Nothing and Some More

Hello world... again! Am I Ugly in Grey, or what ??

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Looking for the The Google Font? It is Catull, but found out more about the Google logo by reading the Google Font Page

Fancy reading my Looking for the Spam collection ? It's even getting multilingual

Linux, Linux, Linux, Linux... want to try it ??? Knoppix is really nice. And easy. Download, burn, reboot. Et voila, Linux is running...

We don't need no education, We don't need no thought control. - 15/09/2005

L'OCDE vient de publier son rapport sur l'éducation en 2005, et la France est mal classée pour l'université. Réaction dans LeMonde Le classement infamant des universités françaises (l'article fait aussi référence au Academic Ranking of World Universities - 2005 (et donne le lien!!!!!!))
Les universités américaines doivent leur efficacité à ce qu'elles apportent une réponse aux contradictions majeures qui traversent l'organisation du savoir : l'équilibre, tout d'abord, entre compétition et coopération, l'arbitrage, ensuite, entre recherche fondamentale et recherche appliquée.
Les universités américaines sont indiscutablement concurrentielles. Elles se disputent les meilleurs étudiants, les meilleurs enseignants et disposent du nerf de la guerre : l'autonomie financière, qui leur est donnée à la fois par les droits d'inscription élevés et des dotations financières propres. Elles sont aussi un lieu de coopération : les enseignants passent de l'une à l'autre au gré des séminaires ou des années sabbatiques, présentent ensemble des projets de recherches à la NSF, l'équivalent de notre CNRS (qui n'est outre-Atlantique qu'une agence de moyens).
Interview with a hacker, Hans Reiser
I grew up in California, couldn't handle junior high school and the insistence on sitting in neat rows, so I dropped out after the eighth grade, ran away from home, took some extension classes at UC Berkeley when I was 14, and then against the advice of everyone applied to UC Berkeley and was accepted when I was 15. Berkeley was a lot better than junior high school, but it still involved homework, which deep down in my heart I could never believe in. Reading textbooks, yes, arguing with the professor in class, yes, but homework I could only possess a theoretical understanding of the social purpose of. Such a pity one cannot get a scholarship to go to the bookstore for 10 years, and at intervals prove by discussion of it that one learned something. I never got a PhD, and never will, because of this. Instead I wrote Reiser4, which was a lot more work, but something that I can care about so it is easier for me.
There were things I never really understood until I did Reiser4 about being a scientist.
For instance, those careful logs that seem so stupid and annoying in lab class, they are important in real life. [...]I also learned to focus on the little things in the data that don't make sense. Often the guys I hire will disregard them, thinking there must be something wrong with the benchmark since it does not make sense. Being more experienced I know that the things that don't make sense are the most important data collected.
Dans LeMonde, un autre article résume le dernier classement européen des Masters in Management Les grandes écoles françaises de commerce plébiscitées par le "Financial Times". Heureusement qu'on n'a pas que des universités en France, hein! Je m'attendai à un lien vers le site du Financial Times pointant l'article en question, mais c'est trop demander. Special Report: European Masters in Management 2005
[Jean-Pierre Helfer, strategy professor and director general of the Audencia Business School in Nantes] refers to the preparatory system as the voie royale into the Grandes Ecoles. "In our schools we syphon off the best 1,000 minds in a generation. During these preparatory classes, the potential of these young people is pushed up like turning up the heat under a pan."
At present these classes are taught in the lycées, not in the business school, and the students are taught a range of subjects, not business. There is a growing view in France that some business should be taught in the second year of these programmes.
Speaking of sexy geeks, the blogosphere (i.e. I don't remember my sources) made me read an old article For a life less ordinary, try marrying an otaku (the other day in the street a japanese girl had the following t-shirt I hear nerds (of course the nerdy version is I <3 nerds))
Elsewhere in the world such men are bypassed as totally non-eligible for relationships or marriage (and the first definition of an otaku is that he cannot, or prefers not to communicate with other human beings) and indeed, in Japan the otaku was long shunned as social outcasts.
Not that the otaku cared very much. Who needed to date when Rei Ayanami (heroine of "Evangelion") beckoned from the DVD?
But as the years went by the otaku, once a minor and underground species, increased their numbers to become very-nearly-mainstream. Yoshika says her decision to marry had much to do with the fact that in modern Japan, it's hard to find a man who's NOT an otaku in one way or another. "Otakuga iyada nante yuttara kekkon dekinai shi, otaku wa uwaki shinai kara ne (if one refused to marry an otaku, one can't get married and besides, otaku will never have affairs with other women)."
While I'm talking about japanese things, Metro introduced here last week Sudoku and I looked a bit to see what was available: Sudoku Programmers Forum is the place to go to discuss algorithm for creating and solving, Windows Sudoku and Turbo Sudoku (fast!!!) are win32 softwares to create and solver. If you prefer to do it manually, Let's Make Sudoku and Solving Sudoku hints will be useful. Last but not least, there are about 6 670 903 752 021 072 936 960 Sudoku grids
Team Whyachi and eMachine Shop will built custom parts if you send them a CAD file. (via Make blog). Watch online the CPAN show: Digital Future: Monday, March 28, 2005 to get a sense of the work of Neil Gershenfeld (see also his books When Things Start to Think and Fab:The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication)
The World Summit on Free Infrastructures (via NTK)
The World Summit on Free Infrastructures is an international series of grass roots free infrastructures events to take place in 2005/2006. Wsfii is a chance for pragmatists and builders of free information infrastructures of different kinds to get together, share experiences, workshop new techniques and create documentation, explore crossovers and publicise their practices.
In order to sell their ...Hacks series, OReilly has a ad that says
When did hacking become confused with breaking and entering
and their tagline is Making the world a safe place for hackers since 1978... Will scan soon since I can't find it online.
In case you did not follow the news, the state of Massachusets is trying to enforce an open format policy for IT. Tim Bray has a good analysis (plus it saves me the work) Massachusetts Back-Room. Like Danny OBrien says, Hackers Heart Plain Text
A new blog I read, Paper Forest Art News and Ideas, found via Make blog
On bookTv Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, the author presented his book, explaining his experience with his hearing implant inside his head. The cover of the book has a XRay picture Rebuilt.
Des robots remontent aux sources du langage
Sous ses aspects ludiques ­ en 1999 et en 2000, elle a été conduite simultanément dans plusieurs musées et permettait aux visiteurs d'interagir avec les agents ­, elle visait à tester quatre idées théoriques. La première était que la langue émerge à travers l'auto-organisation, du fait d'interactions locales entre les utilisateurs de cette langue. La deuxième est que le sens est construit lentement par chaque individu, à travers un processus cumulatif. La troisième hypothèse est qu'une métaphore écologique, avec ses processus d'adaptation et de sélection, est plus réaliste que celle de l'esprit ordinateur pour rendre compte des mécanismes cognitifs. Enfin, Luc Steels soutient que la grammaire non plus n'est pas innée, mais qu'elle est un produit de l'usage de la langue.
Ces conceptions vont à l'encontre des vues des innéistes, dont le plus célèbre est Noam Chomsky. Le chercheur américain postule l'existence d'une grammaire universelle, de structures innées commandant le langage. Luc Steels, qui fut son étudiant dans les années 1970 et n'est revenu à la linguistique qu'après un long détour par la robotique et l'intelligence artificielle, estime au contraire que le langage est un système adaptatif.
Originally published as jemisa.editthispage.com/discuss/msgReader$509
15 septembre 2005 Clés: