Nouvelles Technologies et Internet

Enquête du cabinet Deloitte sur l'impact de l'usage des réseaux sociaux sur la réputation et l'image de l'entreprise

A simple step-by-step tutorial about the CSS cascade. Ideal for web designers and developers who are new to CSS - or those who would like to know the finer details about the cascade.

As a web designer you might be already familiar with the PNG image format which offers a full-featured transparency. It’s a lossless, robust, very good replacement of the elder GIF image format. As a Photoshop (or any other image editor) user you might think that there is not that many options for PNG optimization, especially for truecolor PNG’s (PNG-24 in Photoshop), which doesn’t have any. Some of you may even think that this format is “unoptimizable”. Well, in this post we’ll try to debunk this myth.

This post describes some techniques that may help you optimize your PNG-images. These techniques are derived from laborious hours spent on studying how exactly the PNG encoder saves data. We’ll start with some essentials about the PNG format and will then move to advanced optimization techniques...

Il est des marques qui s’acharnent à trouver sur internet un espace d’expression de leur créativité, et à créer des liens avec leurs utilisateurs/internautes/consommateurs. Certaines cherchent sur internet un moyen d’étendre leur notoriété, de tisser des liens visuels, et interactifs avec l’internaute, et d’autres en sont totalement absents. Au final, certains s’expriment sur internet, et d’autres en sont totalement absents.

Je parle là de marques qui acquièrent une réelle présence dans la mémoire des gens parce qu’ils ont compris qu’internet est réellement un terrain d’innovation. D’autres, s’acharnent en spot télé, presse ou radio, et oublient totalement le web. Sur le terrain du web, certaines marques sont totalement absentes, inexistantes. Passées dans l’oubli le plus total. Et qu’est-ce qu’elle vous évoque lorsque vous rentrez dans leur enseigne, vous, internautes ? Rien… rien d’autre qu’un magasin qui vous vend un produit. Nous sommes bien loin du lien sentimental que certaines parviennent à atteindre...

The internet is now more than 25 years old, and the least you could say about is that the art of designing websites has evolved a lot over that time. The way pages are designed changed is tied to the evolution of technology, let’s take a look at how it evolved.

Are your landing pages feeling tired? Is your conversion rate stagnant? Not quite sure what to try next? To re-energize your post-click marketing, it can help to step back and evaluate your approach from several different perspectives.

Here’s a quick exercise, the Landing Page Wonder Wheel—as in, “I wonder how to improve my landing pages?”—that can give you fresh inspiration.

“Il est essentiel que le réseau ‘universel’ qu’est l’internet conserve une architecture qui favorise l’accessibilité et l’innovation” rappelle la réponse à la consultation du secrétariat d’Etat chargé de la Prospective et du développement de l’économie numérique sur l’internet du futur que publient la Fing, Silicon Sentier, l’internet Society France et plusieurs personnalités de l’internet français.

Une réponse qui pointe du doigt le danger qu’il y aurait de vouloir transformer l’internet sans comprendre comment lui-même nous a transformé.

Satisfaire les visiteurs d'un site Internet est un pari difficile à réussir. Comment concevoir un site agréable, efficace qui donne envie aux internautes d'y rester et d'y revenir ? Vous trouverez sur ce site quelques conseils pour vous aider à bien réussir l'ergonomie web de votre site.

En moins de 10 secondes, votre site web doit justifier sa présence aux yeux de l'internaute. S'il n'est pas capable de l'utiliser dans les premières secondes et de trouver ce qu'il cherche, il changera de site.

Creating a good website isn’t an easy task, but there’s a few tools that can definitely make your developer or designer life easier. In this article, I have compiled 15 extremely useful website that any web developer or web designer should have bookmarked.

Twitter and e-mail aren't making us stupider, but they are making us more distracted. A new book explains why learning to focus is the key to living better.

LinkedIn (LinkedIn), through its networking, question and answer, and application features (which I recently wrote about on OPEN) is already a powerful tool for maintaining and establishing relationships in the business world. But it can also be an enormously valuable way to attract top talent to your company, especially if you use all of the options available to you.

While posting a job to LinkedIn is similar to any other job website – adding details about the position, skills, and requirements – where the site separates itself is with company profiles, allowing you to provide potential candidates with a lot more information about your company and the people that work there. Here’s how they work and how to set one up...

This guest post is written by Geoff Cook, cofounder and CEO of social networking site myYearbook. Everything about Twitter is looking up these days, except for a few pesky uptime issues of course. But a number of recent reports also suggest teens are one demographic that just doesn’t seem to be embracing Twitter like the rest of us. So while I’m excited to see Robert Scoble proclaims that Twitter is worth a cool $10 billion, it might be a good idea to analyze a little data to try to understand why teens just don’t think Twitter is as rad as the rest of us.

Automatically shows a discreet notification when a better price is available on a product you're browsing. Covers over 50 retailers in US and UK.

This is a guest column written monthly for the Chinese business magazine “China Electronic Business” (invested by Jack Ma of Alibaba) and IT news site Interfax. This month’s column deals with digital identity with interesting cases from Science Fiction and today’s Asian digital scene.

Whether you have a blog or online business your website will need to have an About Me page. This is probably one of the most important pages on your website. You will generally have to address these points for your readers:

1. Who you are
2. What’s your expertise and further beneficial skills
3. Your readers possible problem and your goal on fixing it
4. And, how you can be contacted

Many blogs lack information about the author/s of them. Though there exists those blogs that this would be more important than others, however, searching through the web you’ll be able to find web sites without an About page and that can be quite frustrating.

Your About Me page has the power to make or break your image, it can be the pivotal point between a prospective client walking through your door or not pursuing their interest and leaving it all behind as they exit your web site. Below you’re able to find 50+ inspiring and unique About Me pages...

On ne présente plus vraiment Tim O’Reilly et John Battelle. Tim O’Reilly, des éditions O’Reilly, est devenu l’un des gourous incontournables du web. Initiateur - et promoteur - de la notion de Web 2.0 (voir notre traduction), il demeure l’un des plus fins observateurs du changement technologique. John Battelle, journaliste, auteur de La révolution Google est quant à lui l’un des spécialistes des moteurs de recherche. Ils ont commis, à l’entrée de l’été, un texte important, essayant de définir, 5 ans après l’apparition de la notion de Web 2.0, l’émergence d’un nouveau paradigme, entre le Web 2.0 (celui des plates-formes sociales) et le Web 3.0 (le web sémantique), comme l’explique très bien Frédéric Cavazza. Un terme qui s’efforce de mettre en cohérence l’évolution du web des plateformes 2.0 vers le temps réel, les écosystèmes de données, les objets communicants…

C’est là le Web Squared, ce web à la puissance 2, ce web exponentiel (1) que proposent O’Reilly et Battelle. Après avoir déplacé les utilisateurs au coeur du système (Web 2.0), ce Web² s’intéresse aux données. Ce sont elles la nouvelle puissance du web ! On passe d’un web 2.0 qui exploite l’intelligence collective des hommes à un Web² qui exploite l’intelligence collective des capteurs et des données… Un texte important, qui méritait une traduction.

Mobile Technologies

Blair MacIntyre is one of the original pioneers of augmented reality and an extraordinary amount of creative work is coming out of his Augmented Environments Laboratory at Georgia Tech – see YouTube videos here. The screenshot below is from, ARhrrrr, a very impressive augmented reality shooter game created at Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and Savannah College of Art and Design, (SCAD- Atlanta), and produced on the NVidia Tegra devkits.

Blair has spent much of his career working on immersive augmented reality and more recently the integration of augmented reality with mirror worlds.

Where Is The iPhone Compass Pointing? To a big pot of gold.

Apple introduced the mouse to the computing world in 1983, and now it is time to introduce a new kind of mouse. With a magnetometer compass built in, the iPhone will become a pointing device for the real world.

Knowing the orientation and position of an iPhone is the secret sauce for augmented reality, geobrowsing and location-based ads. The latter has the potential for generating huge revenues if it is implemented the right way.

What is the right way? Unobtrusive delivery of well targeted ads.

Ce devait être le grand jour de Bing, mais c’est la présentation de Google Wave qui aura suscité le plus d’attention et d’excitation dans la communauté Tech.

Hier durant la conférence Google I/O keynote, les ingénieurs de Google ont présenté les grandes lignes de la vision de Google pour les années a venir sur le web, vers le standard HTML 5. Et tous les navigateurs (mis à part Explorer) se préparent pour cette nouvelle étape qui comprendra aussi la capacité de voir des films et jouer à des jeux en 3D directement depuis votre navigateur et sans extensions. Mais Google veut aller plus loin avec une nouvelle plateforme de communication appelée Google Wave.

The iPhone is one big constraint — no keyboard, small screen, few buttons — so designing applications for the iPhone is an exercise in building smart, simple software. Bloated apps on the iPhone? You won't find many. Most applications pick one feature or group of related features and centralize the product around that central theme. When Apple began crafting UIKit, the set of APIs used to build the user interface for an iPhone app, they had to see into the future and predict what the most common application design models would be and make sure those could be accomplished easily. It may seem obvious to us now because we're so used to iPhone application design but the high-level navigation and interaction concepts available to iPhone application developers are really quite brilliant...

With every day that passes we become more convinced that the Internet in our hands aka on our mobile devices is going to define network usage and innovation. According to some estimates, the consumption of data on mobiles will near an exabyte by the end of 2009.

Apple's random rules for iPhone app approval are a recipe for trivial apps and alienated developers

The iPhone is a wonderfully designed device, sporting sleek curves and oozing minimalism. Fortunately, the great design doesn’t need to stop there. Ever since the App Store went live, we’ve seen some incredibly attractive software released for the platform.

Whether you’re looking for a robotic unit converter, a realistic app for reading novels, or a intuitive Twitter client – this roundup has something for you. Each application puts design first, offering a fantastic user experience.

If I were to tell you that Apple’s app economy was worth more than $2.5 $2.4 billion a year, you would laugh hysterically, shake your head and walk out of the room, yes? Surf on over to some other web site? But here I am telling you exactly that! According to mobile advertising startup AdMob, there are some $200 million worth of applications sold in Apple’s iPhone store every month, or about $2.4 billion a year...

Mondes Virtuels, Web 3D et Gaming

Yes, good money can actually be made in the rapidly-growing world of free-to-play massive multiplayer online games (MMOs), but just how much can micro-transactions actually generate? Unfortunately, average revenue per user information is often concealed behind the fog of competition by privately held game makers reluctant to report either very high or very low results.

To add to the confusion, some developers choose to report their "average revenue per paying user" (ARPPU) which, by definition, is always more impressive than their "average revenue per user" (ARPU). (Both of these statistics relate to monthly logged-in users, and the amount of monthly logged-in users cited in ARPU is often a fraction of total registered users -- a common metric used in press releases.)

The inability to get at the real "metrics-to-success" can make it extremely difficult for a developer mulling whether or not to enter the free-to-play MMO sector...

Following my prior posting Productivity (Serious) Games, Ross Smith, an 18-year veteran of Microsoft and now director of the Windows Security Test Team Director, reports that they've had some great success using games at work, with a focus on using gaming technology and game elements to help make work more fun while increasing productivity.

Hard evidence can be found on their book The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention and the companion site http://www.defectprevention.org/, that cover what they learned about using games in Windows.

Chapter 5 addresses a theme that is very close to my heart: “using the carrot, not the stick” and the corollary topics: “Use Scoring to Encourage Participation, Keep the Players Coming Back to Check Their Score, You’d Be Surprised at What People Will Compete For”, and much more. In addition, they share some Examples of Using Games for Defect Prevention...

« 55 Milliards d’euros, c’est le chiffre d’affaires du secteur à la fin de cette année 2009, matériel compris », estime Laurent Michaud, responsable de la division Jeux vidéo & loisirs interactifs à l'Institut de l'Audiovisuel et des Télécommunications en Europe (IDATE). « Les ventes de logiciels de jeux sur téléphone mobile, sur console de salon, sur console portable, les jeux en ligne, ou les jeux sur PC vont représenter presque 33 Milliards d’euros. C’est désormais plus que le chiffre d’affaires des ventes de disques. C’est encore moins que le chiffre d’affaires de la musique quand on ajoute le spectacle vivant qui connaît une croissance remarquable. En matière de logiciels, le jeu vidéo est aujourd'hui l’industrie culturelle la plus dynamique en termes de revenus. À court terme, les effets de la crise sur la consommation de jeux vidéo ne vont pas se faire ressentir. Il y a davantage de risques sur les niveaux d’investissements des entreprises. »...

When the schedule is shot and a game needs to ship, programmers may employ some dirty coding tricks to get the game out the door. In an article originally published in Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine earlier this year, here are nine real-life examples of just that.]

Programmers are often methodical and precise beasts who do their utmost to keep their code clean and pretty. But when the chips are down, the perfectly-planned schedule is shot, and the game needs to ship, "getting it done" can win out over elegance. Advertisement

In a case like this, a frazzled and overworked programmer is far more likely to ignore best practices, and hack in a less desirable solution to get the game out the door. We have here compiled nine testimonials from working developers, which chronicle times when they weren't quite able to follow the script and had to pull some tricks to save a project...

Here is the first version of my augmented reality card trick. Have fun watching and let me know what you think. More information about my magic can be found at marcotempest.com

Les lapins crétins aussi savent danser le haka...

Le Président de la république avait raison de le souligner lors de son discours de Versailles en évitant d’en absoudre quiconque. De droite ou de gauche, durant les trente dernières années nous avons fait pire que nous endetter : nous n’avons pas su trouver des relais de croissance forts ! Une nation ne peut se nourrir des splendeurs technologiques des années passées, elle doit, comme le rappelait utilement le rapport Beffa de 2005, s’adapter au monde qui change. Actuellement le gouvernement s’interroge sur les priorités qu’il doit donner à ses investissements sur des créneaux porteurs et rémunérateurs à moyen et long terme. Des pistes nombreuses seront proposées à l’équipe gouvernementale, certaines plus accessibles que d’autres. On peut souhaiter qu’elle ne se laisse pas influencer pour tenter un coup médiatique intellectuellement séduisant, mais économiquement stérile. Parmi les orientations prometteuses, je souhaite attirer son attention sur les industries de la simulation. Qui dit simulation dit applications de la réalité virtuelle, de la réalité augmentée. De fait nous parlons d’une « technologie générique ». Pourquoi générique ? Parce que la Réalité Virtuelle peut être considérée comme une technologie de rupture, elle impacte tous les secteurs d’activités connus. La simulation aura en outre de profonds retentissements socio-économiques...

The tantalizing question about William Gibson's ideas in his novel Neuromancer involves their relationship with the course that the Web took and continues to take as Neuromancer's publication date--July 1, 1984, 25 years ago today--recedes farther into the past. In his afterword to the 2000 re-release of the book, novelist Jack Womack suggests that Neuromancer may have directly influenced the way the Web developed--that it may have provided a blueprint that developers who grew up with the book consciously or subconsciously followed. Womack asks "what if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about ?"

I'll take a stab at discussing Neuromancer's major tech inventions, including the ones that are already coming true, as well as some that seem unlikely to happen anytime soon...

ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones, created at Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD-Atlanta). The phone provides a window into a 3d town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. Watch out though as the zombies will fight back, throwing bloody organs to bring down your copter. Move the phone quickly to dodge them. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion.

WhyVille et Dell annoncent le lancement d‘un notebook pré-configuré pour accéder à l’univers éducatif de WhyVille.

Imaginez l’effet important d’un partenariat comme celui-ci. Dès l’achat, nos enfants pourront simplement allumer l’ordinateur et naviguer dans un univers virtuel. Ils rejoindront les 5 millions d’utilisateurs actifs de WhyVille pour évoluer dans un environnement virtuel éducatif.

Le netbook sera exclusivement vendu par le biais de WalMart à partir du mois d’octobre 2009. A noter que celui-ci est équipé d’un logiciel de contrôle parental afin de sécuriser les enfants dans leurs premiers pas sur Internet et/ou sur un univers virtuel....

Edward Castronova (PhD, Economics, Wisconsin, 1991) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the father of economic analysis of virtual worlds and has numerous publications on that topic, including Synthetic Worlds and Exodus to the Virtual World. He delivered the keynote address for the Washington and Lee School of Law symposium Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law and Play Online.

Augmented ID is a TAT concept that visualizes the digital identities of people you meet in real life. With a mobile device and face recognition software from Polar Rose, Augmented ID enables you to discover selected information about people around you. All users control their own augmented appearance, by selecting the content and social network links they want show to others. Modifying your augmented ID is easier than fixing your hair in real life and, of course, TAT Cascades will make sure you look great!

We present to you our info-packed, first-hand, behind closed doors impressions of Xbox 360's stunning new killer app, chat to Kudo Tsunoda and Peter Molyneux, and explain why some of its critics are really missing the point.

A new study shows that marketing inside video games can lead to greater brand awareness, but there are dangers and pitfalls to be avoided. Gamers and marketing types should agree that the roadmap provided is a good one if we're going to have to live with the reality of in-game advertising.

Business

This post was inspired by Fidelity Ventures Partner Larry Cheng who recently compiled a list of VC blogs and ranked them in order of Google Reader subscribers. I have a few hundred feeds that I follow in Google Reader and the way that I find new ones is a random process of discovery so Larry's post was great in that he not only provided a rank-ordered list but also a convenient way to mass subscribe.

VC bloggers are fascinating to follow. But I also love to follow blogs by entrepreneurs. It's an unique viewpoint and one that I find that I learn a lot from. So with that in mind, I created a list of entrepreneur blogs. The criteria for inclusion on this list is rough but basically boils down to the primary author of the blog has to be a founder or C-level executive at an entrepreneurial organization and write relatively frequently about entrepreneurial stuff. In compiling the list I made several exceptions. For example, I included TheFunded which is not a single author blog but rather a feed from a members-only network of entrepreneurs and I included Marc Andreesson who has great stuff on his blog but he just hasn't written anything new in a while.

My list has many biases. For example, it's tilted toward authors in the US who write about "tech" companies but I would love to expand and grow the reach. So if you know of other blogs that should be included on this list, post a comment here and I'll update the list.

There's that awkward moment in your software development life when you realize that most of the people in your company aren't programmers. Scanning your address book reveals Marketing, Sales, Accounting, Human Resources, and yes, the "business people" with their Masters of Business Administration (MBAs).

I've always been curious about what MBAs really do. In my weaker moments, I've even thought that the only reason people got an MBA was to demand a higher salary or to "move up the corporate ladder" into some management job. What did these MBA ninjas actually learn in school? Would having an MBA help me better understand how I affected my company's bottom line? Although I had the curiosity, I never acted on it. This changed when another programmer recommended that I read The Ten-Day MBA by Steven Silbiger.

Sure, I knew that no one would anoint me with a real MBA at the end of the book any more than watching MIT lectures online would make me an MIT grad. Besides, going to a nice MBA school is more about being around other motivated people and professors. The real value in having an MBA is in applying the concepts, not the concepts themselves.

Disclaimers aside, I was determined to read the book and take notes on what a programmer should know about an MBA.

“Qui n’a jamais voulu tuer son responsable informatique dans cette salle ?”, demande Daniel Kaplan, délégué général de la Fondation internet nouvelle génération, en obtenant l’assentiment complice de l’assemblée participant à la première édition de la conférence Lift à Marseille. Aujourd’hui, les systèmes d’information des entreprises sont le pire ennemi de l’innovation, affirme-t-il. Ils laissent les organisations et les processus à l’âge de pierre. Ils restreignent les horizons des entreprises et leurs réseaux. Ils déforment leurs façons de voir le monde. Mais les ferments du changement émergent… au moins parce que l’innovation les bouscule...

It’s occurred to me more than once that we might be wise to set aside an annual weekend to mourn the death of Osiris or Persephone or Bladud the wind-god or some other divinity, as our pagan ancestors did, or as those Christians who still take the narratives of their faith seriously do each year on Good Friday. It might at least put a merciful end to the media’s frantic and macabre efforts to bestow a belated sainthood on each new member of the dead celebrities’ club, no matter how far from sanctity the trajectory of their lives might have been...

Brooke Hammerling (publicist) and Erin McKean (entrepreneur) are in a Sand Hill Road conference room, hashing out plans to unveil Ms. McKean’s new Web site, Wordnik.

Donna Sokolsky Burke, co-founder of the firm Spark PR, with Alex Edelstein at a friend’s birthday party in San Francisco. She says “power users” in social media
Ms. Hammerling, while popping green apple Jolly Ranchers into her mouth, suggests a press tour that includes briefing bloggers at influential geek sites like TechCrunch, All Things Digital and GigaOM.

But Roger McNamee, a prominent tech investor who is backing Wordnik, is also in the room, and a look of exasperation passes across his face at the mere mention of the sites.

“Why shouldn’t we avoid them? They’re cynical,” he says, also noting his concern that Wordnik would probably appeal more to wordsmiths than followers of tech blogs. “That’s where I would be most uncomfortable. They don’t know the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘there.’ ”

Throughout my 20s and 30s, I played D&D and other fantasy role playing games at least once a week. Doing so did more than teach me the rules of combat or proper behavior in a dragon's lair. I gained several skills that truly did help me in my career.

Note that by "Dungeons & Dragons," I don't mean necessarily the very structured fantasy world made famous by Gary Gygax. I played in standard D&D and other created-worlds (such as Harn), but mainly I played in independently-created universes, at the whim of a particular dungeonmaster (DM).

I got real jobs as a result of playing D&D, one of them directly. One DM hired both my husband and me after we'd played in his universe for five months, because D&D is a great way to find out how someone solves problems and copes with stress. However, in this post I'm not talking about people-networking but rather gaming skills that map to real life. After coming up with a short list on my own, I asked the three primary DMs in my life for their suggestions. I'm grateful to Bill, Ivan, and (especially) Steve for their help. Which probably is an outgrowth of the first lesson....

Presentation at Singapore's UnConference in May 2009 on the topic "Can Asian companies build relevant local web companies. Do they have a shot a building a global one?". It includes Feiyue shoes, a burrito and Chuck Norris

For fifteen years, I was a book packager. It has nothing to do with packaging and a bit more to do with books, but it's a great gig and there are useful lessons, because there are dozens of industries just waiting for you to do something like this. Let me explain...

Asie

Since I got home from China last week, I’ve found myself in a lot of conversations where phrases like “the next Silicon Valley,” or “just like Silicon Valley used to be,” keep coming up. But while China is swimming in capital and littered with start-ups, I’m going to argue it’s not the next Silicon Valley. In fact, it’s something far different than I’ve ever seen before.

If you think about it, Silicon Valley doesn’t really move as fast as people say it does. Sure, the rest of the U.S. business world may feel out-lapped by the pattern of companies going from nothing to billions in a few years, but those start-ups are mostly the outliers. For every wunderkind smirking on the cover of a magazine, there are far more entrepreneurs who slogged away for thirty years before ever getting their Nasdaq moments. And there are even more who slogged away for longer and didn’t...

Le dernier site web coréen dont tout le monde parle s’appelle Afreeca.com. Il s’agit d’un site de partage en ligne de video, tel que Youtube, sur lequel se développent depuis quelques temps des pratiques lucratives de “flirt digital”.

En échange d’une monnaie virtuelle appelée « star ballon », les garçons dépensent de vrais Wons (1 700 wons = 1 Euro) pour flirter à travers leur écran avec des jeunes coréennes.

Selon une récente analyse publiée dans le journal OhMyNews, ces sud-coréennes ne sont pas des professionnelles du secteur mais dansent, chantent et peuvent vous laisser entrevoir un décolleté si vous êtes prêts à y laisser une fortune (plus de 300 euros par session)...

As with most practices in Asia, when it comes to business etiquette dealing with Asians can be very confusing to those who are not familiar with the inhabitants from this part of the world.

Let’s take the practice of exchanging business cards, for example. In Asia, this initial phase in a formal, introductory business meeting can almost be an elaborate ritual! To the people you met, your business card helps to form initial impressions they have about you, and in many Asian cultures there are certain protocols – some of it unspoken – to follow that exhibit the proper respect when swopping business cards.

Although such protocols may differ depending on an individual’s culture, here’s a general guide to help you navigate the pitfalls when exchanging business cards during your first meeting with Asians..

Divers

Software engineering seems different, in a frustrating way, from other disciplines of computer science

These tables contains external links to downloadable software, "cloudware", and webservices like hosting.

All of us get MANY new ideas everyday. Majority of these ideas will never see the light of the day.They die in our minds. But, some ideas we choose to pursue. How do we determine which ones to kill and which ones to pursue? It’s a million dollar question, really.

Here is one model to think about what makes you pursue some ideas and what makes you abandon most of them. At each stage, there are a few attributes that become VERY important – so I have chosen to include a short note with each of the attributes in various stages.

So, here is that simple model...

Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?

J'ai récapitulé à travers le document ci dessous, prés de 80 interviews que j'ai réalisé depuis 2006. Les interviews renvoient sur les liens correspondants qui sont classés en 12 thèmes :
* Complexité,
* Internet et TIC,
* Innovation,
* Intelligence Collective,
* Intelligence Economique,
* Développement humain / durable,
* Knowledge Management,
* Marketing et Communication,
* Prospective,
* Sciences,
* Sociologie.

he meet-up in San Francisco last month had a whiff of revolution about it, like a latter-day techie version of the American Patriots planning the Boston Tea Party.

The inaugural get-together of the burgeoning NoSQL community crammed 150 attendees into a meeting room at CBS Interactive. Like the Patriots, who rebelled against Britain's heavy taxes, NoSQLers came to share how they had overthrown the tyranny of slow, expensive relational databases in favor of more efficient and cheaper ways of managing data.

"Relational databases give you too much. They force you to twist your object data to fit a RDBMS [relational database management system]," said Jon Travis, principal engineer at Java toolmaker SpringSource, one of the 10 presenters at the NoSQL confab (PDF).

NoSQL-based alternatives "just give you what you need," Travis said.

L'élevage à l'heure des biotechnologies...

Cette vidéo retrace le chemin d’un crédit de 25 dollars depuis Londres en Angleterre jusqu’au village de Preak Tomao au Cambodge. Kiva.org est un site web qui permet aux internautes de prêter de l’argent aux plus démunis dans les pays en voie de développement et grâce à ce prêt de se sortir eux même de la pauvreté.

l était une fois, nous dit un - soi disant ? - conte persan, trois princes du royaume de Serendip qui, alors qu’ils étaient en voyage, découvrirent des traces du passage d’un chameau.. “L’aîné observa que l’herbe à gauche de la trace était broutée, mais que l’herbe de l’autre côté ne l’était pas. Il en conclut que le chameau ne voyait pas de l’oeil droit. Le cadet remarqua sur le bord gauche du chemin des morceaux d’herbes mâchées de la taille d’une dent de chameau. Il réalisa alors que le chameau pouvait avoir perdu une dent. Du fait que les traces d’un pied de chameau étaient moins marquées dans le sol, le benjamin inféra que le chameau boitait.” nous racontait déjà Pek van Andel, chercheur en sciences médicales à l’université de Groningue, dans un ancien article sur le sujet que l’on trouve sur le site Automates intelligents.

On sait l’histoire de Mr. Smiley. Il nait sur un bulletin board de l’Université de Canergie Mellon le 17 septembre 1982 à 11 heures 44. Une telle précision n’est possible que grâce au Digital Coelacanth Project d’une équipe de Microsoft qui a fouillé des archives numériques vieilles d’une vingtaine d’ années – autant dire : antédiluviennes – pour retrouver le fil de discussion dans lequel est venu au monde le premier smiley.

Il vient sous le clavier de Scott Fahlman qui deviendra ainsi plus célèbre pour ces quelques mots jetés hâtivement sur le clavier que pour son travail sur les réseaux neuronaux ou le langage de programmation LispW. Fahlman n’en tiendra pas rigueur à sa progéniture et dira avec humour qu’il a ceci de commun avec les sprinters olympiques : il est connu pour quelque chose qu’il a fait sous les dix secondes.

SAGE sera dépassé par les doctrines militaires avant même d’être déployé. Il avait été imaginé pour répondre a une attaque de bombardiers soviétiques volant à très haute altitude et passant par le pôle nord, ou au contraire volant a basse altitude pour essayer de passer sous la couverture radar. Dès l’après guerre, soviétique et américains se lancent dans une course qui mettra leurs capitales respectives a la portée de leurs missiles nucléaires. Les missiles balistiques intercontinentaux rendent obsolète le scénario tactique sur lequel était basé SAGE. IBM redéployera la technologie pour mettre en place un système de réservation centralisée de billets d’avions (SABRE : Semi Automatic Business Research Environnement). SAGE laissera par ailleurs une pléthore de retombées technologiques dont la plus importante sera sans doute la perception de l’importante du temps partagé (« time sharing ») comparativement au traitement par lots (« batch processing » )...

What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smartphones?

AI is becoming the stuff of future scifi greats: A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously...

Ils jouent avec une balle, l'attrapent en vol et jonglent avec une baguette. Les robots de Masatoshi Ishikawa et Takashi Komuro ont pour la plupart la forme d'une main à trois doigts, complétée de deux caméras et leur stupéfiante rapidité a de quoi rendre jaloux un joueur de ping-pong...

I'd like to talk to you about ducts. Wait a minute. Strike that. I meant COBOL. The Common Business Oriented Language is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary as the language that is everywhere and nowhere at once:

As a result, today COBOL is everywhere, yet is largely unheard of among the millions of people who interact with it on a daily basis. Its reach is so pervasive that it is almost unthinkable that the average person could go a day without it. Whether using an ATM, stopping at traffic lights or purchasing a product online, the vast majority of us will use COBOL in one form or another as part of our daily existence.

The statistics that surround COBOL attest to its huge influence upon the business world. There are over 220 billion lines of COBOL in existence, a figure which equates to around 80% of the world's actively used code. There are estimated to be over a million COBOL programmers in the world today. Most impressive perhaps, is that 200 times as many COBOL transactions take place each day than Google searches - a figure which puts the influence of Web 2.0 into stark perspective.

Every year, COBOL systems are responsible for transporting up to 72,000 shipping containers, caring for 60 million patients, processing 80% of point-of-sales transactions and connecting 500 million mobile phone users. COBOL manages our train timetables, air traffic control systems, holiday bookings and supermarket stock controls. And the list could go on...

Microsoft Fix It is a relative new way of solving problems that occur in the Windows operating system. These fix it solutions are basically one-click solutions for fixing problems. The Fix It logo will signal to the user that an automated solution is available. It usually consists of a file that has to be downloaded to the local computer system and executed from there.

Pair programming is like magic in more ways than one. It dramatically improves programmer productivity and reduces bug count, and yet it does so through a technique that’s completely counter-intuitive. You can’t help but think that there’s some trick yet to be exposed; that pair programming is just slight of hand. In this article, I will endeavor to pull back the curtain and reveal the secrets of the pair programming magicians...

Les chiffres parlent d’eux-mêmes : le marché publicitaire français a connu une croissance de 4,4% en juillet 2007 par rapport à Juillet 2006 mais c’est le média Internet qui est à l’origine de la quasi-totalité de cette croissance. Ce chiffre amplifie une tendance qui lui avait permis de prendre 3 points de part de marché au cours du 1er semestre 2007, talonnant désormais les médias traditionnels.

Même si la télévision affiche encore une croissance de +3,6% sur un an, les autres médias affichent par contre des baisses significatives : -2,8% pour la presse écrite, -3,4% pour la publicité extérieure et même -4,5% pour les radios musicales.

D'ici à 2008, Internet devrait rentrer dans le trio de tête des grands médias au détriment de la radio.

It is possible to successfully fend off a zombie attack, according to Canadian mathematicians. The key is to “hit hard and hit often.”

Oh yes, somebody actually did a study on mathematics of a hypothetical zombie attack, and published it in a book on infectious disease. So, while we still don’t know what to do if a deadly asteroid takes aim at Earth, an unlikely but technically possible situation, we now know what to do in case of a zombie attack.

“An outbreak of zombies is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead,” the authors wrote. “It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”...