I don't think it's fair to assume an ex-employee knows the details of the software licenses or where to find them. If he knows more concrete details (like a link to the license file) I imagine he would share, but otherwise invoking NDA is a safety measure to avoid sharing potentially incorrect/outdated info.
Getting involved in the community of open source software is a good strategy. If you can prove your technical chops along with being friendly and open to giving and receiving feedback you'll make good professional contacts.
Why would FedEx require users to enable Flash as "run always?" Is there really not a better solution available to simply whitelist their site or be given a pop-up in Chrome asking to enable it temporarily?
Who knows, but my best guess is that it was the easiest set of instructions to give. The more complicated you get, the less likely anyone is to actually do it.
It actually irks me a bit about Chrome/Firefox. I understand they want to kill these addons. But I still unfortunately am forced to use sites that require Java and/or Flash. I'm just grateful MS still has the older version of IE available in Win10 so I can get these important things done.
One example: website which uses USB crypto tokens for digital signatures. In Kazakhstan (and, I guess, many other countries) every citizen can get digital certificate, signed by government CA and use it to sign electronic documents. It's used for many government internet services, for example. But there's no API even in modern browsers, to work with USB devices, so Java applet is one way to do it.
That said, Java applets are effectively dead, so government services now require installing and running separate program which listens at localhost for connections from browser. Honestly, it doesn't look like a big win for me, more like a big loose, from a security point. But here we go.
Those are rumors. Currently Internet in Kazakhstan works fine without installing any certificates. I wouldn't be surprised, if they would do it, but not yet.
And, yes, those certificates are unrelated, AFAIK.
Don't know about the original poster, but there are still a ton of crappy managed switches/APs/other embedded devices that use Java applets for configuration in operation.
In a past life, I had to keep two different browser installs, each with a different JVM version in obsolete browsers, aside from my "real" browser to deal with crap like that.
I just had to help someone enable Java applets earlier this week, in order to take an online typing test required by a temp agency. At some companies, it seems the 1990's never stopped happening. :/
Those are probably ancient corporate tools, either made in-house or by some 3rd party that won't update to newer technology without enough of a monetary incentive.
We're always happy to talk about personal experiences removing Java and never regretting it.
I've been through multiple attempts at doing it in an enterprise, one in January this year, and it always ends with the determination that Java applets are critical to websites used by the business and not going anywhere. Healthcare portals are a big offender.
Education. A lot of science simulations I would use for my classes are Java Applets. Also the equation editor I have to use for creating tests (yes it's web based...) is a java applet.
It's a total nightmare because most of it is abandonware or is still for sale but unmaintained!
I guess digital signature, mostly. Signing documents without your private key leaving the computer. It's not something you can do easily cross-browser.
And that Java app is basically just a web server, which they could rewrite in node or ruby and then I wouldn't need a JVM on my machine any more just to configure my router.
If FedEx relies on opening a .swf file directly in a new window, you need to select Run Always, because Google apparently doesn't give a shit about doing things right and made it so no amount of whitelisting will allow it to run .swf files directly (instead it just downloads the .swf).
No, they really aren't. If a site opens a .swf file in a new window, Chrome should behave exactly as though it opened an HTML page that embedded the SWF, i.e. letting me approve it, and playing it if I've whitelisted the domain. Instead it will always download the SWF if you have your Flash content settings set to anything else besides Run Always. It's really stupid and it means I have to keep Flash enabled globally (which I really don't want to do) simply because Google doesn't care enough to handle edge cases properly.
I would rather know where flash beings and ends and have to jump through hoops. Actually I would prefer it never run at all ever. Flash not run is "right".
There have been too many security flaws where Flash would allow remote execution of arbitrary code, and that eventually means viruses. If my family gets a virus, then I am on the hook for it.
Yes, this is precisely why Chrome's current behavior is awful. It's forcing me to set Flash to "Run Always", which is a security and privacy problem, simply because one site I use opens .swf files in new windows instead of embedding them in HTML pages.
Techmeme mostly has human curation and a little bit of automation, though it is hard to tell from the outside how much that factors in. Human curators also rename article titles to provide a summary of the contents in an attempt to save you a click if you don't want more detailed information.
A solution: everyone is sequentially numbered. Evens rotate left one round, odds rotate right the next round. That way everyone has to move the same amount (assuming an even number of participants).
That might be valid for most apps or services, but I don't think Facebook needs to worry about their app rating too much. It's almost a required app for most people. Not to mention the rating on the main app took a pretty heavy dive when they separated Messenger out anyway.
I think the problem is that they have "blockers" that aren't quick to solve, and in the meantime other areas of the company are doing all of what you said.
Perceived blockers for a mainstream release:
* Wireless headset with feature parity of the current wired headset
* A large amount of VR content that doesn't require hacking configuration files or video drivers to work
* Minimal-to-no hardware upgrades for consumers after the purchase
I'm with you that I would rather see a release sooner than later, but I'm not a normal consumer. You aren't going to attract users if they need to spend more money or spend time changing their machines to make VR work.
I don't think there is any way around the hardware requirement if you want any kind of decent graphics experience. You need to calculate each scene twice (once for each eye), otherwise you're not going to get stereo vision.
And unless you want to view your minecraft world in 3D, that's going to result in hefty hardware requirements.
Definitely. The target specs[1] they announced are pretty beefy: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater, Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater, and 8GB+ RAM. However, now that there is a target that means that tech will only continue to get cheaper/better from this point forward, so the longer a consumer waits to purchase the Rift the less likely it will be that they need to upgrade their hardware to use it.
I assume "composite views" -> "playlists." I have a 3,200 song playlist that takes 5-10 seconds to load, whereas it was <1 second prior to the latest update. Maybe it was caching a local copy and now it always pulls from the server?
You seem a bit confused as to what the target audience for this is - not unexpected given the single day the project has been online, but a topic worth discussing nonetheless. Your initial demo is to control a mouse on a Windows desktop, but in the README it states that Android will receive the first release since "desktop apps are virtually dead now." I won't pretend to know what platform this idea might take off on, and I think picking Java gave you a good set of choices, but you should nail down your stance so you and the people interested know where the project is headed.
Check out Notch's Twitch broadcast history[1]. Since Mojang was sold he has been playing a variety of games, but scroll down a bit and it mostly turns into live programming and Team Fortress 2.
The earliest broadcast is titled "Notch: Creator of Minecraft," from August 2011. Minecraft was released in 2009. So those videos aren't really evidence one way or the other in regards to what I'm saying: people who do big solo projects don't seem to play many games during the time they're hammering out features. And while Notch's LD sprints are impressive, he hasn't really shipped a big project since Minecraft.
Whoops, I just noticed I phrased my original comment like "I wonder how many games Notch plays" (present tense) which is exactly what you showed. I meant to phrase it in past tense. Sorry, that was my bad.
Notch had handed over the vast majority of Minecraft development to Jeb at that point so its not surprising that he was playing so much TF2. I doubt he was playing as much when he was the sole developer.
