn there as anyone would need, I'd imagine.'"

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.

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