Category Archives: CCNA Certification

Online Tax Prep Services

It’s that time of year again. Tax time. A few of your documents may still be straggling in, but chances are you’ve at least got your W-2s, and you’ve either got all the receipts you’re going to need for your deductions or you’re going to wing anyways. So why not get to work now? I suppose you could wait until Sunday to get started, but who needs all that last-minute pressure? It’s never been simpler to get started—you don’t even have to schlep down to the electronics store to buy a copy of the software anymore, or, worse, spend time haunting a depressing tax center waiting room. As long as you’ve got access to a browser, you can do your taxes without ever leaving home. Unless you’ve got a horribly complex return or have an issue with exposing your financials over the Internet, doing your taxes online is the simplest way to go about it. Accordingly, we’ve reviewed the best online tax packages for tax year 2010.



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All the major tax prep players have had Web-based versions for years, and all look and work like their desktop counterparts, letting you save partially finished returns and finish them in multiple sessions. It’s convenient, and the sites remember your data from year to year. Even if your local copy gets hosed, you’ve got a copy on the tax-prep site. And there’s a good chance much of your basic data will carry over from year to year, giving you a headstart on the process.

Once you’ve chosen a tax-prep package, you’ll need to decide which of the many versions of that company’s service to use—the free 1040EZ version (generally you still have to pay to e-file for your state taxes at least), or the high-end SMB version, or something in between. You’ll have to do a little research to make sure you get the right forms, for, say, your small business’ income. But don’t assume that you need the full-on ultimate premium premier version—with the exception of extra forms (and occasionally some higher-end help functionality) they’re pretty much the same as the freebies, in terms of function and interface and so on. Don’t overpay. If price is the determining factor for you, definitely check out TaxACT—even its high-end versions are dirt cheap.

I won’t tell you that any of these online tax services can make tax time enjoyable, but the best of them can at least make the process relatively quick and painless.

Note that the thumbnail descriptions below link to our full reviews of the major players in the tax-prep space. Click through to read the full reviews by tax expert Kathy Yakal.

CompleteTax OnlineCompleteTax Online

CompleteTax, a service of global financial services provider CCH, has some of the best guidance available on tax preparation sites. It also does a good job of exploring tax topics, and is offering free Premium versions to select populations for 2010.

H&R Block At Home PremiumH&R Block At Home Premium

H&R Block At Home Premium Online gives TurboTax a run for its money every year. Premium’s Best of Both option provides beginning-to-end support that no one else has ever offered, at a reasonable price.

TaxSlayer.com Premium EditionTaxSlayer.com Premium Edition

TaxSlayer.com’s parent company has been in the tax preparation business for over 40 years, and its online offering is a capable 1040-tamer. But the site could use some improvement in the areas of navigation and help.

TaxACT Online Ultimate BundleTaxACT Online Ultimate Bundle

TaxACT is the best buy available for the 2010 tax filing year. It supports all e-filable IRS forms, walks the user easily and quickly through the 1040, and offers unlimited professional help for only $7.95 extra.

TurboTax logoTurboTax Premier Online Edition
Editors
TurboTax remains king of the hill. Though it has stiff competition, its combination of financial topics, guidance, navigational tools, and interface excellence make it the best choice for 2010 taxes.

Evolve Maestro Tablet triple-boots Android, MeeGo, Windows 7, Gives upto 16h of Battery backup

Can’t decide which tablet you should go for? Get the one that boots all 3 popular Tablet OSes.

Evolve III Maestro has built world’s first tablet that Triple boots Android, Windows 7 and MeeGo. The tablet has a 1.83GHz Atom N475 DualCore CPU based on OakTrail processor.

 

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With Windows 7, you would be able to attain 8 hours of battery & 16hours of battery with Android, not bad for a Tablet that weighs less than 2 pounds.

The tablet features a large 10.1-inch 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, up to 32GB of solid state storage, 3G and 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and 2 USB ports.

What Evolve Three hopes will make this device stand out is the fact that it’ll ship with Android, MeeGo and Windows 7 out of the box. Although a custom layer for Windows was in the works – imagine a mash-up of Windows Phone 7 and Android – it was MeeGo that had the developers really excited. A virtualised version was running on the device, and while the combo of pre-release software and hardware were still a little rough around the edges, it certainly seemed like it would make for a finger friendly consumption focussed interface.

The device is set for launch in Q2 2011 and at a price of $500, it could be a steal.

Unfortunately, there’ll be no quick way to switch between the different operating environments.

Stay tuned for more  on Windows Phone, Android, iPhone, Programming and Tech news via @taranfx on Twitter or:

Prevent, Fix Windows Explorer Crashes

Windows 7 has sold more than 30 Million copies, as per Microsoft. Its evident that it had been a big success bringing great improvements over windows XP.

Glitches would never go away till it’s a software. And they can be annoying at times, but there are ways you can minimize the annoyances and prevent havocs. One such problem is with Windows Explorer who like to act weird with its “Windows Explorer has stopped responding” “Windows explorer has misbehaved and needs to be closed”, blah blah.

 

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You can always force close it but The Explorer process runs a lot of important things in Windows, and when it crashes, it can really slow you down.

But there is a solution to minimize the damage by sandboxing its process, so that when next time one crashes, others don’t in the fission.

The Solution to windows Explorer crashes

Windows Folder options actually let you create a separate process for the taskbar and desktop from the other open Explorer windows in two different explorer.exe processes (that you see in task manager). This comes handy when one of them crashes.

HowTo: Go to any Windows Explorer (say my computer), Alt+T  > Tools > Folder Options > View > “Launch Folder Windows in a Separate Process”.

windows-7-explorer-crash

If you look more closely, its something that powers Google Chrome browser, new process for every Tab. Instead, there are just two processes. Of course it would be slightly more CPU intensive, but that’s definitely worth it.

Control Windows 7 with Kinect

Xbox Kinect is the ultimate hack machine, and that’s it the most popular gadget of the year 2010. Kinect has often been hacked to work with a large number of hobby electronics to attain Gesture based control for systems. It has been hacked to control Widnows  7 PC a number of times, but it was never done and sold like a regular software bundle.

 

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Win&I is the first fully useful commercial software that let’s you control your windows 7 PC with a Kinect controller using gestures alone.

You can control Windows 7 and thousands of applications with this natural user interface. WIN&I software replaces the computer mouse by tracking simple gestures from users up to several meters from the screen using the power of the Kinect depth-sensor.

You just have to Connect your Kinect with your PC and run the WIN&I control session to control windows 7, And leave the rest for Kinect to manipulate.

Android tablet on the cheap: Acer Iconia A500 is the XOOM “Light”

Acer’s Iconia A500 tablet features the same exact hardware specifications as Motorola’s XOOM, but with half the flash storage and $150 cheaper.

Back in early March, I proposed that Motorola create a new SKU for their XOOM tablet with a slightly reduced feature set, which I tentatively called the “XOOM Light”.

 

 



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If you don’t remember the piece, here’s the crux of the argument:

If iSuppli’s BOM is to be believed to be within striking range of actual component costs, then Motorola can shave anywhere between 50 and 60 dollars off their manufacturing cost on the XOOM by slicing the flash storage in half to 16GB and going with less expensive camera parts, putting it closer on par with Apple’s iPad 2. This would allow the XOOM to retail for about $50-$80 less than the entry-level iPad 2, depending on how close the company wants to cut their margins.

The only way XOOM is going to be a repeat hit for Motorola Mobility in the same way the Droid was for their handset business is to undercut the iPad 2 on price. With a lower price and a similar feature set to the iPad 2, a large segment of consumers might be willing to overlook some of the shortcomings on Android 3’s current tablet app gap.

While this plea seems to be falling on deaf ears at Motorola, apparently this idea resonated with one of its competitors, the Taiwanese-based PC giant Acer, Inc.

Today the company along with channel partner Best Buy announced pre-orders for its Android 3-based iPad competitor, the Iconia A500, which has nearly identical specifications to the Wi-Fi only version of the Motorola XOOM.

See: Motorola XOOM Specifications

See: Acer Iconia A500 Specifications

The only significant difference? 16GB of flash memory instead of 32GB which lines up with the entry-level Wi-Fi iPad quite nicely. At $450.00, the 10.1″ tablet device costs $50 less than the entry-level iPad 2, and is $140-$150 less than the XOOM.

It seems that Acer didn’t even need to sacrifice the camera capabilities to make up for component costs on the BOM in order to compete with the iPad 2. It also has identically-specced 2MP front-facing and 5MP, LED flash rear-facing cameras as the XOOM.

In addition to identical SoC and PoP, memory, RAM, GPU, screen, cameras and ports, the device is also the same thickness of the XOOM, at 12.9mm, roughly half an inch.

Note to all Android and other would-be tablet manufacturers: The bar for 10.1″ full size, 16GB devices that are not carrier locked has now been lowered to $450.00. That means anything in the tablet market that is not Apple needs to cost this much or less, with similar specifications.

Oh and HP, regarding your WebOS 3 TouchPad, I’m also talking to you.

Today I pre-ordered one of the Iconia A500 devices, sight unseen. If it’s anywhere near as good a device as the XOOM as far as build quality is concerned, I’m willing to put up with some of the current shortcomings in Android 3 in order to keep a test Honeycomb device in house.

I’m not advocating that most consumers look at this device in lieu of the superior application ecosystem on the iPad 2, but this price point was enough for me to take action to meet my immediate requirements. For the same reason, Android developers will probably jump at the opportunity to buy one of these devices as well.

The question now remains of how Android 3 devices can actually differentiate at the $450.00 price point, and if it’s even possible to lower that price bar any further. I think the price bar can be lowered, but there’s only one company who I believe can accomplish this: Amazon.

As I mentioned in my November 2010 piece “Kindle’s Secret Sibling: Amazon’s Android Tablet” it is my belief that the online retailer and bookseller has a definitive plan to release such a device.

What the exact specs for this device are is left to the imagination and may be pure speculation, but certainly if you eliminate the need for Google licensing of the Android OS and the Android Market along with Google’s apps, replacing them with Amazon monetizing equivalents, the price of a similarly-specced tablet could easily be reduced another $50-$80.

An Amazon Android tablet using the Open Source, unlicensed version of Honeycomb, combined with Amazon Appstore for Android,  Kindle for Android, the Amazon MP3 service as well as Amazon Video and Amazon Cloud Player makes for a near-complete tablet OS and application stack, which would allow the company to monetize their properties on the device and take the “Give away the razor but sell the blades” approach.

All of this is dependent, of course, on Google actually releasing the source code to Honeycomb outside of their approved vendors list, a delay which currently has the Open Source community absolutely livid.

The only thing that would actually be missing from such a theoretical device is a native Android mail client to talk to GMail, Hotmail and other services including corporate Exchange email, along with the appropriate calendar sync services, mapping and integrated search engine apps.

Presumably the missing pieces could be coded in-house by Amazon, or purchased/licensed from a 3rd-party. I could certainly see Amazon partnering with someone like Microsoft to provide Bing search and mapping in lieu of Google, as well as a full license of Activesync and native Exchange client.

Whatever the outcome, it’s clear that Acer has just brought prices for iPad 2 competitors down to much more realistic and acceptable levels. Whether it will plunge any further in the immediate future remains to be seen.

Has Acer re-defined the pricing for the full-sized Android tablet space? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

Once upon a time there was Ustream. Then came YouTube Live

YouTube has broadcast several live events in the past, but, as they noted on the official YouTube blog, they’ve all been “one-offs”. Internet users interested in streaming live video relied on Ustream and other similar services, while larger broadcasters streamed video independently. YouTube, as one of the most popular sites on the Internet, was essentially an asynchronous tool for Lady Gaga and cute cat owners.

 

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Today, however, Google announced that YouTube would become a live broadcasting platform:

Today we’re announcing the initial roll out of YouTube Live, which will integrate live streaming capabilities and discovery tools directly into the YouTube platform for the first time. This begins with a new YouTube Live browse page (www.youtube.com/live), where you can always find the most compelling live events happening on YouTube and add events to your calendar.

Their initial live-streamed event will begin in a few hours with a YouTube-sponsored concert series, featuring the most-viewed independent artists from the video sharing site. More interestingly, though, is the fact that this may finally become the social tool that Google has failed to create in its years trying to compete with Facebook.

Although YouTube has featured comments on videos for some time, being able to comment and interact during a live stream takes this to a new level. Right now, aside from the so-called Digitour, the selection of live shows is relatively limited. As Google notes, they are “gradually rolling out [their] live streaming beta platform, which will allow certain YouTube partners with accounts in good standing to stream live content on YouTube.”

As this becomes more widespread, YouTube Live stands to not only change the face of broadcast (can you say Google TV?), but also stands to change the face of social. It’s one thing to interact over static media. It’s quite another to interact (and ultimately, expect to interact) with live video.

Given YouTube’s existing extraordinary reach, this stands to be a big deal. Like a really bit deal. We’ll see what happens when partners beyond the Indian Premier League cricket matches begin to go live. Because while some of the partners will be major media outlets, this has the potential to enable a new level of success for the pre-Justin Bieber’s of YouTube-land.

Parish declares that Facebook and Christianity don’t mix

A Roman Catholic parish in Chicago is warning parishioners about the dangers of Facebook. St. John Cantius parish leaders wrote in the church bulletin this past Sunday that Facebook is against the Christian culture. Social networking sites in general apparently encourage vanity and dishonesty by providing an outlet for children to create their own electronic version of reality, concocting their own identities and social realities with a reduced risk of real-world consequences.

 

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Chicago Tribune has the full quote of what parish leaders wrote in the church bulletin:

[Facebook] is exactly the opposite of the Christian culture where people go into the secrecy and sacredness of the confessional to blot out their sins forever. God entrusted parents with the care of their children for one particular purpose, and that is to teach them the way “to know, love, and serve God in this life and save their souls hereafter.” Everything leads us to think that Facebook fits poorly into this plan and was devised for a very different goal.

The church wants families to raise children without Facebook, as it supposedly helps youth defy their parents and cultivate feelings of lust. It’s rather worrying that families trying to raise their children in a wholesome environment are being told to avoid rather than educate.

Kids are future adults, and must thus learn about this world as much as they can, since they’ll be the ones managing it one day. At least for the foreseeable future, Facebook is part of this world.

TheStartupBuzz VC Showcase

The first of its kind event in India will bring venture capitalists, angel investors, start-up founders and entrepreneurs under one roof.

TheStartupBuzz VC Showcase is going to be held at Capitol Hotel, Rajbhavan Road, Bengaluru on 31 October 2009. VC Showcase is the first of its kind event in India where venture capitalists and angel investors showcase about their firms, explaining about their expectations from entrepreneurs. Each VC/investor will have their own table set-up only for meeting great companies and entrepreneurs.

 

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The event will be attended by VC/investor, start-up founders and entrepreneurs. It will bring together start-up founders to share experiences and interact with other start-ups. Three start-up founders will share their experiences of starting a venture, sustaining it and taking it to the next level.

Around 20 VC/investors will showcase their firms and 200 start-up CEOs and aspiring CEOs will meet and discuss during the event. In addition, there will be a wide range of sessions focussing on building successful start up, best practices, funding theory etc.

Dells new servers come preloaded with hundreds of virtual machines

Dell on Thursday served up a new choice for buying its servers: plug-and-play configurations that include up to 200 VMware virtual machines along with the networking and storage needed to run them.

Dell is also offering a ready-made virtual desktop infrastructure in the same fashion, letting users buy servers pre-configured with hundreds to thousands virtual desktops in two flavors: VMware or Citrix XenDesktop.

 

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CLOUD NEWS: Rackspace, Dell push OpenStack cloud OS

But wait, there’s more. The company tossed in an announcement about a new e-mail backup and archiving service and expanded partnership with Microsoft, then promised to build 10 new data centers worldwide in the next 24 months – three in the U.S. — to support what it hopes will be a massive move to its cloud. In addition to hosting virtual storage, desktops and e-mail backups, Dell says these data centers will serve up VMware, OpenStack and Azure clouds. All told, the company says it is spending $1 billion  on the cloud.

Dell executives explained that despite what virtualization has done for hardware efficiency, it isn’t easy to manage. “Customers are more interested in buying VMs than in buying the physical hardware they have to assemble,” said Stephen Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services, during a telephone press conference this week. He adds that research reports predict that soon “virtually half the workloads will be running on virtual machines … but it’s not that easy to do, to optimize those virtual machines.”

Enter the new vStart line of servers. These are built with the Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge, VMware hypervisors, Dell EqualLogic storage and Dell PowerConnect switches (which Dell OEMs from Juniper) and includes essential virtualization management extensions. The infrastructure is pre-assembled by Dell, and delivered to the enterprise’s site as a single unit, racked and cabled. Customers can own these units, though Dell is also willing to set them up as managed servers, promised Schuckenbrock.

The vStart 100 is a unit preconfigured with 100 VMs and priced at $99,000 while the vStart 200 is configured with 200 VMs and is priced at $169,000. The vStart family will eventually include configurations that offer more and less VMs, said Schuckenbrock, but these two standard configurations are available now.

MORE ON DELL: Dell servers preloaded with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud software

Not wanting to completely tick off the mighty Microsoft, Dell also announced a vague three-year agreement with Redmond that will let virtualized systems be managed by Microsoft System Center. This agreement will one-day also allow Dell to offer Hyper-V as a VM choice. When the Hyper-V option materializes, it will be a less expensive choice, hinted Praveen Asthana, vice president, Enterprise Solutions & Strategy. “Microsoft System Center and Hyper-V will give customers more choice and radically change the economics of virtualization,” he said. However configurations available today star VMware.

Plus, Dell is encouraging enterprises to take the plunge with VDI by similarly offering plug-and-play servers bundled with hundreds or thousands of Citrix XenDesktop or VMware virtual desktops. Customers can choose the number of desktops according to their needs. Dell technically announced its Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DDVS) offering in March but on Thursday reiterated that the VDI bundle can be had anyway the customer wants it: as an owned piece of gear, as a managed service, a cloud service, or some kind of custom package in between, with Dell doing all the integration work to ensure customers’ apps work with it. It, too, is based on Dell PowerEdge servers, EqualLogic storage and PowerConnect networking.

The Best 3D TVs

For all the hype they’ve received in the past year, 3D TVs aren’t exactly flying off store shelves. The biggest problem is that there’s still very little 3D content available. Also, when they started hitting the market last year, 3D sets were priced much higher than their 2D counterparts. Now, however, prices have come down a bit—probably because these models aren’t selling as quickly as manufacturers had hoped.

 

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If you’re in the market for a new HDTV anyway, it doesn’t hurt to get a 3D-ready set if you can find a deal. After all, all the 3D TVs listed below deliver excellent 2D performance too. One thing to keep in mind, though: 3D TV doesn’t always just mean paying for the set itself. Many manufacturers sell the required glasses separately for as much as $150 a pair. So if you want to be able to enjoy 3D with family and friends, tack on a few hundred dollars the price of your TV. (The only exception here is Vizio’s XVT3D650SV, which uses passive 3D, and four pairs of glasses are bundled with the set.) Also if you’re going to watch 3D Blu-ray discs, there’s also the cost of a 3D-enabled player. But the good news is that you don’t have to buy everything at once; you can get the set first and add the 3D accessories later.

If you’re ready to make the move to 3D, check out our list of the best 3D TVs below, along with current street prices, or compare these 3D-ready HDTVs side by side. For a top-rated 2D TV, check out The 10 Best HDTVs. And for general HDTV buying advice, read How to Buy an HDTV.