L’électron libre

I was thinking...that most PCs out there are seldom used to their maximum capacity. The modern office man could do 80% of his work inside a single Firefox window. Why aren't all computers in major companies having their computer processing centralized, with on the desks only the display keyboard and mouse? It turns out that, like often, the question is not new. Mainframe vs. PC was a hot issue ...

("GMAL" which read in French means "I feel pain") GMAIL has been a great innovator 5 years ago, mostly by the 3 pillar features : organizing emails by conversations, proving a robust spam detector, and a powerful search tool to find emails. But like many companies that reach the top, the Gmail team, amongst other Google teams, has been chilling a lot, bringing little if no improvement to their ...

I want to applause with four hands that I don't have the speaker in this video. Dennis Wixon (Microsoft Surface) brings in this video an approach to predicting the future of any technology. His field of expertise is Human Machine Interaction, but the scientific approach he uses to foresee the coming technologies is really universal. Select a field, look deeply at the evolutions in the past that brought to the the ...

Microsoft Research and Microsoft Research Asia organize every year a conference called "Computing in the 21st century". The subtitle was "New Horizon of Computing". This year's version had no less than 3 Turing award winners (Turing awards are something like the Nobel Prize of computing), the Senior Vice President of Microsoft, and a Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia and at the same time IEEE fellow (a very prestigious ...

The financial crisis is expected to foster larger efforts in software security. This (not so) new finding about physical hacking (retrieving electromagnetic signal) however suggests that efforts will have to be made on the hardware as well. In the case of keyboards, it should not be anything too hard. Coating everything with a thin layer of metal and injecting electromagnetic noise to this shield should be enough. I ...

Although Singapore and more specifically NUS seems to have absolutely NO IDEA what Linux is, you may want to set up Linux on your desk at some point of time. And a few days later you will, like me, realize you have not set your lab's printer and start struggle with that. I did, so you no need lah, just follow this: The printer is shared on a PC ...

There is 3 mobile phone networks in Singapore, by order of popularity : Singtel Starhub M1 They are said to be equivalent, I haven't really been through a serious study of their prices, I was at Starhub and paid on average 36 S$ per month for ton of sms and quite a lot of phone calls. Networks here haven't yet started selling bulk sms and minutes to subcontractors unlike they did in France ...

Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail. I ...

 Pour la 18e année consécutive, un jury américain a décerné, le 6 mars, les Jolt Awards, qui récompensent les meilleures solutions de développement des 12 derniers mois. Voici les lauréats. >> La suite... 

 La société de services informatiques invite les candidats à développer leur propre application Facebook, dans le cadre du concours « AppliChallenge ». >> More... ~~~~~ Commentaire de l'Electron Libre ~~~~~ Du point de vue recruteur, c'est une initiative très pertinente et dans l'air du temps. Cette nouvelle méthode de recrutement ne s'intéresse pas seulement à vos compétences professionnelles et à votre expérience. Inévitablement, Altran s'intéresse également à votre RESEAU et par dessus tout ...