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User: Darinbob

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  1. Re: Firmware updates on Ask Slashdot: Should I Allow A 'Smart TV' To Connect To The Internet? · · Score: 1

    Go someplace other than Walmart?

  2. Re:stupidest reason.ever. on Ask Slashdot: Should I Allow A 'Smart TV' To Connect To The Internet? · · Score: 1

    What needs to connect to the TV? The original question says there is already a Roku for streaming, and I honestly can't think of any other use a TV would want to be on the internet for (except firmware updates, but you don't want or need those if you're not on the internet).

  3. Re:Firmware updates on Ask Slashdot: Should I Allow A 'Smart TV' To Connect To The Internet? · · Score: 1

    Keeping Roku on internet makes sense. Everyone knows what it is really doing. Smart TVs have a bit of a history adding unwanted changes. If Roku screws up and starts spying on people. then it's much more trivial to replace that $100 device than to replace the $500+ TV. The internet doesn't do anything useful for a TV if you've got an alternate streaming method already.

    Rule of thumb: if you don't need it, don't do it.

  4. The tme zone is chosen pretty well for New England and Eastern Standard Time. All of New England is within the "natural" border of EST, except for a tiny bump on Maine. Ie, they're not more than half an hour off of true solar time during EST. The western EST border strays too far west, but that's a problem for Michigan and the like.

  5. Re:Compromise on Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    ANY change is hard for software. Dealing with time zones and DST is a bitch in software, and I see so many people screw it up when the implement such things (necessary when the normal libraries won't fit on embedded systems). Any change means fixing up all the databases on all the systems that use time.

    (Annoying sometimes when you've got some systems that stick exclusively to local times, meaning you have to fix up time twice a year. I've seen it on medical equipment when someone naively assumes a hospital network will never straddle a time zone, and on electricity networks where the meters only know local time but the utility straddles 3 time zones. I see equipment where the time zone rules are hardcoded, even though we know the rules will inevitably change before the equipment hits end of life. It was only a decade ago that DST rules in the US changed...)

  6. Re:This is incorrect on Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    Go to work later and come home from work earlier. The only way for you to get longer days in winter is to move closer to the equator.

  7. Re:Make the entire year DST on Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    And we can just shift, assuming that work allows us to. Not just our work, but other people's work if you want to avoid traffic. There are a lot of factors that try to shift people into a standard work day, and that's what is messing us up. A shift of merely an hour is not a big deal to adjust to, but if someone needs daylight to be productive then winter is always going to suck no matter how the time zones are arranged.

  8. Re:Make the entire year DST on Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    And if we really want to increase the number of shopping hours, Massachusetts could just adopt Europe time, the sun comes up at the end of the work and stays light for many hours after that. That's silly though, it's simpler for the stores to just stay open later in the summer, offices could allow workers to leave before its dark in the winter, and so forth.

    We're never going to fix the problem that in Winter the days will be shorter. You either force dawn to come earlier or you force dusk to come later, you can't adjust both. Either it's dark in the morning and I hate that, or it's dark when I come home and I hate that. No amount of adjusting time zones will fix that.

  9. Re:Make the entire year DST on Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    This depends upon where you live. The time zone lines are not drawn in a logical manner, but often for political reasons they shift. So rather than always being within 30 minutes of the true solar time, some areas may be very far off. So while one city may complain that it's getting dark at 4pm, another city in the same time zone and latitude may not see it go dark until 6pm.

  10. Re:You left off on Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    DST is for the summer, in winter we're in "standard" time (in northern hemisphere that is, in southern hemisphere winter and summer are swapped).

  11. Re:You left off on Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    Right, just look at winter. If you've got an eight hour workday, and daylight is only 6 hours in some places, then it's going to be dark at some point when you're at work. DST (which is summer) does not add extra hours of daylight, it just means that stores may open one hour later but stay open one hour later.

    It's rather silly since the store could just adjust their closing hours without the state getting involved. School is a different matter, but school hours can change also. But then some will complain that it needs to correspond to working hours... For that, companies should allow flexible schedules.

  12. Re: You left off on Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    Yes, but that's the "standard time" in the winter, or "normal" time. In summer is when the time advances forward into "daylight savings time". That's why some countries call it "summer time".

    The reason it gets dark so early in some places is because the time zones themselves are very coarse approximations of solar time, with lines drawn due to politics very often.

    You could just get up at dawn instead, don't worry about what the clock says.

  13. Re:You left off on Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com) · · Score: 1

    They'd complain it was government interference probably, or that government was overreaching its authority, despite that government interference created this in the first place.

  14. Re:QA is it's own step in development on Should Developers Do All Their Own QA? (itnews.com.au) · · Score: 1

    QA also does things that developers don't have time for. QA is a full time job, and should be done in parallel with development. Ie, one day of coding, one day of unit testing, then QA may be spending a full week just on feature testing after that, then a week of integration testing, and several weeks of regression testing (hopefully automated).
    That's nto counting documentation; ie, dev is writing specs and QA is writing test plans off of those specs and that's in parallel.

    If theupper management thinks the two can be combined, then they're ignorant.

  15. Re:Hell No! on Should Developers Do All Their Own QA? (itnews.com.au) · · Score: 1

    The two teams do need to communicate. When quality goes down you can often trace it back to having bad communications. Ie, features aren't documented well, documentation wasn't written up front, and so forth. When you run across a developer who thinks QA is an adversary, then that's a problem that needs fixing.

  16. Re:Developers tend to work in teams on Should Developers Do All Their Own QA? (itnews.com.au) · · Score: 1

    In my experience, QA may get paid less, but they work harder than the developers.

  17. Re:QA sucks and developers do pass the buck on Should Developers Do All Their Own QA? (itnews.com.au) · · Score: 3, Informative

    You need a series of gates and software/firmware/hardware has to pass through all those gates. The later a bug is found the more expensive it is to fix it. When the customer finds a bug it can be catastrophic; as in layoffs are going to happen because of loss of revenue. So find the bugs early, and make sure you've got all the gates set up.

    - Developer must unit test the code - developer must to the basic test of flipping it on, making sure that something happens and that it does what the developer thinks it does. Finding and fixing a bug here is very cheap.
    - Other developers must code review the changes; spread out the knowledge to more than one person, have other sets of eyes looking at the code, let someone point out where the clever change is breaking the design or violating preconditions from elsewhere in the project.
    - QA must then test the feature; positive and negative tests. Run it for long periods, try to break it, compare it one by one to each requirement and specification. This can happen before all features are complete.
    - QA then tests the integration; not just one feature but all of the features, so it's done once there's a code freeze for the release. Maybe it repeats some of the earlier tests, but it should run through a full regression, use it like a customer would use it.
    - If it's applicable, do a full system test. End to end, from hardware board to back end server. Test different combinations. Finding a bug here is expensive; but it's still less expansive than having the customers find the bug.

    If you still find bugs after that, then review how the bug slipped past, fix the gates, and do better next time.

  18. Re:Rotate on Should Developers Do All Their Own QA? (itnews.com.au) · · Score: 1

    No matter how good the design and the testing, it never survives first contact with a customer.

  19. Re:Rotate on Should Developers Do All Their Own QA? (itnews.com.au) · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sort of. QA does development, but not on the project, they develop automated testing scripts and the like. The skill sets are different. A developer should do basic testing, but the developer is way too close to the code and is very likely to miss things. I see developers who assume no testing is needed, it was an obvious fix, and then it turns out to have bugs. Developers are often not good at integration testing, because they may have troubles seeing the big picture of how all the parts fit together.

    QA can read the product's code certainly, they can be involved in the code reviews, but they shouldn't develop that code either. For a good QA person, testing, creating the test plans from the functional specs, automating the tests, and so forth, is a full time job in itself. In a lot of ways it is harder than development.

    Every time I have seem companies try to merge two groups or departments together it has not turned out well. And this cost saving measure won't turn out well either.

  20. Re:Lock-in on Experts Propose Standard For IoT Firmware Updates (bleepingcomputer.com) · · Score: 1

    I work on IoT, and don't want this faux standard solution. There's going to be a fight though; the standards fans who insist we adopt this instantly so that they can add another buzzword to the marketing literature, and the implementors who will point out that it won't fit, will use up too much battery life, and so forth. It's one thing to have security guidelines that everyone should follow, but making this a standard that applies equally to 8-bit sensors all the way up to 64 bit phones is pointless.

    Most of these IoT standards are just a lot of me-too people jumping on bandwagons.

  21. Re:How do you try stuff on online? on Shoppers More Likely To Return Items Bought Online Than in Store (axios.com) · · Score: 1

    Plus you are supporting the local economy, which is worth it even if it costs $1 more. I really doubt tha the hipsters who are buying everything online are doing so only because they can saving some money. Some of these online stores are more expensive overall (ie, groceries, sheesh). Personally, I would greatly prefer that Amazon does not become the one and only worldwide retailer, there's no way that could be good.

  22. The World(tm) Series was sponsored by the World newspaper, thus the name.

  23. Re:Who gives a shit? Everyone should... on Twitter Employee Blamed For Deleting President Donald Trump's Account (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    Hmm, do we have evidence that Twitter has ever been used for "communications"?

  24. Re:Virtual is inferior to the real thing on Ask Slashdot: Why Do We Still Commute? (citylab.com) · · Score: 1

    Email takes time too. I find myself spending a lot of time editing, erasing, starting over, to be politically correct and not "on the record"; whereas in the face to face meeting I'll just blurt out "you're all a bunch of whiny morons!" after which the meeting tends to be really short.

  25. Re:I quit so I could go into an office on Ask Slashdot: Why Do We Still Commute? (citylab.com) · · Score: 1

    I dunno if I could. I used to have a job with a 45 minute commute and it was tedious. But I needed the equipment at work. Now it's closer but there's still stuff it has at work that I don't have at home. A gym, free quality food at the cafeteria, a nice chair, a nice desk, and I can say "hey Bob, where did you put that file again?" insteadof waiting 10 minutes to an hour for an email response, doing a remote sync with source code control happens in a few seconds instead of a few minutes, I don't have to call up IT every week because VPN stopped working again, and I don't have to use the laptop as much but can use a big screen monitor. I can look out of the window at work and stare at the green trees (yes, I pity the windowless).

    Right now, when I need to do some work on the weekend, I drive to the office to do it. Seriously. 20 minutes, and I can combine it with some errands or visiting friends, and I'm vastly more productive than if I sat at home with the laptop.