kryptonomist

Reminder for French-speaking readers: you have access to over 23,000 scanned computer magazines on Abandonware Magazines, including many about video games.

https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/

Though the Atari ST was a superior machine.

According to users of the Kaypro II from that time, it was a very robust machine. It was even used on the 1984 Paris Dakar edition.

So, LZEXE was written on an Amstrad PC1512 (of course in 8086 assembly).

One of the best pieces of advice about software engineering as well.

"The A1200 is essentially a Linux single-board computer running emulation, possibly one of the UAE (Ultimate Amiga Emulators) that have been around for decades. What makes The A1200 different from just building your own with a Raspberry Pi is that we get a full-sized recreation of the Amiga 1200, and that includes a working keyboard. "

One great musician to listen to during late coding sessions.

"Can we use a distributed database instead? If the answer is ‘Yes’, why go for blockchain at all? Indeed, blockchain is slower and more resource-intensive."

The key factor when assessing a blockchain project is indeed to see what is the advantage of a blockchain vs a usual database.

Most of the time, there is none. Worse, cost of a blockchain is more expensive as pointed by the article.

And you still need an authoritative registry somewhere if there any physical item involved.

In addition to that, blockchain projects faces another business issue: to be really decentralized, you have to lose control of what you put on the blockchain, which is hard to conceive for a private company.

From at I remember, at least in Europe, it's only from 1994-1995 that you could start thinking having a better proposition with a PC than with an Amiga/Atari ST. In order to surpass what you had on an Amiga 500/600 in terms of games, your needed at least a small 386 VGA.

Before that, the only way to get a configuration at the same price was typically some Amstrad PC (typically the popular PC1512), far less capable in terms of graphics and music.

We often hear about the seminal Popular Electronics magazine, but interesting to see that some others have had also a huge influence.

The Radio-Electronics TV Typewriter magazine is also mentioned by Steve Wozniak while working on the Apple I.

To be honest, I find it sometimes pleasing, like when introducing some new programming libs:

https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/swiftui-concepts/explo...

French readers are blessed with Abandonware Magazines and more than 20k scanned magazines: https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/

Glad to see those valuable principles written, even if it seems we are heading in the complete opposite. At least we can try to apply them on our side business.

These were also true in the early ages of aviation:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Yes, the Coursera title was "Cryptography I", so I was expecting another part, but ten years after, I still do not see any. A great course anyway.

As a regular user of this wonderful archive.org project, I found it a pitty that no agreement could be found with editors such as Hachette regarding old books.

Without archive.org, it seems no money at all was made from them. A subscription to access these old books would be a win-win, with a part redistributed to editors. Access could be made from archive.org or why not, directed to a frame in editor websites.

Same for old magazines which are really appreciated by the retrocomputing community.

Beautiful. And so ambitious, when you realize there is even one to teach assembly language to kids.

They were also translated in French and quite popular.

Yes, maybe something like that (preview only):

Usborne introduction to electronics: https://archive.org/details/usborneintroduct0000beas

Fun with electronics: https://archive.org/details/funwithelectroni0000mcph/mode/2u...

"In a groundbreaking discovery, scientists have unveiled Zealandia, a long-lost continent submerged beneath the ocean's surface for 375 years."

Go almost instant build time is a huge productivity boost when compared to Java. You get both the solidity of a typed language, and the development speed of interpreted languages (py, js).

The five gold ingots, used as currency by Chinese traders, were among the treasures picked up by some discreet divers around 1975 from the ocean floor off the coast of France. The ship they had been on, the Prince de Conty, was a frigate that belonged to the French East India Company, and it was just ten miles from shore, about to return to port at Lorient, France, when it sank amid fog and rough seas and an apparent navigational error by its captain on December 3, 1746. On board was tea, lots of Qing Dynasty porcelain, and around 100 gold ingots embossed with Chinese characters — each worth about $25,000 in today's dollars. Nearly 200 men drowned, and only 45 onboard survived the wreck.

Still, part of the industry is moving towards simple solutions.

A refreshing experience was a mobile app Apple device, with Swift and Swift UI. It was a real joy, works as expected, produces concise code, small files, live preview and reasonably fast build time. Sure, it's closed environment, but last time I felt so productive doing UI dates back to Visual Basic.

Counter-example: a simple web app, nothing fancy, and my node_modules filled with around 500MB of files, hundreds of declarations of injected things everywhere.

But nobody forces us to use Kubernetes, nobody forces us to climb the Rust learning curve, nobody forces us to use this multi-platform framework that solves all the problems of the universe.

I try to stick to standard solutions, oft proposed by the vendor: Kotlin on Android, Swift on Apple, c# on Windows. Server code: stick to Java, or try the simple Golang (another refreshing language).

Also, I try to stay late to adopt tech, just starting to be confident in Docker and will see in a few years if Kubernetes could be useful.

But, an architect needs complex solutions to justify its job, a team lead needs as many dev as possible to tell at the next family dinner, and the new dev wants to try this new fancy tech to put on his resume. So they are all fine with that. Just don't tell the company ownership.

International Large-Scale Assessments (LSA) allow comparisons of education systems’ effectiveness in promoting student learning in specific domains, such as reading, mathematics, and science. However, it has been argued that students’ scores in International LSAs mostly reflect general cognitive ability (g). This study examines the extent to which students’ scores in reading, mathematics, science, and a Raven’s Progressive Matrices test reflect general ability g and domain-specific abilities [...]

The finding that students’ responses to PISA test items reflect general ability rather than domain-specific abilities, if replicated to other countries, could have important implications for the design of large-scale assessments and the interpretation of analyses of large-scale assessment data.

There is a fascinating interview with this great inventor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3vpu67uu28

All IQ research should be taken with a grain of salt: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

Someone told that Idiocracy was actually a documentary.

To get an easy boot of nostalgia, once can listen to early 90s hard drive sound as well. I got one recently starting a classic Mac. Very nice feeling.

Beautiful, thanks. Happy Christmas!

Interview of the 555 creator, which I find fascinating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3vpu67uu28

A winery could assign a token to each physical bottle, and lets its customers freely buy (winery is involved) and then exchange their tokens based on the supposed bottle value ups and downs (winery is not involved any more). Then, from time to time, they come to the winery to take back a real bottle from a token.

Admittedly, there is little to program, but we can imagine all sorts of auctions, games (tokens becoming playable items in a virtual world, but still exchangeable for real bottles), etc., around those tokens.