Instead of slightly diverging game states you have horrendous input lag.
Yeah, that's the real limitation, even if you don't go the whole way to server side rendering and just have the server side calculating the full game state and processing input, and still let the client do the 3D rendering (which avoids a lot of the other problems of server-side rendering, while still offloading work from the client and giving consistent game states.)
Consider that a ping of no more than ~34 msec would be required to stream responsive 30fps video. We're not talking about pre-rendered video that can be buffered to guard against future network issues, I imagine that this all would be generated on the fly.
The acceptable latency is really independent of the desired frame rate; the required bandwidth depends on the frame rate. Latency affects responsiveness, sure, but the same latency will provide the same responsiveness no matter what framerate you have.
I'm having trouble figuring out what would happen to an interactive, unbuffered video stream (that would probably be transported over UDP) when the latency on a client's connection rises to an unacceptable level.
The video stream itself isn't interactive. There would be a control channel from the client to the server and a video feed from the server to the client. At any rate, regardless of latency, I would imagine that the client would always display the most recent frame received; more latency just means that the current frame displayed is further out of date compared to the present state of the server. You might drop frames if you had something else going on on the client computer, so that in the span between the display of one frame and the display of the next frame, more than one new frame was received. In that case, you would drop any undisplayed frame between the last frame displayed and the most recent frame received.
You've seen the HPB [0] in your FPS game who skips (or teleports) around the map 'cause his ping is soo bad that he can only update his position at 1/10th the rate of everyone else, right?)
Latency won't make him able to update his position at 1/10 the rate of everyone else. Latency will just make his current view of the world farther behind everyone else's--if it takes a packet 70msec to get to one client and 35msec to get to another, the first guy is going to have (all other things being equal) a view of the world that is 35msec "older" than that of the second guy. Competing tasks on his local machine might reduce the frequency of updates and cause dropped frames and video skipping visible only to the person whose machine had the problem.
It's amazing - as Gnome and KDE look more like Windows, MS seem to be trying to recreate the old X11 environment where every application had it's own UI.
I don't think this is a new trend, IIRC, MS has for quite some time had a habit of breaking its own Windows UI standards with new releases of Office and Visual Studio, eventually moving those elements into the standards just in time to break them with new changes in its flagship applications.
Breaking down all the arguments, you run into one fundamental unsolvable problem: latency. No matter how fast hardware becomes, you're still limited on the speed of light for how quickly you can transmit input from the user to the server and back again. For anything that requires reaction time, this will likely be unacceptable.
The problem occurs regardless of where you render graphics. Current MMO have latency problems. Moving graphics to the server side (presuming the bandwidth and processing capacity to handle it) means you don't get client-to-client variations (other than those intended in the game design) in what is seen. You get latency problems in either that or the current model.
surely 3D Realms don't have any financial assets left after going bust..?
I believe Apogee Software, Ltd. (the company; "3D Realms" is essentially a brand name under which all of their development was done) has assets (including the trade name "Apogee", and its library of IP, currently licensed to Apogee Software, LLC). A financial judgement against Apogee Software, Ltd., could force them to liquidate those assets to satisfy the judgement.
Also, Apogee Software, Ltd., is a Limited Partnership, which means it has at least one general partner and one or more limited partners. Generally speaking, the general partner(s) are jointly and severally liable for the debts of the partnership, so if Apogee Software, Ltd., doesn't have assets to satsify a judgement, the general partner(s) will be on the hook for the judgement.
Look-up a bunch of cheap hosting providers. How many have postgres?
Fewer than offer MySQL, but enough that if PostgreSQL is the right DB choice for technical reasons, this just means you don't choose one of the hosting providers that don't support PostgreSQL, not that you choose MySQL.
(Assuming, of course, that you are building a web app where a discount shared hosting service is the right choice to start with; of course, not all apps for which a DB is needed are web apps, and not all web apps are those for which a discount shared hosting service makes good sense.)
But, sure, if you are artificially constrained to choose from one of set of hosting providers, none of which offer PostgreSQL and some of which offer MySQL, that's certainly a reason to choose MySQL. But that sounds like a result of a bad planning process, not something that should ever occur in the implementation of a new application.
The Bitfrost system developed for OLPC (which is, AFAIK, completely open) is a comprehensive approach to security, data reliability, theft deterrence, and centralized management of computer systems designed for what amount to massive enterprises with extremely non-technical users.
Apple picking up the designer of that system could be seen as an indication of directions they may take in the future. Its "News for Nerds" even if its not entirely clear, obviously, how much it will turn out to be "Stuff that matters".
OK but none of the products gets hit because MySQL exists right?
Since they have overlapping niches, probably some of Oracle's products, particularly at the low end, take a hit from MySQL. Since even their free low-end products are designed to be compatible with and provide an upgrade path to their pricier DB offerings while its probably as easy to go from MySQL to PostgreSQL-based EnterpriseDB, DB2, or MS SQL as from MySQL to Oracle, their certainly might be reasons why they'd rather, over the long term, either phase MySQL out or evolve it into something very different than it is now. They might not, too; its fairly popular, does have a commercial presence which (I assume) is profitable, and may bring enough to be worth keeping around even if it hurts sales of other Oracle products.
It is a database development company which has no solution to fill MySQL'es place if I haven't mistaken.
Oracle has a number of lighter DB products, including Oracle Express Edition (XE) which is free (as in beer). They don't have anything (that I know of) that does the same kind of multi-backend thing that MySQL does, but certainly they have a number of products whose market niches at least overlap with that of MySQL.
(Also, Oracle is a lot more than a database development company and has certainly been more aggressively pushing into other areas; I suspect that their acquisition of Sun was more focussed on the non-MySQL parts of Sun than on MySQL.)
WHY use MySQL? Gee, because it's well documented, it plays nicely with Perl and PHP, it's available on nearly every corporate hosting package, there's good documentation and websites, etc etc etc. You can't say the same for Postgres.
IME, you can pretty much say all of that for Postgres, Postgres "official" documentation and third-party "how-to" information, on the web, in dead trees, and otherwise, is as good, or better, than MySQL documentation (though the total volume is somewhat lower, the coverage and quality seems equally good or better), Postgres plays very nicely with scripting languages (though I've used it with Ruby far more than Perl or PHP); the only advantage I see to MySQL on the points you make is that there are somewhat fewer hosting packages that offer PostgreSQL.
Politicians are actually one of the original examples in Peter's book. To get elected you need charisma, basically. But after you get elected, you need stuff like management skills, you need to know economics, etc. None of those played any role in convincing the people to elect you. So it's quite easy to end up with a bunch of elected politicians who genuinely don't have any more skills than talking convincingly out the arse and looking good in front of a camera. The skills they'd actually need to do a good job in the office, they simply don't have.
Management skills are usually at least as necessary to run a campaign organization than to do a politicians job, as, except perhaps for chief executives, campaign organizations are usually the biggest, most complex organization a politician will have direct responsibility for managing even if they win. Sure, that may be dealt with by choosing senior campaign staff with that skill, but choosing staff with management skill is equally applicable to the management a politician has to do in office, as well, and selecting staff is itself a management skill.
There may be skills -- particularly, as regards understanding policy issues -- that campaigns often fail to select for that one would usually consider important in office, but management skills aren't among them.
Worse yet, we elect those who can _lie_ convincingly or at least conveniently not mention half the truth. My standard example is the Phillips curve: all else being equal (and invariably out of your control), inflation and unemployment depend on each other.
The "invariably out of your control" part is, well, exactly the thing you accuse politicians of doing.
"Content owners" don't own facts, which are not subject to copyright. So, insofar as content owners are deriving income by leveraging that position to act as if they were "fact owners", that revenue may be at risk.
OTOH, if its like existing mechanisms Google uses to present information culled from other sources, it will link to the sources, and if users want to get more information from that source specifically, they will be free to click through and explore the source, so it may serve as a kind of free advertising for the sites it culls information from that people actually want.
Google's been doing very limited versions of this kind of search for quite some kind (one of the examples usually given for the kind of thing Alpha is good for the Google supposedly isn't is looking up the GDP of a country, which is a clear sign that whoever is giving the example has never done a query in Google for the GDP of a country, which is a question that Google will usually be able to answer directly with a link to the site from which it has culled that information), and its something they've been very clear that they plan on expanding. It is probably the case that these particular features have been released to the public in response to Wolfram|Alpha, but its pretty clear that Alpha didn't provide the impetus for Google's interest in this kind of functionality.
a lot of times google will pull a lot of sites quite frankly should be able to be punished by users by users beign able to filter them out of their search results.
That's a current feature of Google search. Don't want results from slashdot.org or any subdomains in your results? include -site:slashdot.org in your query string.
It would be nice if, e.g., Wonder Wheel kept site restrictions (positive or negative) when you used it to pull up a related search.
The article says transporting hydrogen is "a big challenge". Well then don't transport it. All you need to generate it is water and electricity, which are both pretty easy to transport.
If you do that, you lose energy cracking the hydrogen, so why not just put the electricity directly into a battery rather than cracking hydrogen and putting it into a fuel tank. Even the method you suggest, which makes hydrogen into a transfer mechanism and not an energy source, takes more infrastructure changes than supporting pure-electric vehicles would.
Gee, let's just ignore a field of research that could almost totally eliminate CO2 emissions from transportation.
Even if that description is reasonable for automotive fuel cells (it's not; all it does is move the CO2 emissions from the mobile sources to the sources feeding the electric grid, so unless you eliminate CO2 emissions from large scale generation first, automotive fuel cells don't eliminate transportation CO2 emissions) transferring funding to stationary fuel cells would not be ignoring that field of research, since improving technology for stationary fuel cells will advance the starting point for automotive fuel cells. It also offers more prospects for near term improvements, since stationary cells don't have the high infrastructure demands that mobile cells face.
the fact that you can sue is not related to public health. i didn't say you'd get fined. sued. suits are brought to recover damages caused by the counter party -- not to shape public policy.
This is true to an extent (actually, suits are frequently brought to shape public policy, as in when regulatory agencies are sued to block a regulation or to compel it to act) but, even where it is true, the conditions in which their are legal causes of action for suit are a product of public policy. Often, suits can be brought in areas that have been deemed of public concern with a lower threshold than would be the case otherwise.
Good luck also untangling the dependency mess in software, I doubt it would be difficult to pin down who is really at fault.
This is, in fact, a problem in complex tangible goods like automobiles as well; one solution which the law has found is (roughly) that, when you acquire something from a merchant (someone that is in the business of supplying that thing), that person is responsible for defects as are any other merchants upstream that sold the defective good, as well as the manufacturer of the defective good. (And if the good is defective in whole or in part due to a defective part, the same thing applies to the merchants and manufacturers of the defective part that supplied it to the manufacturer of the finished good.) Liability is not necessarily exclusive.
This could be extended to software licensing fairly simply.
There was a time when there were more applications for Macintosh.
No, there wasn't.
From 1986 until 1990, Windows was irrelevant.
Right. But because the vast majority of apps were for DOS without Windows, not because they were for Mac. In fact, many of the Windows applications didn't require Windows (which had almost no market penetration) but bundled a Windows runtime.
Then Windows 3.x happened.
And then instead of DOS without Windows, the vast majority of apps were for DOS with Windows.
They are working to provide a way to do things which people currently attempt to do (in Wolfram's eyes, with less success than they would with W|A) using Google (among other tools). It is, therefore, in any reasonable use of the words "compete" and "trying", trying to compete with Google in some part of the space in which Google is currently used.
And yes, technically they are a "search engine" if you want to use the literal definition, but I said "it is not a search engine in the conventional sense" which is completely true.
It's "completely true" if and only if one defines "the conventional sense" in a very particular way to make it true. While it certainly isn't a search engine exactly like Google's, in the same way that Google's wasn't exactly like Yahoo! and the AltaVista engine wasn't exactly like either, it certainly is very much the same type of animal. Its more like the an improved version of Google's calculator features combined with Yahoo! old human moderated database combined with Google's I Feel Lucky! button. And yes, its different even from that.
There's no such thing as a verified scientific fact?
Correct. It's a simple English sentence.
So you're saying that the notion of birds having feathers is neither verified, scientific, nor factual?
"There is no such thing as a 'verified scientific fact'" does not mean that no proposition can be verified, scientific, or factual, so, no, that doesn't follow at all from what I said.
That certain animals have certain features that match what is meant by the word "feathers" is an observation. It is a fact. It is "verified" in the sense that the observation has been repeated by many different people. It is not scientific (though explanations for why certain animals have those features and others do not may be scientific.) There is nothing scientific about facts, there is something scientific about certain ways of moving from observed facts to explanations with predictive power related to future observations.
And once again, no they are not trying to compete with Google.
Saying it over and over again isn't going to make it true.
Google is not a source for answers
Yes, it is.
they are a source for sources of information of all sorts.
One of those sorts is "information that answers as a specific question". Some (indeed most) of that information is provided in the form of links to external resources that are identified in Google's database that seem relevant to the query, though for certain questions (what movies are playing today in a specified geographical area, what is the population of a given country, what is the result of certain mathematical computations -- including some unit conversions) Google will attempt answer the question directly as well as providing links to potentially relevant external resources.
While the overall purpose of W|A and Google could be compared in some ways, saying the difference between Google and Yahoo! is comparable to the difference between W|A and Google is just foolish.
The similarity is that Google is one of the big existing players that W|A is going to have to show a clear advantage in utility in helping people answer their real questions for in order for it to be viable product in the market. There is a difference in that Google, when it came on the scene, was aiming pretty much at the entirety of Yahoo!'s utility, where W|A is targeting only a small piece of what Google is used for, and (at least it seems to me) targeting only a small segment of Google's audience even within that use. Nevertheless, they are clearly competing with Google.
The only thing I can think of is a subscription model, and I believe there is too much free stuff on the internet that I suppose is 'good enough' to leave room for subscription based content.
The target of this seems to be people who want "professionally-verified" content, not "good enough" content, so I think that they are probably thinking of eventually going subscription-based (or perhaps pay-per-query).
I am deliberately not saying that I expect this to be a successful business model, only that I think it is where this is intended to go.
For those of you who aren't gonna RTFA, I would like to reiterate something that is stated in TFA, because it seems, from reading comments on previous articles about Wolfram|Alpha, that people think this is a search engine and is trying to compete with the likes of Google and whatnot.
Since it is an engine for searching a custom database using natural language and presenting information that is "relevant" to the request given, exactly like any other search engine, and since its intended use is to answer questions of the type that people might today rely on Google to find answers to, I think the comparison is perfectly appropriate.
People, W|A is not a search engine in the conventional sense. It is more of a knowledgebase. It is a computational engine.
A search engines are "knowledgebases" and "computational engines".
Rather than finding websites that tell you about what you're trying to learn about, W|A gives you the information you're looking for on their site, pulled from a large 20-someodd-year-old database of verified scientific facts that began with Wolfram Mathematica.
There is no such thing as a "verified scientific facts", or even "scientific facts", verified or otherwise. There are "observed facts" (and even that is redundant, "facts" are observations), and there are scientific explanations for facts (which fall into three categories, "untested", "falsified", and "tested but not yet falsified"; note, particularly, that "verified" is not an option.) And in any given domain, its possible for their to be multiple explanations that fall into any of those categories, including the still-potentially-viable categories of "untested" and "tested but not yet falsified".
W|A is not the same as Google and is not trying to compete with Google
It is clearly not the same as Google, but it equally clearly is trying to compete with Google as a source of answers to questions for which people may be searching for answers. Of course, it is trying to compete by using a slightly different way of approaching answering questions, just as Google tried to approach the problem different than Yahoo! had before it.
Wolfram Alpha must be compared to Wikipedia, not to Google. And to be honest, since it is in its first day, it must be compared to Wikipedia in its first days.
"Must be"? Why? If I'm looking to choose a tool to use to answer a question (once Alpha is released), I may choose Google, I may choose Wikipedia, I may choose Alpha. What I am unlikely to even consider as an option is "Wikipedia in its first days".
So I think (a) it is valid to compare it to Google as well as Wikipedia (and any other tool for answering questions, for that matter), and (b) it is, for many purposes, far more relevant to compare it to Wikipedia today than Wikipedia in its first days.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's the real limitation, even if you don't go the whole way to server side rendering and just have the server side calculating the full game state and processing input, and still let the client do the 3D rendering (which avoids a lot of the other problems of server-side rendering, while still offloading work from the client and giving consistent game states.)
The acceptable latency is really independent of the desired frame rate; the required bandwidth depends on the frame rate. Latency affects responsiveness, sure, but the same latency will provide the same responsiveness no matter what framerate you have.
The video stream itself isn't interactive. There would be a control channel from the client to the server and a video feed from the server to the client. At any rate, regardless of latency, I would imagine that the client would always display the most recent frame received; more latency just means that the current frame displayed is further out of date compared to the present state of the server. You might drop frames if you had something else going on on the client computer, so that in the span between the display of one frame and the display of the next frame, more than one new frame was received. In that case, you would drop any undisplayed frame between the last frame displayed and the most recent frame received.
Latency won't make him able to update his position at 1/10 the rate of everyone else. Latency will just make his current view of the world farther behind everyone else's--if it takes a packet 70msec to get to one client and 35msec to get to another, the first guy is going to have (all other things being equal) a view of the world that is 35msec "older" than that of the second guy. Competing tasks on his local machine might reduce the frequency of updates and cause dropped frames and video skipping visible only to the person whose machine had the problem.
Well, bang:buck is infinitely better with OOo.
I don't think this is a new trend, IIRC, MS has for quite some time had a habit of breaking its own Windows UI standards with new releases of Office and Visual Studio, eventually moving those elements into the standards just in time to break them with new changes in its flagship applications.
The problem occurs regardless of where you render graphics. Current MMO have latency problems. Moving graphics to the server side (presuming the bandwidth and processing capacity to handle it) means you don't get client-to-client variations (other than those intended in the game design) in what is seen. You get latency problems in either that or the current model.
I believe Apogee Software, Ltd. (the company; "3D Realms" is essentially a brand name under which all of their development was done) has assets (including the trade name "Apogee", and its library of IP, currently licensed to Apogee Software, LLC). A financial judgement against Apogee Software, Ltd., could force them to liquidate those assets to satisfy the judgement.
Also, Apogee Software, Ltd., is a Limited Partnership, which means it has at least one general partner and one or more limited partners. Generally speaking, the general partner(s) are jointly and severally liable for the debts of the partnership, so if Apogee Software, Ltd., doesn't have assets to satsify a judgement, the general partner(s) will be on the hook for the judgement.
Fewer than offer MySQL, but enough that if PostgreSQL is the right DB choice for technical reasons, this just means you don't choose one of the hosting providers that don't support PostgreSQL, not that you choose MySQL.
(Assuming, of course, that you are building a web app where a discount shared hosting service is the right choice to start with; of course, not all apps for which a DB is needed are web apps, and not all web apps are those for which a discount shared hosting service makes good sense.)
But, sure, if you are artificially constrained to choose from one of set of hosting providers, none of which offer PostgreSQL and some of which offer MySQL, that's certainly a reason to choose MySQL. But that sounds like a result of a bad planning process, not something that should ever occur in the implementation of a new application.
The Bitfrost system developed for OLPC (which is, AFAIK, completely open) is a comprehensive approach to security, data reliability, theft deterrence, and centralized management of computer systems designed for what amount to massive enterprises with extremely non-technical users.
Apple picking up the designer of that system could be seen as an indication of directions they may take in the future. Its "News for Nerds" even if its not entirely clear, obviously, how much it will turn out to be "Stuff that matters".
Since they have overlapping niches, probably some of Oracle's products, particularly at the low end, take a hit from MySQL. Since even their free low-end products are designed to be compatible with and provide an upgrade path to their pricier DB offerings while its probably as easy to go from MySQL to PostgreSQL-based EnterpriseDB, DB2, or MS SQL as from MySQL to Oracle, their certainly might be reasons why they'd rather, over the long term, either phase MySQL out or evolve it into something very different than it is now. They might not, too; its fairly popular, does have a commercial presence which (I assume) is profitable, and may bring enough to be worth keeping around even if it hurts sales of other Oracle products.
Oracle has a number of lighter DB products, including Oracle Express Edition (XE) which is free (as in beer). They don't have anything (that I know of) that does the same kind of multi-backend thing that MySQL does, but certainly they have a number of products whose market niches at least overlap with that of MySQL.
(Also, Oracle is a lot more than a database development company and has certainly been more aggressively pushing into other areas; I suspect that their acquisition of Sun was more focussed on the non-MySQL parts of Sun than on MySQL.)
IME, you can pretty much say all of that for Postgres, Postgres "official" documentation and third-party "how-to" information, on the web, in dead trees, and otherwise, is as good, or better, than MySQL documentation (though the total volume is somewhat lower, the coverage and quality seems equally good or better), Postgres plays very nicely with scripting languages (though I've used it with Ruby far more than Perl or PHP); the only advantage I see to MySQL on the points you make is that there are somewhat fewer hosting packages that offer PostgreSQL.
Management skills are usually at least as necessary to run a campaign organization than to do a politicians job, as, except perhaps for chief executives, campaign organizations are usually the biggest, most complex organization a politician will have direct responsibility for managing even if they win. Sure, that may be dealt with by choosing senior campaign staff with that skill, but choosing staff with management skill is equally applicable to the management a politician has to do in office, as well, and selecting staff is itself a management skill.
There may be skills -- particularly, as regards understanding policy issues -- that campaigns often fail to select for that one would usually consider important in office, but management skills aren't among them.
The "invariably out of your control" part is, well, exactly the thing you accuse politicians of doing.
"Content owners" don't own facts, which are not subject to copyright. So, insofar as content owners are deriving income by leveraging that position to act as if they were "fact owners", that revenue may be at risk.
OTOH, if its like existing mechanisms Google uses to present information culled from other sources, it will link to the sources, and if users want to get more information from that source specifically, they will be free to click through and explore the source, so it may serve as a kind of free advertising for the sites it culls information from that people actually want.
Google's been doing very limited versions of this kind of search for quite some kind (one of the examples usually given for the kind of thing Alpha is good for the Google supposedly isn't is looking up the GDP of a country, which is a clear sign that whoever is giving the example has never done a query in Google for the GDP of a country, which is a question that Google will usually be able to answer directly with a link to the site from which it has culled that information), and its something they've been very clear that they plan on expanding. It is probably the case that these particular features have been released to the public in response to Wolfram|Alpha, but its pretty clear that Alpha didn't provide the impetus for Google's interest in this kind of functionality.
That's a current feature of Google search. Don't want results from slashdot.org or any subdomains in your results? include -site:slashdot.org in your query string.
It would be nice if, e.g., Wonder Wheel kept site restrictions (positive or negative) when you used it to pull up a related search.
If you do that, you lose energy cracking the hydrogen, so why not just put the electricity directly into a battery rather than cracking hydrogen and putting it into a fuel tank. Even the method you suggest, which makes hydrogen into a transfer mechanism and not an energy source, takes more infrastructure changes than supporting pure-electric vehicles would.
Even if that description is reasonable for automotive fuel cells (it's not; all it does is move the CO2 emissions from the mobile sources to the sources feeding the electric grid, so unless you eliminate CO2 emissions from large scale generation first, automotive fuel cells don't eliminate transportation CO2 emissions) transferring funding to stationary fuel cells would not be ignoring that field of research, since improving technology for stationary fuel cells will advance the starting point for automotive fuel cells. It also offers more prospects for near term improvements, since stationary cells don't have the high infrastructure demands that mobile cells face.
This is true to an extent (actually, suits are frequently brought to shape public policy, as in when regulatory agencies are sued to block a regulation or to compel it to act) but, even where it is true, the conditions in which their are legal causes of action for suit are a product of public policy. Often, suits can be brought in areas that have been deemed of public concern with a lower threshold than would be the case otherwise.
This is, in fact, a problem in complex tangible goods like automobiles as well; one solution which the law has found is (roughly) that, when you acquire something from a merchant (someone that is in the business of supplying that thing), that person is responsible for defects as are any other merchants upstream that sold the defective good, as well as the manufacturer of the defective good. (And if the good is defective in whole or in part due to a defective part, the same thing applies to the merchants and manufacturers of the defective part that supplied it to the manufacturer of the finished good.) Liability is not necessarily exclusive.
This could be extended to software licensing fairly simply.
No, there wasn't.
Right. But because the vast majority of apps were for DOS without Windows, not because they were for Mac. In fact, many of the Windows applications didn't require Windows (which had almost no market penetration) but bundled a Windows runtime.
And then instead of DOS without Windows, the vast majority of apps were for DOS with Windows.
They are working to provide a way to do things which people currently attempt to do (in Wolfram's eyes, with less success than they would with W|A) using Google (among other tools). It is, therefore, in any reasonable use of the words "compete" and "trying", trying to compete with Google in some part of the space in which Google is currently used.
It's "completely true" if and only if one defines "the conventional sense" in a very particular way to make it true. While it certainly isn't a search engine exactly like Google's, in the same way that Google's wasn't exactly like Yahoo! and the AltaVista engine wasn't exactly like either, it certainly is very much the same type of animal. Its more like the an improved version of Google's calculator features combined with Yahoo! old human moderated database combined with Google's I Feel Lucky! button. And yes, its different even from that.
Correct. It's a simple English sentence.
"There is no such thing as a 'verified scientific fact'" does not mean that no proposition can be verified, scientific, or factual, so, no, that doesn't follow at all from what I said.
That certain animals have certain features that match what is meant by the word "feathers" is an observation. It is a fact. It is "verified" in the sense that the observation has been repeated by many different people. It is not scientific (though explanations for why certain animals have those features and others do not may be scientific.) There is nothing scientific about facts, there is something scientific about certain ways of moving from observed facts to explanations with predictive power related to future observations.
Saying it over and over again isn't going to make it true.
Yes, it is.
One of those sorts is "information that answers as a specific question". Some (indeed most) of that information is provided in the form of links to external resources that are identified in Google's database that seem relevant to the query, though for certain questions (what movies are playing today in a specified geographical area, what is the population of a given country, what is the result of certain mathematical computations -- including some unit conversions) Google will attempt answer the question directly as well as providing links to potentially relevant external resources.
The similarity is that Google is one of the big existing players that W|A is going to have to show a clear advantage in utility in helping people answer their real questions for in order for it to be viable product in the market. There is a difference in that Google, when it came on the scene, was aiming pretty much at the entirety of Yahoo!'s utility, where W|A is targeting only a small piece of what Google is used for, and (at least it seems to me) targeting only a small segment of Google's audience even within that use. Nevertheless, they are clearly competing with Google.
Sure, but why would I want to code class definitions in one language and system behavior in another, if I wanted to use class-based OO at all?
The target of this seems to be people who want "professionally-verified" content, not "good enough" content, so I think that they are probably thinking of eventually going subscription-based (or perhaps pay-per-query).
I am deliberately not saying that I expect this to be a successful business model, only that I think it is where this is intended to go.
Since it is an engine for searching a custom database using natural language and presenting information that is "relevant" to the request given, exactly like any other search engine, and since its intended use is to answer questions of the type that people might today rely on Google to find answers to, I think the comparison is perfectly appropriate.
A search engines are "knowledgebases" and "computational engines".
There is no such thing as a "verified scientific facts", or even "scientific facts", verified or otherwise. There are "observed facts" (and even that is redundant, "facts" are observations), and there are scientific explanations for facts (which fall into three categories, "untested", "falsified", and "tested but not yet falsified"; note, particularly, that "verified" is not an option.) And in any given domain, its possible for their to be multiple explanations that fall into any of those categories, including the still-potentially-viable categories of "untested" and "tested but not yet falsified".
It is clearly not the same as Google, but it equally clearly is trying to compete with Google as a source of answers to questions for which people may be searching for answers. Of course, it is trying to compete by using a slightly different way of approaching answering questions, just as Google tried to approach the problem different than Yahoo! had before it.
"Must be"? Why? If I'm looking to choose a tool to use to answer a question (once Alpha is released), I may choose Google, I may choose Wikipedia, I may choose Alpha. What I am unlikely to even consider as an option is "Wikipedia in its first days".
So I think (a) it is valid to compare it to Google as well as Wikipedia (and any other tool for answering questions, for that matter), and (b) it is, for many purposes, far more relevant to compare it to Wikipedia today than Wikipedia in its first days.