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Picture doing a remote software upgrade. Now picture doing it when the machine you're upgrading is a robotic rover sitting 350 million miles away, on the surface of Mars. That's what a team of programmers and engineers at NASA are dealing with as they get ready to download a new version of the flight software on the Mars rover Curiosity, which landed safely on the Red Planet earlier this week. Just what do you think you're doing, JPL?
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With all the legal and privacy issues, and now this, will facebook continue to thrive. Will other companies break into the market?
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It might look silly to read through two tutorials to finally control a LED with your iPhone. Oh and it would be useless too. So why are you doing that? Well, an instructor at my university once said: “If you can control a LED, you can control ANYTHING”. And guess what, he’s right! Basically, turning a LED on or off is just like switching a Fan, TV, Dishwasher, or any other device. So for simplicity we’re gonna use a LED. But if you can get this working, then you can control anything. When I was a kid we used discrete components to control a lightbult... and we liked it!
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Logging is important. Very important. When your application breaks, the first place you usually check for a hint of what went wrong is the logs. Unfortunately, I have found that most log messages are absolutely terrible. They include snarky comments, lack any indication of what was going on, and sometimes do not even include the current time. Based on my experience, here's what a good log message looks like... Could not complete this subhead due to unspecified error.
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Seems like logging is not much emphasised. I think that the logs should be very readable. It may not be a programmer that is reading them.
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I agree, they should be as clear as possible
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I’ve been racking my brain for a week straight on the best way to employ test-driven principles to HTML. Hell, I’ve been trying to figure out if it even can be done. Trying to figure out if it’s even worth it. Mostly through blind faith, I’ve come up with the beginning of what I hope becomes a winning strategy for test-driven HTML development. If you can write it you can test it. Hopefully.
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“Management is the craft of enabling people to get things done.” Why is management a craft? It’s a craft for the same reasons engineering is a craft. You can read all the books you want on something but crafts are learned by getting your hands in it and getting them dirty. Crafts have rough edges, and shortcuts, and rules of thumb, and things that are held together with duct tape. The product of craft is something useful and pleasing. Don’t become an engineering manager because you want power - that’s the worst possible reason.
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Bottom line is: when you find #000000 in your color picker, ask yourself if you really want pure black. You’re probably better off with something more natural. And if you’re feeling adventurous, try staying away from the left edge of the color picker altogether. It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black.
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I can't say I understand most of his reasoning...then again, I'm not a designer. Personally, I like things to have black backgrounds, it makes things stand out without the need to burn white backgrounds into my retinas.
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lewax00 wrote: I can't say I understand most of his reasoning
He explained it quite clearly I have to say.
Wout
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The clarity of his explanation isn't the problem, the problem is it just doesn't make sense to me. Don't use black because it's not natural? Neither is a computer screen, or most of the things displayed on it. (Ever see a Start bar wandering around on it's own, detached from a computer? Not likely.) Especially when his example is the work of a single painter, who is painting scenes that can be found in the real world. It's apples and oranges.
modified 10-Aug-12 10:05am.
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Well it does make sense. Perhaps a screen is not natural, but your eyes and your brains are, so the designer should attempt to design things such that they are pleasant and easy on the eye and brain. The screen is just a medium, it could just as well be paper, T-shirt, or a painting as the author showed. In painting using blue in shadows is actually very common, it is not just this one painter that does this. Just that one example is shown, doesn't mean other painters do not do this. The reason they do this is that there is actually more blue in shadows. This is because the sky is blue, and where direct sunlight doesn't hit a spot, the blue light from the sky will.
There's nothing against using high contrasting bright colors at the extreme ends of the spectrum, but it will tire the eye and brain. His way of picking optimal brightness/saturation values is quite intelligent. Going to either 0% or 100% would be very unsubtle. Things on the screen may not be natural things, but still they go through your eye and brain, and you can't get around how they work. E.g. sharp edges are less pleasant to look at than round edges. Sharp objects can possibly hurt you, so there is special circuitry in the brain to detect that. Bright high contrasting colored animals are usually very dangerous or poisonous.
Also most people don't have the brightness + contrast settings on a screen at 100%. Might be pretty to look at for perhaps 2 minutes, but after an hour your eyes would start to burn.
Wout
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wout de zeeuw wrote: Just that one example is shown, doesn't mean other painters do not do this. The reason they do this is that there is actually more blue in shadows. This is because the sky is blue, and where direct sunlight doesn't hit a spot, the blue light from the sky will.
The number of painters wasn't my point. How many computer screens are lit primarily by the sun & sky? It makes sense when painting a landscape or some other natural model, but again computers are not. Instead of trying to hide the differences by pretending one is the other, the uniqueness of the virtual environment should be embraced and utilized, not hidden away.
Also, even darker blacks can be found in nature. Have you ever been deep inside a cave system, where the sun doesn't reach, and turned off all artificial lights? That's much blacker than a computer screen will ever be (mostly because of the back light).
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Quote: lewax00 wrote: <layer>The number of painters wasn't my point.
It does appear so from:
Quote: Quote: Especially when his example is the work of a single painter
Hence the reaction about it not being one single painter's creation, but a general natural phenomenon.
Quote: lewax00 wrote: How many computer screens are lit primarily by the sun & sky?
The author is using examples to clarify a more general observation about how the brain interprets color. The point the author was trying to make, even when you think you're seeing black, or seeing gray, it is almost never a pure black or gray. So when making a design, the objective is using a generally color scheme to get a particular effect (e.g. appearing gray). He quite clearly demonstrates with examples how far you can deviate from pure greys while your brain still thinks the color is grey. So even when designing a grey theme it wouldn't be necessarily a good idea to limit oneself to the pure black and greys (just like painters do).
lewax00 wrote: Instead of trying to hide the differences by pretending one is the other, the uniqueness of the virtual environment should be embraced and utilized, not hidden away.
I don't see where the author is hiding or underutilizing color. He is doing quite the opposite, through understanding of perception of color he is intelligently choosing appropriate colors to achieve a certain effect, rather than limiting himself to pure black and greys.
Wout
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wout de zeeuw wrote: I don't see where the author is hiding or underutilizing color.
The title is "Design Tip: Never Use Black". Never. Not "avoid it in certain cases", not "use it when it's appropriate", but "never". He's saying to avoid using a section of the color space on computers simply because it isn't as natural as other choices. And I don't think that's correct. I'm not saying black is right for everything, but it does have very appropriate uses in a virtual environment.
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Apart from the word Tip suggestsing it's a guideline, the intention of the author is clearly to educate about the subtleties of black and greys. If you're going to take things very literal, never in the whole article he states to not use black because black is not natural. One of the things states is that pure black is very overpowering, but even then he does not conclude to not use it because of that. He merely states what effect a pure black has, and suggests that you take all this into consideration and make a choice based on that, as he summarizes at the bottom:
Quote: Bottom line is: when you find #000000 in your color picker, ask yourself if you really want pure black. You’re probably better off with something more natural. And if you’re feeling adventurous, try staying away from the left edge of the color picker altogether.
Wout
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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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