Eric

To go further out on that tangent... it depends somewhat on the display technology used for the panel. On an OLED / AMOLED / Super AMOLED display, every pixel generates its own light. Black pixels aren't lit at all, which saves a little bit of battery power. On LCD screens, the entire screen is always backlit, and black pixels must block the backlight from coming through. Some fancier LED backlit LCD TVs/Monitors have a matrix of LEDs for the backlight, and can individually darken/lighten regions (not pixels) of the screen making them somewhat more power efficient when large areas of the screen are dark. Contrast ratio does suffer within those darkened areas, however, since if a region's backlight is darkened, it can't display as bright a pixel in that region. Apple uses LCD (IPS) only. Samsung is the biggest innovator when it comes to AMOLED technology, and uses them almost exclusively in their phones/tablets. Other manufacturers have their own preferences, and some mix it up from device to device.

Disclaimer: I didn't design this site, I just manage the software that is purchased from a vendor. Most of the colors you see are the defaults, although I can tweak (and have tweaked) the style sheets to make minor changes. On this site, post text is all nearly black on white... it's not black, but it's very very dark. There are other bits of data that aren't as dark, which I assume are what you're referring to. The reason is that the forum is very information dense, and while none of the content is unimportant, some of of the it is definitely MORE important than the rest. Less important information like how long ago a post was made or a signature line for example is lighter in color so that it doesn't compete visually with the more important text. Deciding what is important and giving it the appropriate visual weight is a basic design principle. If everything stood out, then you would be left with a lot of noise and overall readability (and usability) would suffer. In Web Accessibility terms, the WCAG 2.0 specification (Level AA) says that a contrast ratio (foreground to background) of 4.5:1 is required to pass. Some of the lighter greys fall just shy of that ratio here, so I'll darken them up a bit. If after darkening the light grey text (I'll get to it in a few minutes) you still have trouble seeing it, I might recommend either calibrating your monitor, or using your browser's built in accessibility features to help out, such as magnifying the page. (CTRL + (plus) to zoom in, CTRL - (minus) to zoom out.

Something is wrong when a software vendor can't make their web-based software work in browsers that have the best standards compliance.

I don't think there is a distinction. Password protection without encryption would be too easily circumvented.

A strong password that is unique to the account is incredibly effective. Be careful to not provide it to some look-alike site at www.outlook.fakesite.com for example. If you use an email client like Outlook or Mail or Thunderbird and your ISP / email provider supports SSL, then configure your client to use it. Other than that, it's up to your provider to keep their systems secure. Encryption is important, which is why every single online retailer in the world utilizes it when they take your credit card information, and why many sites use it when taking your username and password. With the latest round of donations, I'm going to buy a 3 year SSL certificate for atxommunity.com. Yes, I did check the email headers to see where they came from. The actual addresses were registered to this forum. They get into the account and send emails to everyone in the contact list. The same thing happened to my mom a few years ago, and once they were done extracting everything they wanted from the account, they deleted every email and contact so she couldn't easily warn everyone of the intrusion.

I won't name names, but It's happened to members of this forum--I've received phishing emails from their hacked accounts. Granted, it was most likely due to a weak password or a phishing scam. The attack vector is irrelevant though; once they have your password, they have your emails and attachments. I believe that depends on the version of Acrobat used to protect the file. Acrobat version 9+ uses 256 bit AES encryption, which is plenty secure, but Acrobat 9 has a weakness in password handling. Anything Acrobat X and above is quite secure as far as I know.

I didn't see a notification, but as soon as I closed the tab, I promptly forgot about it, haha. I do believe that it should work without the tab open, though, and it should work in Chrome on Desktop and Android devices. I imagine Firefox's implementation is similar.

I was wondering the same thing. I'm going to close my forum tab... feel free to mention me and I'll let you know if I get it. I definitely wouldn't enable it on many websites, because I can definitely see how it could get obnoxious.

Holy smokes, that feature is magical. I allowed Chrome to show notifications for the site, and I got an immediate browser popup (bottom-right corner) when you mentioned my name. I'm not sure what the browser support is for notifications like that, though. I'd be curios to know if Firefox and IE users got a prompt for whether to Allow or Block notifications from the site.

Yes, that red line is gone now. When editing your post, quotes can be reliably clicked/dragged to move them around. When you hover over a quote, you'll see a little 4-arrow handle appear in the top-left corner of the quote. The editor has changed quite a bit under the hood; it feels less flaky, and is much faster to load. There used to be a bit of lag when adding a reply while waiting for the editor to load, and now it should be almost instantaneous. The difference is even more noticeable on mobile devices. I really like being able to highlight some text in a post, and quote it directly from there. Member mentions have been added... just type @ and follow with a few characters of a member name. Example: Thank you @JohnH for another donation

Alright, the latest forum update is finished, and you'll probably notice the change in the navigation at the top. If you're looking for unread topics and things like that, check out the Activity tab. All of that has been consolidated into a more powerful "Activity Streams" feature. There have been some changes to the editor too. Quoting selected text is a big one. There are a pile of other changes, so post here to me know if you have any questions. If you notice any weirdness immediately after the upgrade (specifically, the editor buttons have the wrong icons), make sure to clear your browser cache. In Chrome click the "Hamburger" icon at the top-right choose Settings click History on the left side click Clear browsing data... button uncheck everything but Cached images and files click Clear browsing data button In other browsers

I changed the clocks and stayed up an extra hour. My kids got up at their usual time. Extra hour of sleep, my ass.

I'm going to guess that the only reliable way to run most tax software on Linux/Mac is with a virtual machine. There's no getting away from Windows for a lot of niche software, unfortunately. Photoshop is the one application that keeps me using Windows on my desktop (my only remaining Windows computer)

I think this is supposed to be cute, but it gave me the creeps.

Gotta find the silver lining: Melanoma risk rises 75% when tanning beds are used before the age of 30.

What, exactly, is a tanning bed model? Is it like a fashion model, only they... appear in ads for tanning beds? Is it some form of online adult entertainment geared toward tanning bed enthusiasts? I'm sorry, it just doesn't compute, and if I don't ask I'll have an aneurysm thinking about it.

There must be some trick to linking to facebook videos, but I don't know what it is. Here's a video Sam Adams did for April Fools day last year. They called it HeliYUM.

Mine is coming up on 6 years old and still holding its own. Also liquid cooled, and the only upgrade I've done in that time is adding SSD drives. I built mine myself, but it's probably not as pretty as something from Digital Storm. Those people are like craftsmen.

Did you say 7 2TB drives? 14TB? Holy smokes, that must be some computer case. That's a good question. First thing to consider is that at this time, as far as I know, there's no doing a true fresh install with the free upgrade to Windows 10. That could change in the future, but all of the information I've seen says it's unknown whether Microsoft will offer an ISO (disc image) download for Windows 10 to people upgrading from Windows 7 or 8. The closest you can get is doing a "keep nothing" upgrade, which still isn't the same as formatting a partition/drive and doing a fresh install from a disc. Personally, I've always preferred to start fresh with a new installation of Windows instead of upgrading. It's hard to put into words, but I feel like upgrades are never as "clean" as formatting the partition and installing fresh. That's what I did when I went from 95 to 98. And from 98 to 2000. And from 2000 to XP. And from XP to 7. And from 7 to 8. But when 8.1 came out, I trusted the upgrade, which was flawless and felt no different than doing any other Windows Updates. Will I try the upgrade again going from 8.1 to 10? I'm not sure. On one hand, I'm confident that it'll go just fine, but on the other there's my nerd OCD nagging me to do a fresh install. In my case, I have very little software that I need for my work, so reinstalling it is a little bit time consuming, but not nearly as awful as doing multiple years of tax software and accounting software, and restoring data backups, and all that jazz. All of my data is just text and images on a network drive and all I need to do is install Adobe Creative Suite, my FTP client, a few web browsers, and my text editor, and I'm ready to go. If I were in your shoes, I'd probably prepare for a fresh install, but try the clone and upgrade path first, because (and I'm making an assumption) that "adding back all of my programs" step is going to be a long and tedious chore.

And it makes sense that they would want some continuity between different devices using their windows OS given the move toward tablets and smart phones among the general public. My complaint was that the execution was poor in Windows 8. I never minded the full-screen start menu, although not having a visible button to activate it in 8.0 was a mistake they shouldn't have had to correct in 8.1. I use my windows key on my keyboard, but the Start Button is a convention that has been ingrained in people since Windows 95. Leaving it out of 8.0 was dumb. What did bother me was that running Modern UI apps transported you to Metro-land, and left you feeling kind of stranded once you got there. Microsoft did a bad job of integrating the Modern UI stuff with everything else. And by default, some metro apps were associated with common tasks like picture viewing... so you're sitting at your familiar desktop, you attempt to open a JPG file, and you're booted to a full-screen environment tailored for tablet use. Try to listen to music, and you're sent to XBOX Music or whatever it's called, instead of Windows Media Player. Of course you can change the default applications back to their Windows 7 defaults, but it's something you have to frig with... and something a novice user might not understand. Anyway, once you correct those things, it's fine. It's not like Vista where driver compatibility was terrible and performance was just as bad. The core of the OS is fast, stable, and solid. Windows 10 allowing you to run Modern UI apps in a window on the desktop is a significant step in the right direction.

I realize you don't have to use it, and I don't either. My feeling is that 8 is perfectly usable because you can avoid the Metro/Modern UI, but "It's avoidable" isn't exactly high praise. They didn't give enough (any?) thought to integration of the Modern UI in Windows 8--to me it feels "bolted on".

It's not an unsafe choice as far as driver and software compatibility goes. Like I said, under the hood, the guts are all essentially the same as Vista, with gradual refinement and optimization with 7, 8, 8.1, and now 10. As the above video states, they've made it faster and more lean to bring down the hardware requirements. The interface is a different story. 8 brought huge sweeping changes, with gradual refinement in 8.1 and 10. These changes didn't degrade software compatibility or the stability of the operating system, but they did upset a lot of people. For a new computer, I think the decision comes down to how comfortable you will be with the changes to the interface. If you're one to embrace change and enjoy poking around a new system to see what's new, then go for it. If what you see in the video gives you hives, then stick with 7 for as long as you can.

In case anyone is interested in an overview of the release version of Windows 10 that'll be out in a couple weeks. I'll be installing Windows 10 on a spare machine in a couple weeks so I can do some testing with the new Edge browser. I imagine it'll be quite a speed improvement over IE.

Floppy drives I might believe, it's pretty rare to even find a motherboard that supports one these days. But I'm pretty sure that's not true about CD/DVD drives. It might lack software for playing DVD/BluRay movies or something, but CD/DVD/BluRay drives will continue to work. I'm almost certain you can preorder Windows 10 on DVD.