**NEM requires Java 8**.
Seriously? Soooo.. There is no real intention for this coin to be used by the general public for quite some time to come? I know programmers just love to play with shiny new things but someone should have smacked them upside the head and said a big fat no to that one.
You can install Java 8 just like 7. We provided a link too so what is your problem?
You're the first one to complain so you might not want to talk about the "general public" here.
I'm probably the first one to complain because I'm not part of the crypto community and have spent the last decade marketing shit to the general public.. I spent a decade before that managing programmers and keeping them inline so that the products they created could actually be used by people and not just "techies". The general public has a hard time programming their DVD players.. Of those in the general public that have java 7 installed on their computers they probably only have it cause their kids did it so they could play minecraft. You have to create things that someone who is practically "brain dead" can actually use.
Every single coin out there has these sorts of problem, no thought to actually catering to the general public. They just "hope" that they'll somehow come on board. Everything I read on this forum is all about catering to the community and of course the markets. The first coin that will actually focus on catering to the general public will actually have the chance to "win". I'm not picking on NEM, as I said all the coins suffer from this problem. It would just be nice to see one that actually thinks seriously about it before hand and doesn't put roadblocks in their way.
Have to say I agree. The minute java update pops up my mom closes it and tells me whatever she is trying to run is broken and I need to remote in and fix it. The average computer probably has java 1.6 and possibly 1.7. You can say "hey we provided a link" all you want, and that is a valid response, but the average joe ain't gonna navigate that. If they click it, and firefox asks "what do you want to do with this?", and they say "open" and it doesn't involve a couple clicks before the interface is in front of them, they'll roll over, and that's a fact. I do a lot of pc repair and builds for my community and I promise you the average person can't handle installing a new jdk, as ridiculous as it sounds to you and I. If you want to keep it a geek only cost of entry totally fine, just accept that is what you have done.
Also, what features in the 1.8 JDK are we using that we actually need? Are we coding to the new API or are we just saying "for some reason it seems like it only runs on 1.8 because we get a stack trace and we don't investigate it"? I'll accept that as a valid response if there is some UI based objects that really make our lives easier in 1.8. When I compared 1.6 to 1.7 for our dev shop there was like one deal breaker feature we needed (granted our code was business objects and not UI heavy).