News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

leapingdog

Re:No More Icons in Every Menu by Default on Thursday October 22, 2026 @06:07AM (#50193385)
Making software accessible often has beneficial side-effects, like being more usable on crappy displays or bright lighting conditions.
I'm going to guess because they are expensive. Do Apple to on-site support like Dell, HP, et cetera?
Re:Java 27 Released on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @12:31PM (#49715011)
I don't think modern Java is a 'move fast ~and break things~' environment. It's a comparatively stable platform with an enviable focus on backwards compatibility. The maintainers have talked about "last mover's advantage" when it comes to introducing new language features. Java has a checkered history when it comes to novel programming language features, so I think this is good.

Granted, the maintainers are more inclined to deprecate and remove parts of the API than has historically been the case but it is mostly obsolete things like applets. And you may need to keep a close eye on runtime flags and their effects.

Re:Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @11:42AM (#49628399)
Sametime had to work in Java Applets so portability was key. IIRC our biggest customer was the Australian navy.

I was briefly what is now called a developer-in-test on Sametime after Lotus Development bought them. I was untrained in C++ so my bug reports for that API were frequently closed with the comment "No".

Re:Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @11:12AM (#49627906)
I worked in a group that reverse engineered the Lotus Notes database format.

We worked at Lotus Development, but we weren't from Iris or even in the USA. Notes was the golden goose & the risks from leaks were judged too high.

Re:Unified Arabic on Friday September 04, 2026 @11:31AM (#49566114)
I recall a team working on machine translation starting by translating English into a simpler form before translating that into the target languages. This was a couple of decades ago. Perhaps not a new idea even then.
I have unknowingly bought commercial desktop software that turned out to be Java + SQLite under the hood. Don't know what they were using for UI.
> Sadly Java did not take Smalltalk's FP inspiration (I guess they were strayed by C++'s lead in that regard)

You guess correctly. Java was easy for C++ developers to learn which was beneficial for adoption at the time.

I don't really disagree.

The software was released on 7 platforms, not counting multiple Windows versions. I don't know the risks or what platforms changes impact today or the test effort involved. I expect "it's still functioning as expected" was the default.

I may be misremembering a drunken conversation with a developer but IIRC the root cause was choice of cross-platform APIs available in early 2010s & the JSON file was tiny when introduced.
If GTA6 leaks they will not release this year & layoffs will follow.

Different era, but shades of the Half Life 2 leak.

Re:Warren Buffett dumps $1.7B of Amazon stock on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @01:40PM (#47064536)
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

This brings back some (unpleasant) memories.

But otherwise I admire the minimalism.

Re:Java.evolved: Java has evolved. Your code can too on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @01:20PM (#47064277)
Anything relying on beans for (de)serialization via reflection (XML; JSON) were the big incentive in the J2EE space if I recall correctly.
Re:Java.evolved: Java has evolved. Your code can too on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @12:26PM (#47063575)
Records [0] are a modern form of data transfer object. They are immutable though.

[0] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/language/records.h...

Re:Find a pub that needs you on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @03:50PM (#46623133)
England & Wales only. The website is a response to new business rates (taxes) arriving this year.

Scotland, Northern Ireland & the rest of the world play by different rules.

Re:Find a pub that needs you on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @03:47PM (#46623064)
Re:Notepad on Windows 11: Can't Open New Text Document.txt on Monday September 22, 2025 @08:52AM (#45332732)
If I recall correctly Microsoft have always used Notepad as a test bed for new Windows APIs.
I understand your pessimism but believe IPv6 is coming.

I worked on network management software, the kind of software that runs on out of band networks that are unlikely to ever need IPv6. In the beginning IPv6 was a required feature for sales but it was accepted that no one was going to use it so little effort was put into testing it. More recently, it HAS to work. It is being used in anger internally in large telecoms companies.

I expect adoption to proceed at a glacial pace until some tipping point. Consumer ISPs will be the last to adopt it.

Re:Losing the War on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @12:05PM (#44813845)
I think it is fair to say that the USA rediscovered war fever after the attacks on home soil. It resulted in the land invasion of two countries.

> There's a phrase people sometimes use about a nation's collective reaction to events like Pearl Harbor -- war fever. We don't know what a true war fever feels like today, since nothing in our recent history compares with it; even a popular war like the gulf war was preceded by months of solemn debate and a narrow vote in Congress approving military action.

I was unfamiliar with the author but when I read this bit I started hunting for a publication date - 1997.

Re:The Great Egg Heist on Sunday June 22, 2025 @01:44PM (#44348744)
Matt Stoller claims that the USA's problems with egg prices are a result of a European duopoly on hen breeding and USA cartels leveraging exclusivity agreements. I have no way of knowing if that is true or not.
If the data centre is coastal then desalination might be an extra step. A salt water heat exchanger might do the job.
Re:Why Drinking Coffee in Iran Has Become So Complicated on Tuesday April 22, 2025 @12:21PM (#43763831)
> Want a fridge? Good luck in market research.

If paralysed by consumer choice I would lean on Which?[0] magazine which is run by the Consumers' Association charity. Perhaps there is something similar in your geography.

> In my student time. There was a shop where we bought "Beer", "Cognac" or "Vodka", with corresponding simple labels.

This reminds me of the grocery store in the film Repo Man[1] which had a few digs at consumerism. I prefer to know where my alcohol is from & who made it but I pass no judgement.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which%3F [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo_Man_(film)

Re:IPv6 Is Hard on Sunday February 16, 2025 @03:29PM (#43071370)
They're using it internally. It's probably for the best that the last place they test it on is their customers.
Re:IPv6 Is Hard on Sunday February 16, 2025 @03:12PM (#43071231)
Change at tier one telecoms providers tends to be glacial. It follows hardware upgrade cycles that take ages to plan and implement.

I spent a decade writing element management systems. An element is a network device - switch, router, ROADM, etc. Often you give the customer kit & software and they spend a couple of years assessing it. This software would be installed on secure out of band networks with no route to the internet. 10/8 would have been adequate for the lifetime of the hardware currently in service - 200G stuff. However, that's not how things played out.

When I started working on EMS software IPv6 support was a requirement but it was just a box ticking exercise. No one was actually going to use it. A decade later IPv6 HAD to work for northbound and southbound traffic, on an internal network. Otherwise, no sale. IPv6 is being used in anger in telecoms. I have no idea how long that will take to filter to in band networks.

Re:Bunkers in Albania on Thursday January 23, 2025 @11:52AM (#42805625)
I witnessed some of those bunkers on a day trip to [0]Butrint. The tour guide told us they were constantly being told the country was on the cusp of foreign invasion during the dictatorship.

The locals had painted the domes in bright colours as a sort of added tourist attraction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butrint

In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland a number of banks issue bank notes. These banks print their own money because it is cheaper than paying the Bank of England for their notes.
Re:Java String.format vs. MessageFormat on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @04:20PM (#41113718)
The release of Java coincided with the rise of the internet. It wasn't just write once, run everywhere, it meant global interoperability. Mistakes were made of course.
Re:Java String.format vs. MessageFormat on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @02:55PM (#41112857)
String.format is much newer - it wasn't introduced until JDK 1.5.

The choice expression is intended to account for different I18N language conventions. Imagine a language where pluralization works differently to none/one/plural. If you don't work on localized applications you can mostly ignore the MessageFormat type.

MessageFormat is often used in conjunction with ResourceBundle and properties files. The string is likely externalized and distributed to translators. That's probably not the case for String.format strings.

In real life you would typically just have "File count: " and concatenate a number. Translators weren't wild about it but they could work with it. Translators are typically not programmers and many would break any complex expression.

All the types in java.text are a bit archaic. They are basically impossible to reuse in a thread-safe manner. MessageFormat delegates a bunch of other Format instances. There's a lot of parsing and state there. Time zone handling is awkward.

I agree about the error-prone nature of this approach. I have written a library[0] that verifies MessageFormat syntax in properties files at compile time and generates typed methods for each property.

[0] https://github.com/autores-uk/autores

Re:Is Java Still Relevant Nowadays? on Friday July 26, 2024 @05:58PM (#41082685)
Appreciate the answer.
Re:Is Java Still Relevant Nowadays? on Friday July 26, 2024 @05:54PM (#41082655)
Saying Java is terrible has been a thing since Java first came out.

"It's strings aren't even mutable." - some C++ programmers.

Older »