Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight, On Camera 218
future.nerd tips news that Wolfram Alpha is set to be launched tonight at 8PM EST (00:00 GMT), and the entire process will be broadcast live, via webcast. Steven Wolfram said to PCPro, "We've been rather surprised that we haven't been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all. So we thought we would document our own experience. We can't guarantee that everything will go smoothly. We fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that it'll be interesting for people to join us as we work through these in real time." In a related blog post, he explains how Wolfram Alpha interacts with Mathematica.
Oh Oh Oh Google killer (Score:1, Informative)
Qu'est-ce que c'est?
fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa better
Run run run run run run run away
Re:Google Killer (Score:4, Informative)
He specifically said it's not a google killer.
Such confidence. (Score:2, Informative)
http://twitter.com/wolfram_alpha/ (Score:1, Informative)
We are running behind because the justin.tv uplink is not working.
half a minute ago from TweetDeck
We're running a few minutes behind, but stay tuned here: http://www.justin.tv/wolframalpha
13 minutes ago from TweetDeck
Launch delayed, WolframAlpha hits a "snag" (Score:4, Informative)
"We have several supercomputer-class compute clusters. One of our tests was to use one cluster to simulate traffic and run it against the other cluster. And when we did that last night, we found that the through-put we got degraded horribly when we increased the amount of traffic that we were pushing from one cluster to the other."
Remaining questions:
1. Why didn't they test first, then announce launch date?
2. Why are they building excitement towards a specific release day, hour and minute (which will surely cause availability issues even if they launched), instead of releasing it gradually with gmail-style invitation system?
That said, the project seems definitely worthwhile, I hope the internet community cuts them some slack so they can fix this in peace. Hopefully we see the project online soon.
At least it knows the answer (Score:1, Informative)
to life, the universe, and everything:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+answer+to+life%2C+the+universe%2C+and+everything&asynchronous=false&equal=Submit
Re:Idiots - exactly the wrong way to launch a webs (Score:3, Informative)
If you look at the top ten websites on Alexa, maybe two of them (MSN and Microsoft Live) had high-profile launches. I know that three of them (Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia) had launches consisting of the site creator saying to his friends "Hey, guys! Look at this cool thing I made!"
Input page (Score:5, Informative)
Been using it for about an hour... (Score:5, Informative)
You just have to type in http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/ [wolframalpha.com] to get to a usable input screen.
Unfortunately, it seems as though Steven Wolfram's screencast that's been up for the past few days used rather cherry-picked examples, as the underlying datasets do not seem to be as comprehensive as one might have been led to believe. Beyond the fairly basic things you might find in the CIA fact book or other source of basic data, it just doesn't yet have the breadth of underlying data that would make it an indispensable tool. For example, after playing around with W|A finance queries, I was left completely unimpressed with the paltry datasets and feel that any market/stock questions I have would be better served by hitting up finance.yahoo.com. They have some basic data about professional sports teams, but NHL hockey is nowhere to found, and you can't find anything in the way of current player stats for any sport, let alone historical data. Birthdays of notable sports figures are there though...
Gotta admit, it's quite an ambitious undertaking, I just think they're somewhere between 3 and 5 orders of magnitude away from having enough data and detail to make it the kind of thing I would consider using regularly. Stay tuned, might be interesting in a year... or five.