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Thank you for that reference. Paul Lutus is a childhood hero.

I've been writing code professionally for 25 years. You're not alone. It does get worse. Junior programmers just don't get it and jump into management before they have a chance to.

"Fortune favors the prepared mind." - derived as to still be relevant (I personally think) from Pasteur's "In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind."

> On the other hand, doing the taxes was not at all complicated and I got proper help

Tax collection is relentless and very efficient - they act is if it was THEIR money. France can borrow at very little interest rate because it is known that it will repay its debts, it can collect the money for it.

I think it does. People raised on farms have less allergies than the rest of the general population [citation needed but I'm lazy]

Kids need to play outside, in the dirt, interact with live animals and other kids and be exposed to a lot of different food when they're young and later on in life as well.

One YT view leading to an other, I ran into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jRgpTp8pR8

7400 logic CPU, running a port of Minix, C compiler, assembler, TCP/IP stack, apps, etc...

Yes - a recommended read. In a similar vein: http://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/

Nice - who needs 8K. 8. K. I haven't even updated to 4K. I don't think I have anything that runs 1080p.

First computer was a PC1211. Then I got an ORIC ATMOS and an Atari ST. Never really had a chance to play with an Amiga and couldn't buy it (a bit pricey - although maybe an other way to play that hand would have been to save the money spent in other computers to only buy the Amiga. But at that rate, I'd probably still be waiting for something better to come around.

"The Future Was Here" really got me to understand what was so great about the Amiga (because, the ST also had the Boing demo - but the sound wasn't as nice.)

One can read "The Future Was Here", to learn more about the platform and its contributors. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here - there's also an accompanying website: http://amiga.filfre.net

Note that the Platform Studies series (http://www.platformstudies.com) has exciting upcoming stuff.

The Atmos is the second machine I learned how to code on.

Wow - this is really taking the Oric far. Looks like I found one project to take a close look at while on vacations.

Many thanks for sharing this here!

Also note, an other cool project: http://moxielogic.org/blog/ (a ex co-worker.)

"Moxie is a general purpose bi-endian load-store processor, with sixteen 32-bit general purpose registers and a comprehensive ISA consisting of two-operand variable width instructions. There are moxie implementations that run on both Altera and Xilinx FPGA architectures, a number of simulator ports (including QEMU), and a complete GNU toolchain for C/C++ development."

Contains the famous ``Too big for Excel is not "Big Data".''

I hear the hum as well sometimes, in different locations (my home office, separate from the house - here I can hear it during the day) or in the house, at night. When heard, if I move my head a little bit, the sounds goes away and usually comes back a second later. I thought this was a nearby engine/motor (there are a lot of houses with installed heat pumps in the neighborhood), but as I've read the Wikipedia article, my money is now on tinnitus.

I've been running a FFY analyzer when I hear it and it's never been able to pick anything up actually airborne, nor any vibration through anything solid that would be picked up by a microphone.

There's some white caps but not a whole lot. Wind speed at sea level might have been around 8 to 11m/s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort_scale

Sucker's better: Neither suckers nor spies.

Pigeons get plucked. The sentence roughly translates into "Neither fools nor spies.".

Has a bit of "you're not worthy" feel that surfaced as satirical couple pages built in the mid 2000 (I don't think they are still around.) It was listing pumped-up exceptional characteristics of Apple products and mentioning that as not being worthy they probably wouldn't even take your order ;-)

Yes - also:

"The concept was pitched for the reopening of the Maison de la Radio, French’s principal and historical radio building situated in the heart of Paris."

\o/ - everybody loves Maison de la Radio, home of the excellent French radio public broadcasting (France Inter, France Musique and especially France Culture - which is some serious public broadcasting with no compromise on quality.)

I agree - how old are your kids and how did you get them started in being interested with 8-bit systems?

The part related to floating point optimization is really cool.

Ah - I've always ignored the existence of a 6501.

I've had the privilege to write an article for the Dr Dobb's journal (print edition) Hard to describe how proud I was of that (of course, I received a ton of help from awesome the coworkers I had at the time.)

Salaries are very depressed. Experienced engineers outside of Paris make 45K top, when you live in Paris you get a 30% salary increase for the cost of living. Payroll wise: take what you pay someone, multiply by two, that's what you actually have to front: half goes to the worker (who will be heavily taxed) and the rest is tax. Taxation is pure confiscation here.

> they really don't speak English ;-)

I see it slowly changing - I blame this on how good American TV has become now (I'm taking about the series of course.)

> and I would still choose it for every device I own, but the choice should be there.

What prevents you from using a different search app? Or am I missing your point?

> 3.5 inch floppies with a hole punched in the corner to make them high density

I don't remember that. I remember the trick of punching a hole in a 5¼ to make it double sided though.

I cast aside written French input. I still had to produce output. And I did learn, under supervision, how to write well during these years; using French as a target language but that knowledge has proven to be highly re-usable. I'm lost writing correct French without a spell checker.

Your blog is answering so many young adult-hood questions I had about many things Atari, it's unbelievable.

Indeed - it makes a few broadcasts palatable. I don't think that option is widely used though and I'd say mostly by people who don't speak French.