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(Credit:
IBM)

IBM currently has no plans to break out its VSO technology on its own. Magoon said it will be sold to customers as part of the menu of services available through IBM Global Services.

To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it’s good to be the R&D king.

“Customers are almost universally aware of desktop virtualization technologies that are emerging…the majority of them have some sort of pilot or have tried something in their departments or are playing with it in some fashion,” said Magoon. “We’re in the phase where people recognize it’s out there and they’re trying to figure how and when to take advantage of it.”

Virtualization, anyone?

On Tuesday, IBM, claiming to be the first vendor to crack the code on virtual desktop storage, is set to debut a technology at the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas that executives say reduces storage costs by up to 80 percent. Here’s the relevant portion from the announcement about the Virtual Storage Optimizer:

Available beginning today, the new IBM Virtual Storage Optimizer solution for VIA directly addresses this challenge, helping businesses further optimize their virtual desktop environments, while saving time and money on storage requirements. Based on an algorithm developed by IBM Research, VSO dramatically reduces the large physical storage requirements associated with storing virtual images. The solution also allows organizations to streamline operations by creating new desktop images in mere seconds or minutes, a process which previously could take up to 30 minutes - a 75% reduction in the time required to create and deploy new virtual machines. This represents a tremendous operational savings for clients, and allows them to realize more immediate returns on their investments.”

Twelve months ago, IBM Research began work on a project to develop an algorithm to help reduce the cost and requirements of virtual desktop storage.

The new phase of “cloud computing” gives end-users access to the critical information they need remotely, from any device, anywhere. IBM helps organizations benefit from this new model with its Virtual Infrastructure Access (VIA) services that give end users with Internet-enabled PCs and other devices the ability to access applications and data through a centrally managed computing environment. Until now, virtual desktop deployments have been hampered by the cost and complexity of managing storage, one of the most expensive hardware components of any virtual desktop environment.

The important takeaway is that IBM claims to have resolved one of the biggest barriers in the way of the spread of storage virtualization: the cost and complexity of dealing with storage. It’s not an insignificant consideration. Storage can turn into one of the–if not the–most expensive components of any virtual desktop setup. If IBM’s technology lives up to the claim, that will go a long way toward allaying some of the lingering concerns about virtualization. Fact is, however, that two-thirds to three-quarters of IBM’s customers have already incorporated “some sort of virtualization” into their operations, according to Jack Magoon, a business development executive in IBM Global Technology Services.

IDG, which puts on the expo every year, says that this year’s registrations are expected to match last year’s total if current trends continue. Last year’s attendance ended up at around 47,000 people. A large part of that number is made up by last-minute registrations, and with two and a half weeks to go before the curtain raises on the event, there’s still plenty of time for people to register. IDG has also already committed to putting on Macworld 2010 in San Francisco, even without Apple.

Mike Leeds, a Mac technician at a Portland, Ore., college said he doesn’t think the trip is worth making anymore.

On a MacRumors.com discussion board, “SFStateStudent” expressed what seemed to be a common feeling: “The thing I like about MWSF (Macworld San Francisco) is the opportunity to do ‘the hands-on’ thing with everything Mac and the other vendors’ wares. I enjoy picking up new software, a new portable hard drive, a new laptrap or a new case for my
iPhone. Oh well, I’ll enjoy Apple’s last MWSF ‘09… :(”

What about you? Will this affect your travel plans to Macworld this year or next?

The yearly Macworld Expo is a place for Apple fans to get their hands on new products, hobnob with like-minded
Mac fans–and to see chief executive Steve Jobs in the flesh.

Yes, but this will be my last year
Yes, I’ll continue to go
No, I’m done with Macworld

“Living in Portland means I go for professional reasons (which means I get reimbursed for time and mileage). I don’t see how I could justify it without Apple’s presence,” he said. “Apple certainly brings the critical mass for it to survive, but Adobe and the other software houses are needed to make it flourish. It’s been ailing for a few years now, and Apple finally put it out of its misery.”

The question is whether the largely local attendee base will still be compelled to attend after Apple’s announcement Tuesday that Jobs won’t deliver the next Macworld keynote speech and that this will be its final year of participating in the event at all. The Macworld Expo doesn’t have a huge economic impact on the city of San Francisco. (It’s attended mostly by local people, so the city’s Conventions and Tourism Bureau can’t track it by hotel rooms booked the way they do for other conferences.)

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But without Apple’s presence after this year, and without Jobs, there seems to be considerably less of a draw–even for the Mac faithful who normally attend.

CNET News’ Daniel Terdiman contributed to this report.

News.com Poll Does Macworld still matter?
With no Steve Jobs keynote, will you still go to Macworld?

Others are sticking to their plans to attend, but may reconsider the arduous line-waiting tradition. Wrote commenter Mike Cohen on MacworldBound.com, “I’m staying…about a block from Moscone (Center), so I’ll be going straight there instead of to the Apple Store meetup. Unlike last year, I’m not getting up at 4 AM to stand in line.”

Launched just two weeks ago, the plan originally was available to San Francisco customers only. T-Mobile has yet to make a formal statement acknowledging the expansion, and a carrier spokesman wouldn’t confirm the move with RCR Wireless News, but two of the publication’s reporters were able to sign up for the plan in different locations.

RCR Wireless News is also reporting that as part of the T-Mobile deal, customers can add additional lines for $40 per month per line, and they can claim a $135 credit for bringing a new customer from a different carrier to their family plan.

T-Mobile is being a bit cagey on the subject, but everyone else is saying that the carrier is expanding its $50-per-month unlimited voice plan. It will now be available on a nationwide basis for customers who have been with T-Mobile 22 months or longer.

The $50 price point matches a similar plan that Boost Mobile announced in January. Yet, T-Mobile customers will be able to combine the voice offering with an unlimited data and text plan that runs just $35 per month.

The combined $85 per month cost for both unlimited voice and data would make T-Mobile the most affordable national carrier. Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Sprint also offer unlimited packages, but their services start at $99 per month.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tinker around with notions of how astronauts in the not-too-distant future might get around the Sea of Tranquility or some other lunar destination. That’s part of the driving force behind NASA’s Great Moonbuggy Race, an annual event geared toward college and high school students.

Of 68 teams in this year’s moonbuggy event, just 39 completed the race. Top honors went to the Rochester Institute of Technology in the college division, and–in a two-way tie–to teams from the Huntsville (Alabama) Center for Technology and Erie (Kansas) High School in the high school division.

It’s been a long hiatus since the last time a human strode across the lunar terrain, and we’re still some years out from the next planned mission to the moon.

Photos: Lunar lessons for moonbuggy makers

This team from Southern University in Louisiana has a grip on lunar rover design in a race that's part aerospace engineering, part soapbox derby.

(Credit:
NASA/MSFC)

Check out our slideshow for more details and a look at 15 or so of the vehicles.

The mission: design and build a lightweight, human-powered buggy, then race it around a half-mile track pocked with gravel pits and bedeviled with other pseudo-lunar obstacles. While the race is designed to be forward-looking and to build on youthful dreams of the future, it also hearkens back to design challenges faced by Apollo-era engineers in the 1960s and 1970s.

Gigi Sohn, the president of public interest group Public Knowledge, said the service is analogous to TiVo and that the dispute characterized the disconnect between copyright law and realities of a digital world.

Cooper sat on a panel at the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee’s State of the Net Conference here, during which representatives from the entertainment industry and public advocacy groups debated Cablevision’s liability in maintaining on its servers recorded programming without paying licensing fees.

Net neutrality legislation, which is a judiciary issue, Cooper said, could also impact copyright holders depending on how Internet service providers are allowed to manage their networks.

WASHINGTON–It may seem as though Congress has completely forgotten about Net neutrality, a topic that has languished in legislative purgatory since mid-2006. But a Democratic aide said Wednesday that it’s likely to come back this year, along with potential alterations of digital copyright and patent law.

Webcasters have until February 15 to reach an agreement with the music industry for a statutory license, and Daryl Friedman, vice president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, said they would have to find a marketplace settlement for “a technology that’s not monetizing.”

If the Justice Department and the courts give Cablevision the green light to proceed, it will be “setting a roadmap out for anyone who wants to create a copyright infringing service,” said Alec French, vice president for government relations for NBC Universal. He said such companies shouldn’t be free from liability simply because they “outsource the ‘push the button’ service,” he said.

Friedman said he thought some in the music industry could support Net neutrality legislation “as long as it doesn’t mean piracy is equal to legal commerce.”

Technologies like Webcasting often need time to grow before they become profitable, said Michael Petricone, senior vice president for government affairs of the Consumer Electronics Association.

The laws are currently “geared toward an analog world,” Cooper said.

The judiciary committee is also likely to try to modernize statutory licensing laws, Cooper said. Statutory licenses allow copyrighted works to be used without the explicit permission of the owner.

“Are we really going to say every single temporary copy demands a licensing fee?” she asked. “I think that’s insane.”

“They will be the future of the industry if they’re allowed to thrive,” he said. “Let’s not cook the golden goose.”

All panelists agreed statutory licensing needs to be reformed, but there was disagreement as to whether their problems could be fixed with marketplace solutions.

Aaron Cooper, who serves as counsel to Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) in the Senate Judiciary Committee, said his boss is interested pursuing performance rights and Net neutrality legislation, a topic that could implicate copyright issues because of its relationship with file swapping. These subjects will likely arise as top committee issues along with patent reform, which is Leahy’s priority, Cooper said.

Cooper said the goal would be to “limit the amount of piracy (without) stepping over the line in having ISPs deciding what is lawful and what is not lawful.”

Cablevision’s proposed service allows consumers to record broadcast TV shows and movies on a digital video recorder that Cablevision maintains on its network.

Correction at 8:40 a.m. PST on Thursday: An earlier version of this story misidentified a service called Mystro TV. That service was tested by Time Warner Cable.

If you thought that watching football in high definition seemed more realistic, just wait until you can view a game in 3D.

The NFL has invited representatives from consumer electronics companies to view the event in an effort to drum up support. In addition to showing the game on a big 3D screen, the demonstration will include television displays to show what could be possible in people’s homes, The Wall Street Journal reported. Some consumer electronics makers have already begun making 3D television sets, mostly to accommodate DVDs that are available in 3D. But the industry is still working on standards for 3D.

Burbank-based 3ality Digital will shoot the game with special 3D cameras and transmit the game via satellite service to the three theaters. Real D 3D is providing the displays in the theaters and is overseeing production and transmission of the 3D broadcast.

This isn’t the first time that the NFL has demonstrated 3D technology. In 2004, it filmed the Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers in 3D. Sandy Climan, the CEO of 3ality, told The Wall Street Journal that when he shows the footage from the taped 3D Super Bowl, “people crouch down to catch the ball. It’s as if the ball is coming into your arms.”

Next week the National Football League is broadcasting live in 3D a game between the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders to theaters in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston. The event, to be held December 4, is a demonstration to show how the technology can be used to provide a more realistic experience in a theater or in the home.

Even though other live events like operas and circuses have been broadcast live in 3D to theaters around the country, the event on December 4 will be the first time that the NFL has broadcast a game live using the technology.

Just as live sports entertainment has pushed the adoption of high-definition TVs, it could also help drive standards efforts and adoption of 3D TVs.

Poptub features, among other things, interviews. Here host Maria Sansone interviews Matt Iseman of Sports Soup.

(Credit:
CNET News)

In its latest move to bring some commercial order to the YouTube chaos, Google has begun showing a brief video show called Poptub with perky hosts, amusing videos, promotional interviews, and a prominent Pepsi sponsorship.

Poptub has promised advertisers 3 million views of Poptub by the end of the year, according to the report. More than 100 installments have been prepared, and several are released each day.

The show, called Poptub, is produced by Embassy Row, which is run by Who Wants to Be a Millionaire creator Michael Davies, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The shows will be distributed not just through YouTube but also through the Google Content Network, which can distribute video to Google advertising partners.

So the desktop target model we are designing for has several elements:

The target we are designing for is not the legacy model of thick Windows clients or terminal services. Open source is about driving innovation and new paradigms of use, not just to make a cheaper alternative to proprietary (software).

While evangelists of Linux distributions built for personal computers (i.e., “Linux desktops”) point to Netbooks as an indication of renewed life in their chances to compete for consumers, new data suggests that this may be a fool’s hope.

Sure, this means lower profit margins for Microsoft, but that’s a hollow victory for Linux, isn’t it?

Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth told me last year that his Ubuntu desktop strategy would increasingly include cloud services. Recently, Canonical started to deliver on this vision by Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) hooks to its server edition, which has the added bonus of giving Canonical a compelling revenue model.

The two companies are going in opposite directions, but they end in similar positions. For Canonical, which, with Ubuntu, arguably has the strongest claim to innovation and leadership on “the Linux desktop,” the trick is to move more personal-computing services into the cloud.

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Instead, such advocates would do well to follow the leads of Canonical and Red Hat, as they respectively extend the desktop with cloud services and deliver desktop functionality from the cloud.

In sum, Red Hat is not merely looking to join the Linux game for personal computers; it’s also seeking to completely change the desktop market–Linux, Windows, or otherwise. This is an ambitious goal–one that Red Hat’s Linux server strength puts it in a good position to deliver.

There may be flaws in this strategy, as some have pointed out, but as Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens told me on Wednesday, Red Hat’s approach makes a lot of sense for CIOs who want to increase manageability of desktops while simultaneously reducing costs:

Red Hat, for its part, is starting with the server, where it’s the undisputed market share and value leader. Recently, Red Hat told Computerworld that it plans to grow its so-called desktop footprint with a “desktop” that isn’t: it’s a virtual machine running remotely on a server and sitting side by side with Windows.

And while Dell is now saying that the return rate on Linux Netbooks is no longer four times that of Windows, as it was reported in October 2008, it’s unclear how or why Linux will be able to take a greater share of the Netbook market, given that Microsoft has reduced its pricing to compete with Linux.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Enable open-source solutions to help lower the OpEx costs of Windows environments by allowing Windows desktops to be virtualized within the data center;
Open up the interoperability and technical advancement of the desktop remote-protocol space by open sourcing the Spice protocol for building VDI infrastructure on. This will have impact not just on virtual desktops, but also remote display of physical desktops;
Through our ovirt.org effort, build an open-source implementation and reference architecture for building clouds, on which servers and desktops can be instantiated on demand;
Bring virtualization to the client through our KVM technology, putting a hypervisor directly on the desktop. Enable the client to not just plug into VDI environments, but to be able to run desktops within the cloud or locally, seamlessly, and with full mobility;
Through this new model, which enables multitenancy of desktop environments, enable a virtualization-optimized Red Hat Enterprise Desktop to be run from the same pane of glass as Windows.

Although it’s true that roughly 30 percent of Dell Inspiron 9s Netbooks run Ubuntu Linux, it’s equally true that about 90 percent of Netbooks run Windows, as Computerworld recently pointed out, while Linux had started with 30 percent of the Netbook market.

The Linux server, however, is ripe to creep down into the desktop, and that’s precisely what Canonical (Ubuntu) and Red Hat are doing.

Linux has a much better chance of succeeding on personal computers, if it starts from a position of strength, not weakness. Two areas of strength for Linux are mobile and servers. The mobile Linux market, however, remains somewhat fragmented, making it difficult to mount a near-term desktop challenge.

Linux desktop advocates should take a cue from two leading Linux companies, Red Hat and Canonical. The point isn’t to replicate the Windows desktop. The point is to completely change the way desktops are delivered and their services consumed. Anyone still worried about Linux on Netbooks is fighting the wrong battle.

Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

Worried about the carbon footprint of your Google searches?

Google disputed that report late Sunday evening, saying in a blog that the “time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than Google uses to answer your query.” The blog also noted:

The global IT industry generates about 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, or about as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines, according to a recent Gartner study cited by the newspaper.

Updated at 12:20 a.m PST January 12 to include Google comment.

“Google operates huge data centers around the world that consume a great deal of power,” Alex Wissner-Gross told the newspaper. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

A Harvard University physicist says a typical search on a desktop computer generates about 7 grams of carbon dioxide. Thus, performing two searches is comparable to bringing a kettle to boil, according to a report Sunday in The Times of London. While that may not sound like a lot, the report notes that Google handles about 200 million searches daily.

The search giant’s Google.org philanthropy released numbers and policy recommendations in November regarding how the U.S. could wean itself from coal and oil for electricity generation and nearly halve its gasoline consumption by 2030.

The search giant has actively campaigned to reduce the amount of energy consumed by the IT industry.

Google first introduced its 2030 energy road map in the fall. And CEO Eric Schmidt, an adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, called on the federal government to show more leadership on climate change by fostering clean-technology businesses.

Google is a board member of a new coalition called the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which aims to reduce computing power-consumption by half by 2010. It will do that largely by encouraging member companies like Google to turn off computers when they’re not in use. The coalition says that reaching that goal would be the equivalent of taking 11 million cars off the road.

Schmidt told the Corporate EcoForum last year that the company’s plan is to reduce global demand for oil and to help generate new white- and blue-collar jobs by investing in solar, wind, and geothermal energy projects.

TaxSlayer makes tax prep quick.

Is TaxAct worth the $13.95 it charges for the basic edition with state e-file? You bet. It’s simple, it’s quick, and most importantly, you can’t screw anything up. But if you have a complicated return, don’t waste your time trying to save a few bucks on TaxAct. You’ll lose more when you file your taxes.

TaxAct comes in three versions: Free, Deluxe, and Ultimate. After you e-file your state taxes (for free), it will cost you $13.95 to file federal. The Deluxe and Ultimate versions will both run you $16.95. That’s a fair price for what you’re getting with the software.

(Credit:
H&R Block)

To calculate my basic return, I used TurboTax Online’s free version. It’s bare-bones and doesn’t feature all the extras you’ll find in more capable versions of the software, but it got the job done. Unfortunately, because TurboTax Online is more powerful than competing products, it takes more time to prepare your taxes. In fact, it took me over an hour to file my basic return with W-2 wage income, interest, and basic deductions. After all that work, it returned the same refund as the other tax preparation tools.

If you’re looking to prepare a basic return, don’t waste your time with TurboTax Online. It’s too expensive and it takes too long to calculate the same refund you’ll find with basic services like TaxSlayer or TaxAct. But if you’re preparing a complicated return, TurboTax Online is the best service on the market. Sure, it might cost a little more, but if you can save as much as I did by using the package, the extra cost is a pittance compared to what you could lose in tax payments if you use another product.

But it paid off. As I worked my way through preparation, TurboTax highlighted possible areas where I could deduct cash that the other services didn’t and when it was finally complete, the TurboTax error check found issues that the other tax preparation software packages missed. Most importantly, TurboTax performed a sweeping audit risk check and returned a tax liability that was a whopping $1,000 lower than its closest competitor, TaxCut Online.

When I prepared my basic return on TaxAct Free edition, it couldn’t have been easier. I input the wages, interest, and other data and within 30 minutes, TaxAct had my return ready to be e-filed with the government. The refund it calculated was exactly the same as the refund the other tax preparation solutions determined.

H&R Block TaxCut Online: Powerful, but not ideal
H&R Block may offer its tax services in franchised locations across the U.S., but it also provides its software online. And although those who are less knowledgeable about tax law shouldn’t have too much trouble preparing their taxes with the company’s TaxCut Online software, there aren’t enough options to justify using it if you file a complex return.

I created a fake return (without filing) to evaluate each service and found that TaxCut Online works beautifully for those who have simple returns. In a matter of seconds, I was able to work my way through wage income, interest, and basic deductions to create a return. It was quick and easy.

But when I started using the premium version, all that usability was eliminated and I was lost in a tool that simply couldn’t handle all the complexity I was giving it. Its deduction walk-through was nice and that helped somewhat, but when it came time to input investment and business data, TaxSlayer didn’t provide quite enough guidance or tax help to ensure I was saving every penny I could. In fact, the payment it calculated was almost $2,000 higher than the payment calculated by TurboTax Online. Much like TaxAct, it’s not really meant for power users.

TaxCut Online makes the hard stuff simple.

Quick and easy is TaxAct's motto.

When I first started using TaxAct, I was impressed by its simplicity. It doesn’t feature all the extras you’ll find in more capable products and it’s obviously designed for someone who wants to get their taxes filed as quickly and efficiently as possible. If you want to find obscure tax code topics, you won’t find it in TaxAct. It’s simply not that kind of preparation tool.

As soon as I started using TurboTax Online Home and Business, I quickly realized that the software was nothing like the other tax preparation tools I had used earlier. It offered more menus, much better tax guidance, and a slew of options that allowed me to work through each phase of my taxes independently or let TurboTax guide me. I chose the latter to find every deduction I could.

TaxAct Online: Simplicity is king

Related: The software versions of TurboTax and TaxCut 2008 compared.

TaxCut Online is free when you e-file your federal taxes, but just like every other service in this roundup, it charges you to e-file your state taxes. With TaxCut Online, that will run you $29.95. Aside from the free edition, TaxCut Online is also available in Basic for simple returns for $14.95 or Premium for those who have more complicated returns for $39.95. Neither of those fees include the state e-file charge.

But I can’t even recommend using TaxCut Online if you file a basic return. It’s too expensive. Nor do I recommend using TaxCut Online if you file more complex returns. TurboTax Online is a much better alternative.

TaxAct Online isn’t nearly as powerful as TaxCut from H&R Block or TurboTax Online, but it’s not meant to be. Instead, TaxAct is aimed at the taxpayer who doesn’t want to pay an accountant $250 to prepare a relatively basic return.

If you don’t want to pay for the best tax preparation software, you might as well forget about TurboTax Online. The software’s basic version is free to e-file your federal taxes, but you’ll be forced to pay $25.95 to e-file your state taxes. Worse, it adds $34.95 to the price of its paid versions to e-file your state returns. And depending on your needs, those other versions cost between $29.95 and $109.95.

(Credit:
TaxAct Online)

TaxSlayer, much like TaxAct, is affordable. The company’s classic version only costs $9.95, including your state return. The premium version is $14.95, which includes more menus and a deduction walk-through.

April 15 is quickly approaching, which means we all need to buckle down and spend a Saturday preparing our taxes. I prepare my own taxes, and I know all too well how hard it can be to find the right program to help out. Let’s look at four online tax preparation software packages that are good places to start.

But as good as TaxAct was on my basic return, it was equally poor on my complicated return. Inputting self-employment income and expenses was too difficult, and the software’s import feature, which attempts to find tax data from your banks and employers, was useless; it found nothing. Once I finally completed the return, it calculated a tax liability that was more than $2,500 higher than what I calculated with TurboTax Online. Suffice it to say that TaxAct Ultimate is best-suited for someone who has wage income, owns a home, and hasn’t sold any investments over the past year. Anything more than that and the software becomes difficult to use.

But when I tried to create a complicated return that featured the sale of a home, self-employment income, and investment income, TaxCut Online proved to be a relatively useless tool, at least compared to TurboTax Online. It didn’t maximize my tax credits, it failed to provide me with enough control to pinpoint specific deductions like self-employment insurance, and it delivered a tax liability that was almost $1,000 higher than the figure TurboTax Online calculated. That said, its “Worry-free Audit Support” tool came in handy and its error correction feature fixed mistakes it found along the way, which certainly helps put the mind at ease.

Go it alone or let TurboTax help.

For just $14.95 for the premium version and $9.95 for the classic version, TaxSlayer is an easily affordable service. And although it may not be able to provide the same level of guidance as powerhouse software from H&R Block and Intuit, it’s an ideal solution for anyone who wants to get their simple tax return filed as quickly as possible.

When I started creating my basic return, I was quite pleased with the software’s ability to cut down on preparation time by asking for basic information like name, address, and social security number first, and maintaining that information throughout the process. Whenever I wanted to fill in W-2 information, most of the data was already available, making it as simple as inputting figures and moving along. Because of that, TaxSlayer had my taxes ready to be e-filed within 20 minutes. It calculated the same refund as every other tool in this roundup.

(Credit:
Intuit)

Although TurboTax Online’s most expensive offering is $109.95, it’s not necessarily the most useful, since it’s specifically designed for corporations, partnerships, or Limited Liability Companies. Because of that, I opted to use Intuit’s Home and Business software to prepare the complicated return. That package costs $79.95 before the state e-file charge of $34.95 is factored in.

TurboTax Online: Your go-to tool for complex returns

(Credit:
TaxSlayer.com)

TurboTax Online is the most expensive tax preparation software, but it’s also the most capable. With a host of features that aim at substantially reducing your tax liability, the software is, without a doubt, the best on the market.

TaxSlayer: Best for your simple return
Like the others, TaxSlayer is one of the chosen tax preparation software solutions advertised by the IRS for those who want to e-file their federal taxes for free. And much like TaxAct, it does the easy stuff really well.

Inputting information in TurboTax Online Home and Business was simple, but because the software contains so many more deductions and tax considerations, it did take much longer to prepare those taxes than on other services. In fact, it took me more than three hours to finish preparing the complicated return.