If your main criteria is "freely available" and not "open source", and your adjusted gross income is less than $57K, you can just fill out the forms for free. It uses Adobe Flash if you have an aversion to such things, and there doesn't appear to be anything open source about it.
If your AIG is more than $57K, your tax situation is probably such that you ought to be handing over some money to a pro or Turbo Tax.
I've got no idea how BestBuy can turn the tide, but it sucks to walk into a BestBuy. It's not a very happy experience.
They can start by making it not suck to walk into a BB. To paraphrase what my wife said this morning, they have the advantage of instant gratification while instead turning it into annoyance.
I am convinced that BB's C-level employees have never donned a t-shirt and jeans on a Saturday afternoon and shopped at a couple of local stores. If they had, there can be no way that a competent (I know, operative word there) exec would deem the experience acceptable. On the other hand, maybe they have. And instead of looking at it from the point of view of Joe Customer, they go back to the office to write a strongly-worded memo about how sales employees did not try hard enough to sell Monster cables and extended warranties.
It's as if no BB exec had ever stepped foot in an Apple store, or even a Fry's.
And my mods points are all gone. Anyway, what you point out is why when we did look at hybrids, the Prius was the only one on our list. The Honda Civic with a 13bhp electric motor? Umm, no, I have tools in my garage that put out more than that. Ridiculous SUVs with an electric motor attached? Kind of misses the point. Since there was a multi-month wait for Priuses at the time, we just skipped hybrids until the Leaf came out.
I have a Scion Xb. If I could find something like it -- upright, not made for speed but for utility
We have a 2005 xB, ordered one the day they were available to order in WA. We're going to shed a tear when that delightful little car finally dies. We also have a Leaf. The back with the seats down isn't quite as roomy as the xB, especially height, which is important for carrying the two mutts or furniture. But it's otherwise darned close. Almost or equal headroom, plenty of seating room front and rear.
Would the Leaf replace the xB (range excepted)? Sadly, no. The Leaf just isn't the "cube on wheels" the xB is. It's still more utilitarian than I imagined. Carries people and cargo from Costco just fine, just not the big stuff.
(my Xb has a tighter turn radius than either the volt or the leaf),
Really? I'd swear the Leaf is tighter than the xB. Even if not, I don't think the difference is huge. They're both just shy of a Dixon lawnmower.
I've yet to hear of any anecdotes of this happening, though.
I'm pretty sure Nissan, in the case of the Leaf, said the tax credit was built into the price of the lease. So I could believe the same for the Volt. (Note that we bought our Leaf outright, so there is the possibility that I'm wrong.)
But with the leaf, you range is 80 miles PERIOD. If you get caught out and run out of charge, you're screwed.
Well, more like 100 miles if the heater isn't running, but whatever. We've run our Leaf more than 100 miles before plugging back in at the house because in the Seattle area chargers aren't hard to find. In the worst case, if you run to empty, Nissan (for the first three years) will send a truck at no charge. I've tried to run the Leaf to "turtle mode", the state right before running out. Even with an estimated 4 miles left on the batteries, I got bored of driving around the block and gave up before it hit "turtle mode". It's incredibly conservative in it's estimates when it gets low, it gets incredibly naggy, and you'd have to try harder than I did to run it until it stops.
If I want to take a road trip, I take the Scion. We didn't buy the Leaf to drive to LA every other weekend.
The Volt is no-compromise.
The Volt is nothing but compromise. It makes for a crappy EV, and an even more crappy ICE vehicle. More mechanically complex than the Leaf, with less room. It just wasn't what we were looking for if we were going to buy something "different", and pay a premium to do so. If you're enjoying your Volt, great; at least it's not yet another gas-guzzling SUV. But when it came time to put our money where our mouthes were, the Volt didn't make the list.
More of a Volt person, I take it?:-) I realize that you may not be entirely serious, so I won't entirely dump a full report on you. It has fulfilled expectations, getting us to where we expect it to go. No, we'll not be driving it from Seattle to San Francisco. But for roads trips we're probably taking the dogs (who are not allowed in the shiny new Leaf) anyway, so we'll pile into the 35mpg Scion xB.
In summary, I probably enjoy the Leaf more than the Jaguar we got rid of to make room.
It's a credit, not a deduction, so you get the $7500 regardless. Take my word as someone who bought a Leaf and is in the process of filling out the tax forms.
One of your mistakes is rating by bug count. Another is thinking that a tester's job is to find bugs. What you ignore is the quality of the bugs your professional found. I'm willing to bet she found bugs the college kids would have never found. She also verified that the software does what it says on the tin. If she's spending her days filing bugs on BS defects like typos and "this button doesn't do anything", you're wasting money and boring her to death with crappy code.
Finally, if some random college kids found a bunch of bugs by "just trying things", I'd consider taking a look at your development process. Most bugs should be harder to find than that, with the caveat that I have no idea what kind of a system you're talking about.
Consider taking your iPad back, it may be faulty. I've used an iPad or iPad 2 most days since they were launched a couple of years ago and can't recall Safari ever crashing on me, so I'd be worried if it happened multiple times in two weeks.
I, too, have had an iPad/iPad 2 since the first day they were sold. Safari crashing a couple of times in a two week period is not something I'd consider to be unusual or a cause for return. Open it back up, it remembers all open pages, so it's a minor annoyance.
Kodak also had an on-again-off-again affair with printers. I bought one their laser printers for our business in the mid-90s. Kodak knows imaging, right? The price was right, and it had a good spec/price ratio. All was well until the toner ran out and I found out they quit supporting it almost as soon as it was released. Oh well, should have stuck to an HP LaserJet. Note to self: nothing else from Kodak that doesn't involve film.
Years later Kodak's making printers again. Oh, I don't think so, Kodak. Beside, as parent points out, I was already weening our house off of printing at that point anyway.
1) The Leaf can text you if it hasn't been plugged in by a certain time. I've never used the feature as I have to walk past the charger to get into the house. Not plugging it in requires a conscious decision not to do so. Otherwise it's "put it in park, flip the plug door, get out and plug it in as I walk toward the door to the house". It's literally an extra five seconds out of my day.
2) The Leaf won't "start" if it's still plugged in. Or so I've been told. *cough*.
I'm sure there are some use cases I'm missing that would make inductive charging super cool. I'm just not convinced that it does anything for me.
You've heard of a hatchback, right? Even extremely non-exotic cars come in this flavor. Or there's my car, the Scion xB which isn't really a hatchback (weird-looking station wagon, maybe?) but has no trunk. On top of the folded down rear seats is where the two pit bulls ride, so I don't worry too much about smash-and-grabs in that car.
Already done (I think it's US Federal Law). Our Leaf thankfully has a switch to turn off the "chime...chime...chime" that I'm sure our neighbors would otherwise never tire of hearing every time we back out of the garage. There's also supposed to be a noise (switchable as well) emitted moving forward below 19mph, though I can't hear it from inside the car.
I switch off the noisy merry-making when I think about it, and I haven't mowed down any pedestrians yet. I can't tell if it makes any difference in ped behavior because in Seattle they step off the sidewalk without looking whether I'm in the Leaf or an ICE-powered car.
Does it bug anyone else around here when they boast about how they built systems for as cheap as they claim?
You mean every time anyone dares type the words "Mac Pro"?
The storage alone is going to be over $100, I'm guessing the RAM is going to put it over the $200 mark. No CPU, no case, nothing else. Oh, and it runs 50 VMs at once? VMs running DOS, maybe.
Exaggerated claims help no one. Let's say that ESX hardware really costs $1000. Okay, now a person can make an educated decision on whether that's the way to go. Stating that one can build such a machine for $200 just wastes the research time of anyone that goes to Newegg and finds out the one making the claim is exaggerating or just flat out lying.
My wife, at least once this week (DVDs and books). Me, once this week and probably tomorrow (to get out of the home office for a bit, and maybe a book). Pick any random day at any random time the Redmond, WA King County Library is open, and the parking lot will be a minimum of half full. Weekends or after work/school it's probably close to full.
That's not counting the eBooks that don't involve going to the b&m library. Overdrive worked, but was generally a PITA. The Amazon setup, all other complaints aside, was surprisingly low-friction. If I like the book and might reference it again, Amazon has a convenient "buy" button when going to check it back in (yes, yes, evil corporate bastards).
In summary, it looks like plenty of people use our local library. I don't know why anyone that consumes books, CDs, or DVDs wouldn't at least pop in to see what it's about.
My karma's still excellent, where'd that checkbox go? Because crap articles like this make me want to check it. I mean, maybe they will, maybe they won't. But there seems to be little basis to say they won't from the oh-so-thin facts in TFS.
Better viewing angle and better color reproduction are the advertised benefits. I just think they look better. Response times don't matter to me, as I rarely play games on this machine. That said, Portal 2 and Left for Dead 2 look just fine to me.
Considering however that the U2711 is VESA compatible, and comes with a far better stand - it still remains the arguably superior option. I'm not sure Apple has even fixed the Cinema vs. iMac alignment issues yet.
Both the iMac and Display are VESA compatible, albeit with a $27US adapter (it is Apple, after all). I've got both on monitor arms, which is why I forgot about the stupid, stupid misalignment between the two.
Looks like the price difference got bigger, as you point out. $170US to over $200 difference depending on where one looks. When I was looking pre-Thunderbolt (six months ago?), $100 was the biggest discount I could find.
only sells monitors because some morons pay through the nose so their monitor's case matches their computer's case.
No, I paid through the nose because when I went to buy a 27" monitor to set next to my 27" iMac, I found exactly three choices that did better than 1080. The NEC, though I'm sure it's pro-level, quality kit, was insanely priced. The Dell was about the same price as Apple, maybe less with a discount, and about the same quality. So, for about the same amount of money I just bought the Apple.
Where are these cheap, >1080 27" IPS monitors you imply everyone is making?
what I actually implied was that you were stupid enough to fix something by hand that didn't need fixing. Repeatedly.
Fix what by hand? You mean clicking the "start a new backup" button, as prompted by Apple? Or have you last track of where you're at in the thread, and who you're replying to? I'm trying to be charitable here by assuming you're just confused.
So what you're saying is that Time Machine does not "just roll it all up to work perfectly with no learning curve". Thanks for the clarification, I had always heard that Time Machine is the brain-dead solution that simply cannot be screwed up. I guess it's rsync FTW, then.
Even in the case you described (which sounds contrived, and I've certainly never heard of it,
Just because you've never heard of it doesn't make it contrived. I've seen it on three machines in the house that backup to a compatible NAS. "Time Machine has verified the backup, and for reliability must start a new backup. Backup later/Start a new backup?"
Hey, Apple, deleting my backup history doesn't fall under the umbrella of "reliability".
Slashdot Mirror
If your main criteria is "freely available" and not "open source", and your adjusted gross income is less than $57K, you can just fill out the forms for free. It uses Adobe Flash if you have an aversion to such things, and there doesn't appear to be anything open source about it.
If your AIG is more than $57K, your tax situation is probably such that you ought to be handing over some money to a pro or Turbo Tax.
I've got no idea how BestBuy can turn the tide, but it sucks to walk into a BestBuy. It's not a very happy experience.
They can start by making it not suck to walk into a BB. To paraphrase what my wife said this morning, they have the advantage of instant gratification while instead turning it into annoyance.
I am convinced that BB's C-level employees have never donned a t-shirt and jeans on a Saturday afternoon and shopped at a couple of local stores. If they had, there can be no way that a competent (I know, operative word there) exec would deem the experience acceptable. On the other hand, maybe they have. And instead of looking at it from the point of view of Joe Customer, they go back to the office to write a strongly-worded memo about how sales employees did not try hard enough to sell Monster cables and extended warranties.
It's as if no BB exec had ever stepped foot in an Apple store, or even a Fry's.
And my mods points are all gone. Anyway, what you point out is why when we did look at hybrids, the Prius was the only one on our list. The Honda Civic with a 13bhp electric motor? Umm, no, I have tools in my garage that put out more than that. Ridiculous SUVs with an electric motor attached? Kind of misses the point. Since there was a multi-month wait for Priuses at the time, we just skipped hybrids until the Leaf came out.
I have a Scion Xb. If I could find something like it -- upright, not made for speed but for utility
We have a 2005 xB, ordered one the day they were available to order in WA. We're going to shed a tear when that delightful little car finally dies. We also have a Leaf. The back with the seats down isn't quite as roomy as the xB, especially height, which is important for carrying the two mutts or furniture. But it's otherwise darned close. Almost or equal headroom, plenty of seating room front and rear.
Would the Leaf replace the xB (range excepted)? Sadly, no. The Leaf just isn't the "cube on wheels" the xB is. It's still more utilitarian than I imagined. Carries people and cargo from Costco just fine, just not the big stuff.
(my Xb has a tighter turn radius than either the volt or the leaf),
Really? I'd swear the Leaf is tighter than the xB. Even if not, I don't think the difference is huge. They're both just shy of a Dixon lawnmower.
I've yet to hear of any anecdotes of this happening, though.
I'm pretty sure Nissan, in the case of the Leaf, said the tax credit was built into the price of the lease. So I could believe the same for the Volt. (Note that we bought our Leaf outright, so there is the possibility that I'm wrong.)
But with the leaf, you range is 80 miles PERIOD. If you get caught out and run out of charge, you're screwed.
Well, more like 100 miles if the heater isn't running, but whatever. We've run our Leaf more than 100 miles before plugging back in at the house because in the Seattle area chargers aren't hard to find. In the worst case, if you run to empty, Nissan (for the first three years) will send a truck at no charge. I've tried to run the Leaf to "turtle mode", the state right before running out. Even with an estimated 4 miles left on the batteries, I got bored of driving around the block and gave up before it hit "turtle mode". It's incredibly conservative in it's estimates when it gets low, it gets incredibly naggy, and you'd have to try harder than I did to run it until it stops.
If I want to take a road trip, I take the Scion. We didn't buy the Leaf to drive to LA every other weekend.
The Volt is no-compromise.
The Volt is nothing but compromise. It makes for a crappy EV, and an even more crappy ICE vehicle. More mechanically complex than the Leaf, with less room. It just wasn't what we were looking for if we were going to buy something "different", and pay a premium to do so. If you're enjoying your Volt, great; at least it's not yet another gas-guzzling SUV. But when it came time to put our money where our mouthes were, the Volt didn't make the list.
More of a Volt person, I take it? :-) I realize that you may not be entirely serious, so I won't entirely dump a full report on you. It has fulfilled expectations, getting us to where we expect it to go. No, we'll not be driving it from Seattle to San Francisco. But for roads trips we're probably taking the dogs (who are not allowed in the shiny new Leaf) anyway, so we'll pile into the 35mpg Scion xB.
In summary, I probably enjoy the Leaf more than the Jaguar we got rid of to make room.
It's a credit, not a deduction, so you get the $7500 regardless. Take my word as someone who bought a Leaf and is in the process of filling out the tax forms.
One of your mistakes is rating by bug count. Another is thinking that a tester's job is to find bugs. What you ignore is the quality of the bugs your professional found. I'm willing to bet she found bugs the college kids would have never found. She also verified that the software does what it says on the tin. If she's spending her days filing bugs on BS defects like typos and "this button doesn't do anything", you're wasting money and boring her to death with crappy code.
Finally, if some random college kids found a bunch of bugs by "just trying things", I'd consider taking a look at your development process. Most bugs should be harder to find than that, with the caveat that I have no idea what kind of a system you're talking about.
Consider taking your iPad back, it may be faulty. I've used an iPad or iPad 2 most days since they were launched a couple of years ago and can't recall Safari ever crashing on me, so I'd be worried if it happened multiple times in two weeks.
I, too, have had an iPad/iPad 2 since the first day they were sold. Safari crashing a couple of times in a two week period is not something I'd consider to be unusual or a cause for return. Open it back up, it remembers all open pages, so it's a minor annoyance.
Kodak also had an on-again-off-again affair with printers. I bought one their laser printers for our business in the mid-90s. Kodak knows imaging, right? The price was right, and it had a good spec/price ratio. All was well until the toner ran out and I found out they quit supporting it almost as soon as it was released. Oh well, should have stuck to an HP LaserJet. Note to self: nothing else from Kodak that doesn't involve film.
Years later Kodak's making printers again. Oh, I don't think so, Kodak. Beside, as parent points out, I was already weening our house off of printing at that point anyway.
1) The Leaf can text you if it hasn't been plugged in by a certain time. I've never used the feature as I have to walk past the charger to get into the house. Not plugging it in requires a conscious decision not to do so. Otherwise it's "put it in park, flip the plug door, get out and plug it in as I walk toward the door to the house". It's literally an extra five seconds out of my day.
2) The Leaf won't "start" if it's still plugged in. Or so I've been told. *cough*.
I'm sure there are some use cases I'm missing that would make inductive charging super cool. I'm just not convinced that it does anything for me.
You've heard of a hatchback, right? Even extremely non-exotic cars come in this flavor. Or there's my car, the Scion xB which isn't really a hatchback (weird-looking station wagon, maybe?) but has no trunk. On top of the folded down rear seats is where the two pit bulls ride, so I don't worry too much about smash-and-grabs in that car.
Already done (I think it's US Federal Law). Our Leaf thankfully has a switch to turn off the "chime...chime...chime" that I'm sure our neighbors would otherwise never tire of hearing every time we back out of the garage. There's also supposed to be a noise (switchable as well) emitted moving forward below 19mph, though I can't hear it from inside the car.
I switch off the noisy merry-making when I think about it, and I haven't mowed down any pedestrians yet. I can't tell if it makes any difference in ped behavior because in Seattle they step off the sidewalk without looking whether I'm in the Leaf or an ICE-powered car.
Does it bug anyone else around here when they boast about how they built systems for as cheap as they claim?
You mean every time anyone dares type the words "Mac Pro"?
The storage alone is going to be over $100, I'm guessing the RAM is going to put it over the $200 mark. No CPU, no case, nothing else. Oh, and it runs 50 VMs at once? VMs running DOS, maybe.
Exaggerated claims help no one. Let's say that ESX hardware really costs $1000. Okay, now a person can make an educated decision on whether that's the way to go. Stating that one can build such a machine for $200 just wastes the research time of anyone that goes to Newegg and finds out the one making the claim is exaggerating or just flat out lying.
My wife, at least once this week (DVDs and books). Me, once this week and probably tomorrow (to get out of the home office for a bit, and maybe a book). Pick any random day at any random time the Redmond, WA King County Library is open, and the parking lot will be a minimum of half full. Weekends or after work/school it's probably close to full.
That's not counting the eBooks that don't involve going to the b&m library. Overdrive worked, but was generally a PITA. The Amazon setup, all other complaints aside, was surprisingly low-friction. If I like the book and might reference it again, Amazon has a convenient "buy" button when going to check it back in (yes, yes, evil corporate bastards).
In summary, it looks like plenty of people use our local library. I don't know why anyone that consumes books, CDs, or DVDs wouldn't at least pop in to see what it's about.
My karma's still excellent, where'd that checkbox go? Because crap articles like this make me want to check it. I mean, maybe they will, maybe they won't. But there seems to be little basis to say they won't from the oh-so-thin facts in TFS.
Better viewing angle and better color reproduction are the advertised benefits. I just think they look better. Response times don't matter to me, as I rarely play games on this machine. That said, Portal 2 and Left for Dead 2 look just fine to me.
Considering however that the U2711 is VESA compatible, and comes with a far better stand - it still remains the arguably superior option. I'm not sure Apple has even fixed the Cinema vs. iMac alignment issues yet.
Both the iMac and Display are VESA compatible, albeit with a $27US adapter (it is Apple, after all). I've got both on monitor arms, which is why I forgot about the stupid, stupid misalignment between the two.
Looks like the price difference got bigger, as you point out. $170US to over $200 difference depending on where one looks. When I was looking pre-Thunderbolt (six months ago?), $100 was the biggest discount I could find.
only sells monitors because some morons pay through the nose so their monitor's case matches their computer's case.
No, I paid through the nose because when I went to buy a 27" monitor to set next to my 27" iMac, I found exactly three choices that did better than 1080. The NEC, though I'm sure it's pro-level, quality kit, was insanely priced. The Dell was about the same price as Apple, maybe less with a discount, and about the same quality. So, for about the same amount of money I just bought the Apple.
Where are these cheap, >1080 27" IPS monitors you imply everyone is making?
Never mind, I just looked at your post history. Gave the benefit of the doubt to troll, damn it. Well done.
what I actually implied was that you were stupid enough to fix something by hand that didn't need fixing. Repeatedly.
Fix what by hand? You mean clicking the "start a new backup" button, as prompted by Apple? Or have you last track of where you're at in the thread, and who you're replying to? I'm trying to be charitable here by assuming you're just confused.
So what you're saying is that Time Machine does not "just roll it all up to work perfectly with no learning curve". Thanks for the clarification, I had always heard that Time Machine is the brain-dead solution that simply cannot be screwed up. I guess it's rsync FTW, then.
Even in the case you described (which sounds contrived, and I've certainly never heard of it,
Just because you've never heard of it doesn't make it contrived. I've seen it on three machines in the house that backup to a compatible NAS. "Time Machine has verified the backup, and for reliability must start a new backup. Backup later/Start a new backup?"
Hey, Apple, deleting my backup history doesn't fall under the umbrella of "reliability".
If you're only using 2GB, I doubt that puts you anywhere near the top 5%.