Someone doesn't know their Java history. Oracle bought Java 16 years ago in 2010. At that time Sun had been working on Java 7 for over 4 years with no release date in sight. Oracle trimmed the fat and released Java 7 in less than a year. And since then has kept a regular release cadence. Sun would probably still be working on Java 7.
it wasn't about Oracle trimming the fat. Java 8 took 3 years to release and then Java 9 another 3 years.
They had to commit to half a year release cycles and LTRs every 2 years. Since then the releases became a lot more predictable. Whatever is not ready is not released (or is there as a preview feature).
This more agile approach is a lot better in my experience and we see that the changes made are more relevant and what people actually want.
I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?
Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, and that’s a tough spot to build in (and which partly accounts for both the fond and bad memories that both typically surface whenever Lotus Notes is mentioned).
You could put it another way: Every time Ray joined a new company he startet to reimplement Plato Notes/the idea of a synced database.
Groove Networks did that and its a shame that all thats left at Microsoft is OneDrive.
And if you look at the optic of Microsoft Teams, the small bar at the left, the tiles of the app part ... hello Notes my old friend/enemy
This. Any engineer or manager developing Notes at the time had to be aware of X.400 and X.500, and SMTP. They decided to ignore them. However cool and useful and clumsy Notes was, it was a proprietary walled garden. Lotus and the IBM hawked it, and surely profited. But for the customer it was an expense. Eventually Notes was overtaken by Metcalf’s Law, and the fact that cheaper always wins.
Sure, but Notes was built for a world where ccMail, MS Mail, and GroupWise were the main workgroup email systems.
Notes followed a similar pattern, with a proprietary "post office" system with optional gateways to larger x.400 / SMTP / UUCP / OfficeVision networks for those who needed them.
Going SMTP (or even x.400)-native from the start might have been a better choice in the long run, but that's only clear in retrospect - it certainly wasn't obvious at the time.
Yeah, Exchange is a good comparator because it shows what the mail aspect of Notes might have been like had it been designed in the mid 90s rather than the late 80s.
It's hard now to appreciate how different corporate IT was from the free-wheeling Internet world. The unexpected popularity of the web really did change everything.
in 1990 the internet was something talked about on your BBS as a mystical place you couldn't get access to except as a student. Lots of places had email, but it was unusual for anyone to be connected to any other system. Sometimes a BBS was part of fidonet, but that was rare (and there were many many less known networks).
Even if your typical big company did have a gateway for their internal email to other companies, odds are very few people used that gateway for business. If you wanted to communicate with somebody in a different company you dialed the phone or sent a fax.
On the other hand, anyone working on Notes would also be aware that its relationship with email is closer to today's Sharepoint than to today's Exchange. Email was one small aspect of a massive featureset; Notes was ahead of its time in terms of CRM/ERP/one-platform-for-everything that drives modern businesses like Oracle and Salesforce.
The Notes directory was based on X.500 - it had the same attributes etc. Notes didn't implement DAP, but then almost nobody did, which is why we got LDAP.
There was an add-on connector for X.400 mail. I remember installing it a couple of times. It was fine, if cumbersome due to the nature of X.400. ;-)
They also didn't ignore SMTP. There was a connector for it for Notes 4.0 and 4.1, and starting with Notes 4.5 that connector was bundled in the box. Starting with Release 5 they retired the connector and moved SMTP functionality to be native in the mail router process, and for security they provided a separate SMTP listener task. Both of these were configured in the Notes Directory via Server Documents and Configuration Documents, just like any other feature of the server. If a Domino server wasn't sending or receiving SMTP, it's because its administrator didn't want it to, not because it couldn't.
It wasn't a walled garden, or if it was the wall was very low. By comparison Microsoft's first attempt to dethrone Notes - Exchange Public Folders - was a completely walled garden. And a very well fertilised one which people avoided due to the smell.
But it's OK, Microsoft then gave us SharePoint. The fact that Microsoft's customers rushed to it tells you how bad Public Folders were. So your comment "That and, you know, Microsoft" is much closer to the truth than protocol support.
(Source: I was a Principle Certified Lotus Domino Administrator for multiple versions, and have used & administered Lotus Notes versions from version 3.33 through to 8.5. I worked at a consultancy and installed many, many implementations of Lotus Notes across a number of topologies. I also had an Exchange Server MCP and worked with multiple versions of that too.)
Usually, when someone talks about "starting from scratch" they mean "starting over from scratch," meaning throwing out something good enough in the hope of building something perfect.
This article is more about "first mover disadvantage" or "handicap of a head start" where an early implementation is leapfrogged by competitors that don't have legacy baggage.
I think they basically did (at one point, horrifyingly, there was a lotus notes based on Eclipse of all things), but yeah, article doesn’t mention it as far as I can see. Maybe they hit publish too early…
Always fun when NLNOTES crashed but the Eclipse wrapper kept running so things like tabs still worked but couldn't show any Notes tabs however web based tabs kept working.
The sad thing for me is that Notes’ core data model was really solid. As a rapid internal app dev platform it was ahead of its time in many ways. E.g. Microsoft’s sharepoint and power apps still cannot compete in terms of capabilities. IBM just didn’t know what to do with it.
>Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something?
In a way yes, IBM wanted notes to be an email clone. IBM took cc mail (I think) and shoehorned it into Lotus notes.
To me, that ruined Notes. If I get the versions numbers right, version 3 was great, IBM/Lotus came out with v4, which to me was a bit worse, and each new version was worse than the prior. Instead of focusing on emails, IBM should have focused on making notes servers easy to install and maintain and keep the application portion relevant.
By worse, it was the application portion that degraded. If you saw how cool the applications were with v3, you would wonder why Notes never became a "thing". Even third parties were creating applications for Notes at the time, some were very good. But to me IBM ruined that business by focusing on only Email part of Notes. Now AFAIK, there are no 3rd party applications for notes.
Maybe the company that bought notes from IBM is trying to get back to the roots, but I kind of doubt it.
The IBM Lotus Notes mail client and cc:Mail were developed independently by separate teams in different locations. Both were originally built by independent companies that were later acquired. cc:Mail was killed in 2000. IBM might have added some Notes features to achieve functional parity with cc:Mail and make it easier for customers to migrate.
I had the same reaction. I was particularly interested in "the dangers of starting from scratch" and it just turned out to be a history of lotus notes. I stopped reading about 80% of the way through, so perhaps they addressed that towards the end - but the title should have been different then.
Not saying it's not a problem, I actually don't know, but new CPU's are just old models with more improvements/tooling. Same with TV's. And cars. And clothes. Everything is. That's how improving things works. Running out of raw data doesn't mean running out of room for improvement. The data has been the same for the last 20 years, AI isn't new, things keep improving anyways.
Well from cars or CPUs its not expected for them to eventually reach AGI, they also don't eat a trillion dollar hole into us peasants pockets.
Sure, improvements can be made. But on a fundamental level, agents/LLMs can not reason (even though they love to act like they can). They are parrots learning words, these parrots wont ever invent new words once the list of words is exhausted though.
Meh. Good article but not sure it's globally relevant.
Spotlight is about personality. Some people are visible, outspoken, and in the spotlight, and impactful. Others are quiet, subdued, behind the scenes but impactful. Some of the best developers I've known have been on either end of the spectrum.
At the end of the day it's about impact. When the quiet guy gets the job done every time, people still notice. When the loud guy doesn't, people notice even more.
Sure, there are cases where one guy screams from the mountaintops about how much he has done and gets promoted. And there are cases where the quiet guy gets passed over no matter how well he does. But these always wash in the end unless you work for a supremely shitty company. And even then they tend to work themselves out in life eventually. Even if it sucks for the people involved at the time.
Impact is the name of the game. Loud or quiet is irrelevant.
> based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 people aged under one to 90, mapped neural connections and how they evolve during our lives.
That is an absurdly small sample size to make such a conclusion.
It seems this age range could at least partly be culturally attributed. In modern industrialized life, many people don't have to "grow up" until a later age. At the risk of generalizing, people have more support from family, friends, and society at large.
Is the forming of those neurons based on some natural law, or is that people just haven't had to live the experiences that do so until their 30's nowadays?
As far as I know, forming neurons isn't something that "just happens". It happens due to catalysts in life. In pre-modern society, and indeed most likely in under-industrialized nations today, those catalysts, those experiences, would happen earlier. As others mentioned, there is a clear correlation with the typical age in which modern society gets married, settles down, and has kids.
I wonder what that era age would have been 200+ years ago.
You require "statistical calculations" to support the notion that a sample size of 4000 people in two countries, two of the most modernized and affluent nations on the planet at that, is too small for a study to conclude how the human brain works across billions of people alive today across the world, Much less in human history? How about common sense?
Ok, let's do some math.
Approximately 108 to 117 billion humans are estimated to have lived in human history. Let's take 110 billion (the low end) for our purposes.
4,000 / 110,000,000,000 = 0.000003636%
Let's just go with people living today, which is approximately 8 billion (the low end).
4000 / 8 billion = 0.00005%
Not sure if that covers the "statistical" part of your requirement, but it covers the "calculations" part.
I myself would be hesitant to make claims about knowing how neurons and brains and ages work based on a sample size of pessimistically 0.000003636% or even optimistically 0.00005% of the human population and their brains.
Not sure why this is downvoted.
The authors themselves note that parenthood could be a catalyst for the change at 30-- in previous centuries, when parenthood happened much earlier, why could it not affect the brain's timeline? This study is simply descriptive of a particular dataset, a collection of snapshots at a particular time and place. Certainly the brain is elastic and responsive to external conditions.
What I noticed is that the 4000 samples are all from England and the U.S. Replicating this study with a greater geographical and socio-cultural diversity would be very useful in supporting or expanding these results.
There is another aspect that many people aren't discussing, the communication aspect.
For a medium to large organization with independent programs that need to talk to each other, Kafka provides an essential capability that would be much slower and higher risk with Postgres.
Standardizing the flow of information across an organization is difficult. Kafka is crucial for that. To achieve that in Postgres would require either a shared database which is inherently risky or would require a customized API for access which introduces another layer of performance bottleneck and build/maintenance cost and decreases development productivity/performance. So you have a double whammy of performance degradation with an API. And for multiple consumers operating against the same events (for example: write to storage, perform action, send to data lake), with a database you need a magnitude more access, so N*X with N being the number of consumers multiplied by the query to consume. With three consumers you're tripling your database queries, which adds up fast across topics. Now you need to start fixing indexes and creating views and other workload to keep performance optimal. And at some point you're just poorly recreating Kafka in a database.
The common denominator in every "which is better" debate is always use case. This article seems like it would primariy apply to small organizations or limited consumer need. And yea, at that point why are you using events in the first place? Use a single API or database and be done with it. This is where the buzzword thing is relevant. If you're using Kafka for your single team, single database, small organization, it's overkill.
Side note: Someone mentioned Postgres as an audit log. Oh god. Done it. It was a nightmare. Ended up migrating to pub/sub with long-term storage in Mongo. which solved significant performance issues. Audit log is inheritently write once read many. There is no advantage to storing in a relational database.
At my company there is a team like this who are solely responsible for a significant piece of internal infrastructure.
People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them exactly how to do it and that it does work.
Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of". Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.
I like the realistic idea of Duolingo. I know I'm not going to get fluent with it and I'm not trying to, but I do want a good app to expand vocabulary and basic structures that I can do in 30 minutes a day. And I'm a sucker for streaks, but not all the other gamification. I don't need gems or XP or potions, just a streak to form habits, which I am bad at and need that positive affirmation.
Does anyone know any alternative apps that achieve the same goals with less of the fluff?
This is really helpful. Every comment is about immersion, I get it people, but how do you achieve that in the real world. Most of those comments seem to ignore that fact that many people can't move to another country for a couple years and leaving their significant other to get a new one that natively speaks the desired language isn't a great suggestion. I understand those are the best ways to learn, but let me run that by my wife and kids and we'll see how that goes.
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