Daily Archives: 9/19/2005

Théorie de la spéculation

I’m currently reading Poundstone’s book Fortune’s Formula, and am up the the part which discusses the French mathematician Bachelier, and his thesis that the prices of stocks in the market follow a random walk. His thesis was published in 1900, and slept for quite some time until resurrected after his death in 1946. A bit of googling revealed that you can get his thesis here, in French. NUMDAM is apparently a project to provide digital versions of many old mathematics papers published in French journals. Cool.

Now, I’ll have to dust off my high school French.

A Mini-ITX Computer that Boots from USB Flash

Exactly what it sounds like: XYZ Computing describes a project to get a M10000 Mini-ITX motherboard to boot from a stick of USB flash memory. It uses Puppy Linux, and is pretty straightforward. As it happens, I have exactly that motherboard: I remember trying to get it to boot USB stick memory and failing, and this author suggests that upgrading syslinux might be all it takes. I’ll have to try it again.