Dilberito (archived copy)

Related blog post by Scott

Shibboleet

They don't, and they don't need to. Think of the ultrasound motion sensors in car / room alarms: if you emit chirps inside a closed volume they'll bounce off everything solid, and the pattern received at any point depends on everything inside, so you'll know if something moves. If you can keep track of the changes, you know if it's moving rhythmically and at what rate. Using multiple frequencies makes it more sensitive to changes, roughly speaking.

Again, no need. Put on some earplugs, or stick your head in a box, and you'll still recognize the beat of your favourite song in drastically altered acoustical conditions. The app is not measuring the transfer function to compare against some carefully calibrated curve, but the changes that tell it that something's moving, and with some smart processing it can tell apart your respiratory movements from the cat wandering in. A second person in the room might throw it off, though.

This is the part that got me wondering. A cursory Google search gave me plots like this and this for the speaker and this one for the mic (yeah, condenser microphones have a pretty good range). So for this particular bit my answer is "feasible, and effectively inaudible if you're over 30".

Um, I'm behind a proxy and apparently for single-word queries it launches a search ahead of time. Meanwhile:

• * if the word resolves to a hostname, Firefox asks me "Did you mean to go to 'foo'? [Yes, take me to 'foo'] / [No, thanks].
• • - if I say Yes it sets browser.fixup.domainwhitelist.foo = true and the prompt is suppressed the next time I enter this word.
  • - if I say No the prompt closes and I'm left at the search it already did. Nothing is changed.
• * if it doesn't resolve, no prompt is shown (though the proxy might still process it since it will try to resolve the name on its own).

  It should wait for my answer before attempting a search. Queries with a whitespace before the/any "/" first result in a search because that can't possibly be a valid URL.

Time to check Bugzilla.

The malformed URL would've resulted in an error otherwise, with more or less the same result. That's why I leave out the scheme bit and just give them host/path, or mail them the URL. Non-technical users don't care for URLs (or anything with a precise structure), and figuring out how people fail is part of the art of user support (:

To be fair, they didn't say how popular. Maybe they just mean that it has been accepted as opposed to brought out-of-the-blue (it's just above YouTube Unblocker and the Reddit Enhancement Suite), but I get your point - it sounds a bit like marketspeak.

Remind me, what did we lose along with the status bar? AFAIK everything either pops up as needed or was moved to the menu/toolbars.

I don't think interface changes or "bloat" are what slows down Firefox's adoption. I've used it since 1.x and I'm actually eager to see the search bar merged with the address bar, since I already do all my searches with engine keywords ("az" for Amazon, "/" for Google, "w" for Wikipedia though it's my default engine, etc...).

Quoth Mozilla from TFA:

The "removal instructions" are just to drag the button out of sight, but the bug report asking for actual removal, quoth Manish Goregaokar [:manishearth]:

Degrees of damage. Hell, it's the oldest joke in the programmer's book:

1. Would you complain if this was an "Ask Slashdot", or taken from a respected programmer's blog? Does the name behind the thing matter that much?
2. Slashdot is now owned by Dice. The Golden Rule says the one with the gold makes the rules. You're free to seek greener pastures or linger on.

Unless they need you to be productive shortly, not in 2-3 months while you learn generic programming and STL/Boost.

Maybe this prototype won't be recovered, just like the Enterprise never reached space.

Instructions unclear - accidentally ate the whole thing. Having dreamy thoughts about how big I am getting.

You misspelled “cowboy user”.