I was a Lotus Notes developer for more than 10 years. The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing. I started with Notes 4.5, IIRC, and ended my time around Notes 8.
The first few years were a little heavy on RAM usage, so people thought it was slow. To give you some context, this was back when 16 MB (megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM was a thing. But as RAM increased, Notes was no longer a problem.
For example, Lotus Notes 8, which I still have on my personal PC, uses about 11 MB just after starting. Then it adds roughly 10 MB for each "app" you open. Today, Outlook alone uses around 170 MB just after starting.
It was incredibly powerful. And migrating a Domino server was incredibly easy. Basically, you just copied the DATA folder. I remember doing this when we migrated from Windows 2000/2003 to AIX.
In the same way, the Notes client was basically a portable app. You could just copy the NOTES and DATA folder, edit notes.ini, and have it running.
> The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing.
It is. And it's the main thing why my boss does not understand why rebuilding databases takes so much time. For him its just a little thing, some fields and off you go...
Unfortunately it is possible for databases to be copied, mixed and matched and deployed somewhere else resulting i a pile of duplicated databases without structure.
I don't get it, why can't they just change the region in the settings?
I was able to on my LG. Nice TV, worst firmware ever. It had an issue with Wifi. It basically will not connect once or so a week. You needed to change, you guess it, the region. So I will keep changing from Germany to Spain to Ireland to Germany to Etc. I sent pictures, videos, emails, links to youtube videos to LG support, they wouldn't care, they would just deny it. In the end I bought a Fire TV Max and that was it. But what a horrible support experience LG never again.
"This project was born out of accidentally changing the area option to EU in the EZ-Adjust service menu on a US TV. The factorymanager binary enforces a region lock (geolock) that prevents reverting the area code — even through the same EZ-Adjust menu that was used to change it"
Sounds like service mode shenanigans. I'm curious though - does switching the TV to EU even do anything 'better' privacy-wise or anything, or do you just get trapped in that 'region' for services?
Similarly for me. My dad bought a fully expanded TI-99/4A from a friend who was selling it to buy a C64. On the TI, I learned LOGO and then BASIC, and played Parsec, BurgerTime, and others. Cartridges were super expensive in my home country.
A few years later, we traveled to New York and bought an IBM PC XT with a 20 MB (yes, MB!) hard drive, 640 KB of RAM, a floppy drive, and a CGA monitor. At the time, IBM had already announced the IBM PC AT with a 286 CPU, and Compaq was already selling clones.
I adored that thing (coming from a ZX Speccy it felt like a proper computer), I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years.
> [...] I've considered buying/tracking down a non functional one and putting a high performance ITX build into it a few times over the years.
I'd buy a classic keyboard case x86 (with PCMCIA card slot, Enhanced Personal Computer Keyboard layout plus integrated trackball), preferably made to last, made out of metal. Sadly, no one makes decent cases for something like a Vortex86. It's either weird mini towers to appeal to the nostalgia of the Old Breed, or cheap 3D-printed contraptions in the vein of stompboxes (for MiSTer implementations). Sad.
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