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OK. But the (not so) recent trend to display light grey text on a white background is disturbing. I wonder how many of these self-professed designers actually spend hours reading content styled this way. 
I don't care if it's black or white. But I care deeply that it's easy to consume.
/ravi
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It's true: some of the countertrends can be just as bad as the practices they're trying to replace. I still use the Readability bookmarklet far more than I ought to considering the design resources available to web developers today.
I think in our excitement to move beyond paper, we've forgotten so many lessons learned from nearly 500 years of printing. Readability is a solved problem (allowing for individual reader preferences). Printed pages are rarely true black on true white. Black and white on screen can be tiring to read (maybe it's just my aging, overworked eyes), but yes, often better than gray on tan.
Then there are elements like font proportions, line length and line spacing that make a huge difference and yet rarely get the attention they deserve.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Printed pages are rarely true black on true white.
If you're talking about popular media. 
But I've yet to find a book (paperback, hardcover, technical, non-technical) that is not black on some shade of white. Usability studies have shown that Tappi 100 whiteness is harsh on the eyes, which is why most book manufacturers scale down a tad. Also, almost all printed publications use non-acid-free paper which causes them to yellow with age.
/ravi
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Whoever wrote this article never saw the optical illusion where just having a light shine on black area next to an area that does not have a light on it make the black look white. Grey will look like the black if there is nothing to compare it to. Is he saying do not use gray either. Then maybe we should not use white. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_illusion[^]. The top illustration shows this.
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In "The Art of Science Fiction", Frank Kelly Freas (the creator of Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman) wrote about how he had to paint a black man (alien) for Clifford B. Simak's "The Big Front Yard":
"In the original, the skin tones are a bit more subtle, but the color is BLACK: not brown, or purple, or chocolate, but black -- and astonishingly tricky to paint."
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
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One of the most significant early personal computers, the Commodore 64, went on sale in August 30 years ago. For many people, this machine was their introduction to personal computing, and for two members of the Ars staff, thinking about the machine brings up strong memories. For me, stepping up tp the Commodore 64 from my TI-99/4A was a quantum leap forward in computing. The multimedia experience alone was worth the price of admission—incredible graphics and sound that seemed light years ahead of the market. Then there were the games. From arcade knock-offs to innovative 2-player experiences, you never got bored with the c64. What are your fond memories of the C64?
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: What are your fond memories of the C64?
I have to say, learning to program on it. Plenty of fun experiences with it
I do still have my old Compute! magazines boxed away some where around here.
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
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Would have to be the games Wolfenstein, Phantasie, and IK+[^].
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It was October 4th, 1957. Scientists at MIT noticed that the frequency of the radio signals transmitted by the small Russian satellite increased as it approached and decreased as it moved away. This was caused by the Doppler Effect, the same things that makes the timbre of a car horn change as the car rushes by. This gave the scientists a grand idea. Satellites could be tracked from the ground by measuring the frequency of the radio signals they emitted, and conversely, the locations of receivers on the ground could be tracked by their relative distance from the satellites. That, in a nutshell, is the conceptual foundation of modern GPS. You are here.
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Narrative is this crazy itch we all want scratched – if you think back to the last speech, song or standup routine that really grabbed your attention, chances are good that it told a story. This very human craving is something we try to feed on our developer evangelism team here at Twilio. But, I’ll be the first to admit, constructing a narrative out of code is damn tough. It was a dark and stormy codebase...
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The long-delayed TextMate 2 text editor for Mac has been open-sourced under the GPL 3 license, says its creator Allan Odgaard. The editor, after being announced years ago, was released as an alpha in December of last year. Now, the app has been open sourced, which has led a lot of folks to immediately predict its death by disinterest, at least in terms of official development. I've embraced Sublime Text. What's your favorite editor?
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All I had to do is write software to tell the modem to dial over and over and try different combinations. Because I was a self-taught programmer, this was no problem. But because I was an overachieving self-taught programmer, I didn't just write a program. No, I went off and built a full-blown toolkit in AppleBasic, with complete documentation and the best possible text user interface I could muster, and then uploaded it to my favorite BBSes so every other addict could get their online modem fix, too. I called it The Hacking Construction Set, and I spent months building it. Using my own software got me in trouble with the law. And deservedly so.
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Agile development isn't just for software anymore. Even NPR is using it to develop programs like TED Radio Hour [ITworld]
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One Methodology to rule them all, One Methodology to find them,
One Methodology to bring them all and in Scrum bind them.
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In this installment we talk to Vanessa Hurst, founder of Developers for Good, co-founder of Girl Develop It!, and a consultant and advisor to startups. Our continuing series in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves.
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In a significant divergence from traditional fault-tolerance approaches, ROC emphasizes recovery from failures rather than failure-avoidance. This philosophy is motivated by the observation that even the most robust systems still occasionally encounter failures due to human operator error, transient or permanent hardware failure, and software anomalies resulting from "Heisenbugs" or software aging. Fixing Murphy's Law.
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Let's say you have a large computer system and you want to measure it for performance or efficiency. You want metrics. You want pretty pictures that tell you what's going on. You start looking at graphing libraries and databases. I think this is exactly backward. You have to start with measurement. It's shockingly easy to fool yourself and you really have to get it right. Bad data looks very much like useful data and it's worse than having no data at all. Understanding the difference between measurements and metrics.
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Windows 8 apps can be designed and coded using HTML/CSS/JS just like PhoneGap apps can. And with very little effort you can use your skill and existing resources to crank out a sleek, modern looking Windows 8 style app in no time. PhoneGap and Windows 8 development – more similar than you realize.
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After the hacking of a former Gizmodo writer’s Apple account, a lot of discussion has been going on concerning turning on two-factor authentication on services like Google Apps. I absolutely recommend doing so, but I also think that’s not enough. A good majority of the people who read this blog are creators of webapps of some description. It’s time for us to start building two-factor authentication into our products. 7 well-documented methods of implementing two-factor authentication.
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Shameless plug, but there's an article for that!
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This page introduces a compact and efficient implementation of Bresenham's algorithm to plot lines, circles, ellipses and Bézier curves. A detailed documentation of the algorithm and more program examples are availble, as well as four C-program examples. A simple implementation to plot lines, circles, ellipses and Bézier curves.
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Message Closed
modified 9-Aug-12 15:41pm.
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Go ahead and write the article, I'd be interested.
In settings like creating a bitmap in e.g. Silverlight where basically only a SetPixel is available the Bresenham algorithms are still quite relevant. In Silverlight Bitmap drawing is quite a bit faster than the WPF type of graphics. The WriteableBitmapEx[^] project was created for this purpose.
Wout
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So I started the GNOME project at that point in August 1997. The draft for the announcement was sent to various friends of mine which included Richard Stallman, Marc Ewing, Elliot Lee, Erik Troan, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mathis. When the project was ready Federico and I sent the announcement of the creation of the GNOME projects to a few mailing lists: The GIMP mailing list, the Guile mailing list, the GNU project announcement mailing list and comp.os.linux.announce. Federico and I started developing the GNOME libraries on our spare time. He was still mostly working on the GIMP and I was still mostly working on the X11 IRIX emulation code for Linux on the SGI/Indy. We setup the makefiles to mimic the Gtk+ setup.... Miguel de Icaza tells the story of GNOME.
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It has taken nearly a decade, but SCO’s hard-fought but ultimately ludicrous legal campaign against Linux is finally winding down, seemingly for good. The company, now know as The SCO Group (TSG), filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection this week, conceding that there’s no longer any hope of a reorganization under Chapter 11. Its only option now is liquidation. Both feet in the grave and still swinging wildly at IBM for allegedly “devaluing” its version of Unix.
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