Category Archives: Technology

search – wolfram alpha going live

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The process of bringing Wolfram Alpha online is being webcast live right now.  It starts with a 5 minute intro along with some other pre-recorded clips.  Some interesting tidbits:

  • it will be run on thousands of CPUs
  • it is planned to be a 48 process – presumably shooting for being fully live Monday morning
  • the webcast will include deployment and testing

I look forward to seeing snippets of it throughout the weekend.

I also watched the overview of what Wolfram Alpha is all about.  My first impression as posted earlier on JavaRanch:

What is interesting to me is that it gives you the answer, but not the source. For calculations, there isn’t really a source anyway. I don’t cite that 2+2=4. However, I do cite the population of Germany. So how are we supposed to know it is right? On the other hand, I think showing similar information you might not have asked for is cool.

I expect my impression will change once I actually get to try it out.

7:15 CST , I’m still unable to get through to the live part.  Firefox is still showing the pre-recorded clips and my other browser is timing out on the site.  Will try agin later.

7:30 CST: It was a browser caching thing.  Clearing the cache shows justin.tv – the live part.  The site is very slow.  I think demand is higher than expected to follow the events live.  Maybe it was publicized too well?

7:31 CST: It’s up now.  Reloading yet again helped.

See part 2 for my impressions of the parts of the webcast I am watching tonight.

Yet another reason not to switch to Blu-ray

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The Sony Blu-ray launch has been marred by a near-endless amount of mistakes, not least of which was the two years they spent duking it out with Toshiba’s HD-DVD, which, although they won, came at something of a high cost. For example, despite being launched in 2006, 3 years later Blu-Ray players are still ridiculously priced, especially when compared to DVD players. Not to mention that a lot of people have predicted the format war was so off-putting to customers that many may skip it and go directly to digital distribution. With the popularity of Hulu, iTunes, and Tivo, that does seem to be the case.

But, if you had any more doubts about Blu-Ray, never fear, Netflix will now charge you 20% more to rent items on Blu-Ray than on standard DVD: Boost Blu-ray Fee as Demand Increases

Makes you wonder, do they even like their customers? I don’t blame Netflix, I imagine the discs do cost more, I blame the studios for raising prices and missing a golden opportunity to be competitive with DVD. There’s just no compelling reason to switch.

javaranch & coderanch forums

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I gave IBM’s data visualization tool Many Eyes a shot.  Very cool.

The tag cloud visualization shows the most common words used in the JavaRanch/CodeRanch forum names and description.

Unsurprisingly, words like Java, certification and discussion feature prominately.  In two word mode, “sun certified” was the clear leader.

I have no doubt that other data sets would be more interesting.  It’s a nice tool to explorer.  Free to use with the only caveat being anyone can see your data/visualization.