Feed TurboTax's electronic filing overloads at the last minute (com.com)
Blog: Intuit confirmed on Tuesday evening that a deluge of last-minute filing had overloaded the electronic filing system used in its...
Submission + - Healthcare IT Hurting at Kaiser Permanente
Justen writes: "The front page of this morning's Los Angeles Times has a story investigating the disaster of HealthConnect, "Kaiser Permanente's $4-billion effort to computerize the medical records of its 8.6 million members." The system "has encountered repeated technical problems, leading to potentially dangerous incidents... At times, doctors and medical staff at the nation's largest nonprofit health maintenance organization haven't had access to crucial patient information, and system outages have led to delays in emergency room care... Other problems have included malfunctioning bedside scanners meant to ensure that patients receive the correct medication... A 772-page problem report covering Feb. 27 through Nov. 5 of last year showed nearly two dozen reported instances in which Health Connect's unreliability may have risked patient safety." Amidst all the problems, "Kaiser recently demanded...a rate cut from its technology vendors, and some IT employees [were forced] took as long as a week off without pay." Says one former IT manager: "This is the worst [technology] project I have seen in my 25 years in the business.""
Submission + - Flash: The End of Adobe [Acrobat] Reader?
ThinkComp writes: "As hatred for Adobe Acrobat continues to grow, the fact remains that the Portable Document Format is a useful and nearly universal file format with few competitors in the same league. Meanwhile, the client software needed to use the format continues to expand in size and slow down, especially as a browser plug-in. In the interest of faster load times, fewer ads, and smaller file sizes, we've created a Flash-based PDF viewer that you can embed in web sites, including blogs. It's bare-bones, but given what YouTube's Flash-based player eventually did for on-line video, could this mean the beginning of the end for clunky software like Adobe [Acrobat] Reader 8.0?"
Submission + - How to Get a Book Published, Internet-Style
ThinkComp writes: "My startup has made a web-based tool that makes it easier to reach literary agents. As anyone who's written a book manuscript knows, the process is incredibly painful, it takes forever, and traditionally, everything has to be done via U.S. Mail at considerable expense to the author. While some agents might want pages 1-50, others might only want Chapter 3. Almost a decade after the dot-com bubble, the publishing industry is finally getting a taste of what life can be like with the internet."
