ydavid

A similar question would be: What is your take on programming companies that won't give you the source code on projects that you paid for?

There are legitimate business reasons to do these things but if you want to avoid the situation, make sure to have it clearly stated before the project begins that you expect to have full rights to the source files. Even better, include it in the contract. Or have it written up clearly and agreed to in an email before the project starts.

And if you ever have a wedding, the same thing applies for your wedding video or wedding photos. Work it out ahead of time that you will actually own the raw video or photo files.

And don't be surprised if the prices that you're quoted go up when you ask for these things. Often, contractors will quote low prices knowing that they will make more money in the long run from followup work. It's not wrong for contractors to do that, but it feels dishonest when it's not clearly explained ahead of time exactly what you're getting when you pay for contract work.

The rumored version sounds much more interesting than the current one. The time required to test out a service using flash/ajax is just as long as the page takes to load. With an applet it probably takes a minimum commitment of at least 5-10 minutes to get the thing to install properly. And I hope that it's well-tested so that it doesn't conflict with any of my Firefox plugins...

An article linked from the realityprime.com article that you listed has an interesting quote:

Our mandate was to get usage," Guymon (note: Mel Guymon, Google's Head of 3D Operations [and former There.com developer and IMVU Co-Founder]) said of his business plan. "The difference from the startups I’ve been in is that startups have to turn a profit or die. All the projects in Google are run as startups, but we’re given an incredibly amount of rope to be successful. We’re not about to run out of money and die. For Google it’s the opportunity to get into a space that we think is really going to be important in the long term. For me personally, I think this is going to make people’s online experiences richer and more interesting. For generations coming up from age 4, this is what they expect. For Google, that was really the stake in the road"

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/07/google-announce.htm...

Any thoughts? To me it sounds like they're a bit undisciplined. I'm not sure that it's a recipe for success to just throw money at a project. Constraints often help shape a product in good ways. In this particular example, it could have been a good thing if they didn't have enough programming resources to build and test their own plugin. They would have had to live within the limitations of the flash plugin, but that tradeoff could prove in retrospect to have been well worth it.

Even IF Java had a flash-level 98%+ adoption rate, the UI experience with Java applets in the real world has never been good in my experience. There is an annoying startup time before the apps load, Java sometimes crashes my browser, and the most ridiculous thing of all is that the last few 'advanced 3d' apps that I've tried running display a horrific security warning message saying that the app is untrusted. Apparently you can sign the apps to remove the warning, but why is it that people aren't always doing that? Is there some huge fee that Sun charges to sign your apps? I'm sorry but I'm not willing to give an untrusted browser app full access to my file system. Flash doesn't allow full access PERIOD (which definitely limits its usefulness in some applications) and I don't have to even worry before trying a new app.

Anyhow, I still haven't seen any compelling reasons to use Java that are so incredible that they outweigh these serious shortcomings. I think it's just a total non-starter. And with Flash starting to now support hardware 3D acceleration with Flash 10, there is one less reason to use Java.

I don't understand why they didn't create the app using Flash 9. There are some really impressive 3-D apps using Flash 9 and if they used Flash, it would work on Macs and Linux also. does_not_make_sense . I honestly expected that if anything, google would come up with some cool tricks to make it work without requiring any plugins at all, even Flash.

Check out this amazing app called AlternativaPlatform (Disclaimer: They not friends of mine and I don't have any connection.) if you want to see what's possible for 3D using just regular Flash 9. It's the most impressive example that I've seen so far. The link goes to their blog, which contains a bunch of demos:

http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/

This is another really cool Flash 9 - based 3D app: http://ecodazoo.com/ (Disclaimer: No personal or financial connections here either.)

Maybe there are some technical requirements that I'm not aware of the necessitated using a custom plugin. Assuming that there was a good reason for it, why didn't they integrate it into an update for their Google Toolbar product or the Google Earth browser plugin? I'd be curious to hear any ideas on the subject.

It's pretty clear that our 'personal' information just isn't so personal anymore, so I think that it's a good idea for companies that use verification questions to be very careful to determine that the verification questions that they use for password reset or identification purposes contain truly 'private' information. It's scary when I call up a bank and I can get full access to my account by just giving my account number and my mother's maiden name. Isn't that information in a database somewhere? If I'm on facebook and my mom is on facebook, how hard is it to figure that out? Genealogy websites would probably also be a great help to dig up this info.

My other favorite verification questions are "Where were you born?" and "What's your birthday?". Hm... these are also Facebook profile questions, and they're also not so hard to dig up.

I thought that my social security number was private at least, but last week (no joke) I got a letter in the mail from UPenn saying that a university researcher's laptop containing my social security number had gone missing. fun fun.

My recommendation for web developers would be to rely on users having control of their email accounts and to not allow for "security questions." And if there is a problem with someone's email account being hacked, speak with the customer and use your common sense to resolve the situation. You can always just suspend the account pending the outcome of your 'investigation'. But please please don't outsource this 'investigation' task to people who lack communication skills and/or common sense. (e.g. PayPal, eTrade, Citibank & Dell)