True. French here, one of the main demands of the Yellow Vests is more "fiscal justice" (whatever that means but essentially less tax burden on the lower middle class and more on the upper class, to simplify). The budget of the French government is 240 billion Euro a year and Tax evasion is estimated at 80 Billion (low estimate - a figure often quoted by Yellow Vests). But as you say, this program will likely crack down on "small time" tax evasion.

Yes, very true. I didn't mention software piracy but you are right, it was a problem back then although the counter argument was "but it sells machines" ;-) Of course, it does up to a point where software houses decide not to support the platform. And yes the custom chips were an advantage in 85 but already by 89/90 they weren't anymore.

I was fortunate to own both an Amiga and Atari ST (not at the same time) in their late 80s heydays and I absolutely loved those machines. The thing is both Commodore and Atari made the same mistakes and died pretty much at the same time (~ 1994). The Amiga 1000 was ahead of its time in 1985 but Commodore tried to sell the same architecture for pretty much 7 years. The Amiga 3000 and 1200 were too little too late. By 1990 both PCs (in the affordable space) and Macs (in the unaffordable space) were ahead hardware wise. Sure, PCs were clunky but if you had a Soundblaster and a VGA card, you were ahead of an Amiga 500/600. And even the 1200 was not massively ahead of its time. Software wise, neither Commodore nor Atari managed to convince Microsoft, Lotus, Adobe, etc. to write any software for their machines. So in the business space, it was PC or Mac. You have to give Steve Jobs credit when he negotiated with the software powerhouses of its time to have software ready by the time the Mac came out. Sure there were some niches in graphics and video effects for the Amiga and MIDI and desktop publishing for the ST but it wasn't enough to save them. Amiga OS was interesting but a 68000 and 512k or 1MB of Ram wasn't really enough to really take advantage of multitasking and hard drives were very costly peripherals. Sure, you could get an Amiga 2000, add more RAM and a hard drive but you then ended up in PC and Mac territory price wise. Finally, the US market was lost pretty fast to the Amiga and ST. They resisted on some European markets but by 1992/3, it was over. I grew up in France where both the ST and Amiga were popular in the late 80s. I got my first 486 PC in 1993 because by then it's what everyone was getting.

Who is this Martin Fowler guy?! ;-) If you're "in the industry" and you've never heard of him, you might want to change direction.

Atlassian is an Australian company. We don't take people to court for a yes or a no down under.

WSL is geared at developers and aims at giving the same kind of developing experience you'd expect working on Mac i.e. use a graphical IDE but run CLI utilities and frameworks. Also, from an IT consultant point of view I still need to run all the office stuff and other enterprisy pieces of software as well as developer tools and unixy stuff. This explains why Macs have been so successful in the developer world (go to any dev or DevOps conference). WSL closes that gap. It's not designed for much else really, you won't use it to run server workloads.

For all the brilliant jerks out there...

Radios in France have a quota of 40% of French "speaking" music, and although you could argue the quality of French "pop" (it's bad), it did keep the industry alive. Of course, the quota of French songs on radio tends to revolve around a small number of tunes in constant rotation but that's the way commercial radio works.

As a cloud migration consultant, I see a lot of companies going dual cloud with a sort of DR model in a second cloud provider to avid tat kind of scenario. Yes, it creates quite an overhead but it could be worth it.

DevOps initial aim was indeed to have Dev and Ops working hand in hand using the same workflows and development techniques. The article is spot on. Unfortunately, "DevOps" engineer nowadays is more often the new name for "Sysadmin who does some automation". The "I do some Puppet, I am DevOps" syndrome.

Macs represent 15% of Apple's revenue now. How much of it is the pro audio/graphics market? 1%? Less than that? I switched to Macs 10 years ago primarily to record Audio with software like Cubase and Ableton Live and it was a definite improvement at the time. Now, the same software exists for Windows. Macs don't have the form factor or screen advantage anymore. They are expensive compared to equivalent PCs so you really pay for the stability of MacOS and the integration of the hardware and the software. Dos that warrant the price hike? Less and less probably... Being an IT guy, I do like that MacOS is a UNIX platform that can run enterprisy productivity software but I must say Windows 10 has made progress on that front and you can of course run Linux on a PC.

You still can't bulk delete images with Instagram which is a royal pain in the bottom.

Wether we like it or not, a lot of "vertical applications" in many domains are Windows only (health comes to mind) so I wouldn't be surprised if indeed a lot of software used by cities in Windows only. Office is only a small part of the equation.

It seems Azure is not mentioned much in comments. It is by all account a hit and new features are coming weekly if not daily. It is well on its way to be as big as AWS revenue wise. Secondly, I am an IT pro who switched to Mac nearly ten years ago and I am looking to switch back possibly to Windows 10 as I cannot justify spending so much on the latest MBPs (not mentioning the idotic lack of ports for "pro" machines). WSL is a bit of a game changer in the DevOps space.