I assumed the timer was there to prevent clicking Install by accident.
Popup dialogs may appear right "above" something else you were clicking on, or while you're typing; hitting Enter, or Escape, which then causes the dialog to eat the input and vanish.
Putting a dialog on cooldown like that would be interesting UX behavior. So if a dialog receives input < 1 sec after creation, it would discard the input and put itself on a cooldown timer, like that install dialog, or you could just change the context and avoid popups altoghether.
PS: I'd mark my post Off-Topic/Digression/UX if HN had that option.
For the same reason Facebook puts a big loud warning in the developer console. People will follow any instructions they're given. "Press ctrl+shift+I and paste this in the box and you'll get a free puppy" "Put this in your address bar and your crush will be revealed" "Go to about:config and double click this thing, and then click this link and we'll show you nearby singles that want to hook up"
Firefox add-ons essentially have full, unrestricted access to your computer. Locking this down good and well is pretty important.
Non-technical users do not use sudo, but they do use a web browser. Do you think Facebook add this JavaScript console warning for no reason at all?
.d8888b. 888 888
d88P Y88b 888 888
Y88b. 888 888 This is a browser feature intended for
"Y888b. 888888 .d88b. 88888b. 888 developers. If someone told you to copy-paste
"Y88b. 888 d88""88b 888 "88b 888 something here to enable a Facebook feature
"888 888 888 888 888 888 Y8P or "hack" someone's account, it is a
Y88b d88P Y88b. Y88..88P 888 d88P scam and will give them access to your
"Y8888P" "Y888 "Y88P" 88888P" 888 Facebook account.
888
888
888
I think this is unnecessary, especially in the land of FLOSS licensed software where the developer disclaims any and all warranties.
Developers should focus on usability, and not on idiot-proofing software.
There is no way to guard against users installing malware themselves. No matter what kind of safeguards and check summing and signing you use for your application once a program has full access to a machine it can do anything, including bypass your safeties.
You can't fight user stupidity. In doing so developers do a disservice to their regular users. (The way Chorme prevents this issue is exactly an example of this because the app is no longer portable) No matter what kind of padding you add, stupid users will still manage to hurt themselves in the most unexpected and unimaginable ways.
I really despise this trend stared in the US and the rest of the western world where idiots sue companies for the effects of their own idiocy and this results in all kinds of redundant warnings on products that just serve to guard the manufacturer from stupid lawsuits.
We should not strive so much to go against natural selection. Darwin awards exist for a reason.
Firefox actually has additional protection against such attacks. Minor annoyance for developers (who may not even hit it if they use the console regularly), but helps mitigate such attacks quite a bit.
> Non-technical users do not use sudo, but they do use a web browser.
Your casual casting of a swath of the population as "non-technical" notwithstanding, the point is still sound: why do you think that it's worth gutting this feature as a safeguard against someone being fooled into navigating to "about:config" but not worth removing sudo for the same reason?
If someone can be persuaded to abuse "about:config", why not sudo?
90% of web users are on Windows, where there is no sudo. Malicious add-ons make money by injecting ads, overriding default search engine settings, capturing login credentials or even local files, or installing zombie spam relays. sudo is unnecessary for these attacks. How does one make money with sudo?
And as for locking down sudo, OS X is now "rootless" (System Integrity Protection) by default, preventing even sudo access from modifying some system settings.
> 90% of web users are on Windows, where there is no sudo.
This argument is becoming increasingly specious.
Firefox is the default browser on Ubuntu, where there is sudo. So do you acknowledge that it is consistent to keep this preference in at least the linux version of FF?
Oh you're right! We need EME'd web assembly so Facebook can hide everything behind a proprietary binary blob. THEN the user will really be free from themselves and their own stupidity. \s
> Mozilla was in the best position to pursue FFOS in the purest possible manner
Well, maybe philosophically, but they didn't have enough influence, money, or manpower to actually make it successful. The first version of FXOS shipped without a calculator app because they couldn't work all of the bugs out. Clipboard support didn't make it until sometime around v2 or 2.5. Apps never got API support for things like front-facing cameras or bluetooth, or even access to which wifi networks were available. One constant complaint was that the Alarm app would sometimes go off at the wrong time, and sometimes not at all.
There's also other components to FXOS that simply weren't free software. The everything.me integration (which was a for-profit service baked in) was truly abhorrent. Hardware vendors refused to provide open drivers in many cases, leading to chunks of FXOS not being open source. Operators and carriers insisted on installing their own crapware on devices and forced the OS to lock them down so they couldn't be uninstalled. At the end of the day, FXOS as it was sold wasn't nearly as free as it was made out to be.
I don't want to pick on Mozilla, but despite having a great vision for FXOS they ultimately were vastly underprepared to build a solid mobile operating system. Even worse, Gary Kovacs bet the farm on FXOS and let Firefox proper rot in a corner.
You really make a tradeoff with FOSS. You can have software that's free in the most pure way possible, but it's ultimately going to be terrible unless the company putting it out is fiscally incentivized to make it great. If Acadine keeps FXOS as open as it is today, that's still a great win for the community and probably most of the users.
I'm not familiar with everything.me... I had the Flame (and now a flashed-by-me LG Nexus 5), so maybe I never saw that integration.
All the things you mentioned are true though -- it did have it's slew of problems, but the beauty is that most of those things are fixed now :)
Mozilla didn't have what it takes to bring up a mobile operating system, but I'm glad they had what it took to start it -- It has a life of it's own now (as I've previously said)
Highly doubt Acadine will have what it takes to put FFOS on par with Android and iOS (mostly because I don't think any company does) -- so it feels like they lose both on the philosophical and practical ends.
This is excellent, honestly. We recently moved a few billion requests each month behind CloudFlare and our metrics show that our median user (in terms of load time) had their assets loaded almost 40% faster. It's also worth noting that CloudFlare is the only reputable CDN that currently supports SPDY, and is (purportedly) actively working to turn on HTTP/2. Compare that to a company like Akamai that's still advertising Edge Side Includes like they're new and innovative and the year is 2004.
Elsewhere in the manual it seems to imply that formulas can include arbitrary Emacs Lisp functions, which would make it quite easy to implement a virus as there appears to be no sandboxing. What it probably means is that viruses written for other spreadsheet implementations won't work on it.
Edit: never mind; I read further and it does do some sandboxing based on the same whitelisting principles as directory-local variable settings. Very clever.
I really love this. When I was young, I was really excited to learn to play the piano. The biggest problem I had was being able to read the sheet music. It was incredibly difficult for me to read and understand the notes for both hands at the same time. A big part of this was that when individual notes were off the normal staff (e.g., C is below the staff), you either had to have an innate sense of how far from the staff it was and what note that corresponded to, or you had to stop playing and count to see which note it was. This seems to solve all of those problems.
I suppose one could also say "if you can learn to sight-read a novel you can learn to sight-read music" and it might be true but I think there is a certain natural ability prerequisite. I played in school concert bands for four years and could never manage to sight-read anything very complicated. Practicing was a chore and when we got new music I always had to sit and pick through it very slowly measure-by-measure until I figured out how it was supposed to sound. Once I knew that, I could "read" the music but I could never play a new piece on first sight. I knew all the notation but I could not look at a new piece of music and "hear" it in my head.. It felt more like trying to read a book letter by letter. I never was able to really see "words" and "sentences". By the time I quit I really just hated everything about it.
I also had tremendous difficulty learning basic addition, subtraction, and multiplication facts compared to most of my friends. And I don't play video games.
I do enjoy listening to music quite a bit, but I think I am a person who doesn't have an ability to play it.
There are two factors - an individual difference and a general matter.
In general, musical sight reading requires specific practice most people are not exposed to. Even if you play instruments fairly well, sight-reading practice is not something you implicitly pick up. I play piano for hobby over 30 years, took lessons time to time, but it's only recently I consciously started practicing sight reading and the effect is remarkable. It's a very specific exercise, different from just practicing a piece.
And there is the individual difference. My son is very visually-oriented, that he can make sense complicated figure at one look, but he's having hard time reading long sentences. Some people may just not good at read music.
I chose "flash cards and multiplication tables" as an example for a reason and I find your response fascinating. Thank you.
I will state that group instruction via band class at certain ages is perhaps the worst possible way to develop a love for something ("practicing was a chore...")
I too started note by note, then measure by measure. I felt like a total idiot! Gradually it became "phrase by phrase" and then turned into this surreal feeling where my eyes wander a few bars ahead and somehow my hands catch up in time. I wish everyone could experience that. I was just SO clumsy at first and I started SO late. I'm SURE you could do it given practice.
Not in the usual sense. If there is such a think as numeric dyslexia I might have that to some degree. I frequently transpose digits. I have trained myself to be very careful whenever I have to transcribe a number, fill out forms, or even dial a phone number. I find it helps to look at numbers in groups (pairs or triplets) rather than individually. I don't recall every trying that with music...
But I don't have any difficulty with reading text, and enjoyed reading a lot as a kid so in that sense I am not dyslexic.
tl;dr don't cripple yourself with substandard notation when it takes 2 weeks to learn it.
You shouldn't be counting.
Any decent pedagogical training is going to introduce the lower and higher notes one at a time. And 'decent' can include self learning. Have some patience and don't try to jump into advanced things right off. You will just learn bad habits.
Say you know by sight all the notes g below middle c. The next exercise should introduce the f below middle c. When you see it it will be the one and only note you haven't trained on, and before you know it it will be trained into your muscle memory. Soon you will just see all the notes and know what it is. No counting required.
We are talking a couple of weeks here. A note a day, say, will get you pretty far - scores almost always change clefs before going 14 semitones above/below the staff.
Some people will do anything to avoid learning in a disciplined manner, and then spend years never advancing or fighting their bad technique. Take a bit of time, and the world of music is opened up to you.
Analogy - imagine somebody asks you to teach them how to pitch (baseball). You ask to see their current throw and it is some weird, lurchy, shot put type of throw. You show them a standard over shoulder release. They say no, they want to keep their current style, and maybe, just maybe, over many months, first remove some part of the weird lurch. In six months, then maybe they'll raise their hand a few inches. After that is working over several months, then maybe they'll start moving their hand behind their shoulder just a bit. Why, in just 10 years they'll be able to throw a ball!
It's crazy. If you want to pitch a baseball, just learn the movement that is required. If you want to play piano, learn how to hold your hands, and learn to read the music on sight. If you want to play guitar, learn the correct way to hold the strings with the left hand, and learn the proper plucking/fingering of the strings with the right hand. Etc. It's a few weeks of boredom, followed by a life time of being able to play.
actually I find it very zen, and love to go back to the beginning exercises, seeking absolute, unthinking perfection, letting each note ring for several seconds. Learned that from reading about Horowitz, and it works. But it is a bit much to expect 'zen' from a beginner that just wants to play some Billy Joel tune. To them I say Billy Joel did this to get the skill to play his songs, and you are probably not more a natural genius than he is, so you probably can't skip over what he had to do.
What you say is not wrong but it's just not that simple for some people. In my case I did start with the basics, learned to play all the notes and could tell you any fact that the written music represented. The note, whether it was sharp or flat, the fingering to play it on my horn, the meter, the tempo, whether to play staccato or legato, fortissimo or piano, etc. but after four years as a kid I was never able to put it all together at tempo on sight. Once I had learned the piece yes I could use the written music as a reference and play it. But never on first sight. And I really don't think it had anything to do with the notation.
