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SXSW: Stephen Wolfram Jumps On Bandwagon For Cloud, Mobile Devices
Nerval's Lobster writes "At this year's SXSW conference, Stephen Wolfram—most famous in tech circles as the chief designer of the Mathematica software platform, as well as the Wolfram Alpha 'computation knowledge engine'—demonstrated his upcoming Programming Cloud, and indicated he was developing a mobile platform for engineering and mathematical applications based on the Wolfram programming language built for Mathematica. He also talked more broadly about the future of Wolfram Alpha, which he said will become more anticipatory of peoples' queries. 'People generally don't understand all the things that Wolfram Alpha can do,' Wolfram told the audience. His researchers are also working on a system modeler tool, which will allow researchers to simulate complex devices with tens of thousands of components; in theory, you could even use such a platform for 3D printing. Wolfram also wants to set Wolfram Alpha loose on documents, with the ability to apply complex calculations to, say, company spreadsheets. 'A whole bunch of things that I've been working on for 30 years are converging in a very nice way,' he said."
So that Wolfram, who heads a firm whose product (Wolfram Alpha) is a key part of the set of cloud services backing Apple's cloud-based voice assistant for mobile devices (Siri) has "jumped on the bandwagon for cloud, mobile devices" is supposed to be news?
Next we're going to see a headline about how Steve Ballmer has jumped on the bandwagon for desktop, office software.
I don't mind pay services, and I don't mind free trials, but Wolfram Alpha somehow manages to rub me the wrong way. It seems that if you have any arbitrary calculation, just about every point on the page you can click asks you to upgrade to pro. Images are poststamp size and hardly readable. They make a zoom button and it pops up a 'upgrade to pro' screen if you click it. They show you a bunch of paragraphs in an outcome, with 'requires interactivity', which you have to pay for, which you only find out when you try to enable interactivity. Why not just say 'requires wolfram alpha pro' or such then?
I don't mind that you have to pay for it, but I do mind that they make it seem like an available function, don't mark it in any special way, and then come with a 'upgrade to pro' window when you click it.
In my opinion they should put some more intellectual honesty there. I would probably pay for this service if it didn't seem they like to trick you into paying all over. If I take a subscription now I would feel bad about being tricked into it.
Wolfram.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Why the hell is Slashdot pimping SXSW so diligently? Does Dice Holdings have a stake in SXSW?
I swear this whole site is becoming nothing but spam.
Wolfram has previously "jumped on-board" with comparing himself to Isaac Newton. He wrote and self-published a five-inch-thick book of pretty cellular-automata doodles and ego-stroking sophistry that was supposed to revolutionize all of science --- about a decade ago. Haven't heard much about it since (at least the book was cheap per kilogram, and good for a few laughs). He's a sharp mathematician/programmer, but I wouldn't put too much stock in his grandiose predictions.
Just because you just discovered some new memey thing Slashdot, please stop posting it all over the place.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I remember what a well-known British physicist said about Wolfram a few years ago: "He's a very smart chap - but not the genius that he thinks he is." The fact is, he was supposed to be the next Einstein but his accomplishments, while nontrivial, in depth and width are by no means beyond those many competent (much less luminary) physicists from the last half century.
“A whole bunch of things that I’ve been working on for 30 years are converging in a very nice way,” he told the audience, before launching into a rather lengthy history of Mathematica’s development. “Given how complicated things in nature are, you might think the programs running them would be very complicated,” he began. As his research progressed, however, he soon found the exact opposite: simple equations and programming could underpin enormously complicated systems.
But then the article says:
It took a lot of Mathematica code to make the Wolfram Alpha system work
It is hard to reconcile "the simplicity of Mathematica" with "it took a lot of code (and presumably a lot of time) to make it work".
You're right - for predictions, you should be looking at fellow megaguru Kurzweil!
And don't be so impressed by Wolfram's Alpha - at least last week when you asked it to evaluate 20000! (that's factorial), it would give an answer that was out by a factor of 20000! (that's not factorial, that's an exclamation.) Dumbass out-by-one error - heads should roll for something as stupid as that (it's an easy mistake to make, but it's equally easy to test the answer's right - the lack of testing is the unforgivable thing). Can you imagine a mobile phone that failed to dial the final digit in a telephone number, or a word-processor which would always chop off your final character?
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
How many years until it catches up to Dwarf Fortress?
And can it get more than 4 frames per second modeling 200 dwarves down to the fingernail on a 3.5GHz machines with 16Gb of ram and SSD drives?
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."