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Submitted: Staying Connected to the Internet while Traveling - http://www.mixx.com/stories...

August 28 from Mixx - Comment - Like - Share

As a mobile online project manager you either already know the benefits of staying connected, or you really have room for improvement! - Ananya Walia

Leo Laporte to Leo's feed, TWiT Conversations

Live now: net@night with Amber MacArthur and the creator of RunPee.com. http://live.twit.tv - discuss here....

May 19 - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hansel, Julian Flores, Marco and 7 other people liked this

http://friendfeed.com/twit-co... - Timo Ukkola

25 more comments

Hey Leo, Congratulations Amber - Matthew

Napster Re-launches: http://napster.com, $5/month - Leo Laporte

couldn't you just subscribe for a month, download a ton of music, and then strip out the DRM? - Matthew

Matthew - Nodoby would ever strip out DRM. What are you thinking? That's *crazy*... - Ken Sheppardson

Tweeting too hard http://tweetingtoohard.com/top - Leo Laporte

looks like shoemoney - Matthew

Since you are on audible break, folks check out StoryPod by James kelly. They are a collection of short SiFi stories. PeeTime? That is cool idea. - Dutch [aka fairuse]

Amber audio {video on G1} in right ear, NASA TV on speakers, finger ready to hit record button. But I got to 'hit the head'. be back shortly - Dutch [aka fairuse]

Think we should be able to vote on the best "time" to go. Star Trek was at the 60 minute mark for sure. - Jude

Best time in Star Trek = When it starts snowing - Ken Sheppardson

I wouldn't suggest "cool kids". We're geeks so not cool by definition. - Jude

Tweet it. See how long it takes somebody to show up. - Ken Sheppardson

Sarah's mic is popping a bit. - Jude

Sarah's pick: http://fotomoto.com - in private beta but you can request an invite - Leo Laporte

Yes, Sarah has great light! - Jude

MaPlace http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet... http://www.maplace.ca/v2/Home - Leo Laporte

LOL!! leo just ate it! - Marco

youtube please - Matthew

Finally! I get to see Leo's ball pop on video! - netjackal

siinking, sinking... WOOSH! gone! - Marco

well Leo DID sink out of sight .. just not slowly .. hope he did not get hurt - netjackal

video http://dl.getdropbox.com/u... - Marco

I'm sinking... Bang! LOL That was brilliant! I am glad that you haven't hurt yourself and hoping that you won't suffer PTSD. - radiomensch

Did anyone find that link that Amber talked about regarding the best designed landing pages? I've been searching and can't seem to get past all the SEO ads. =( If someone finds it let me know. =P - Aaron M. Clay

1242pm hi from the rainy south holliday weekend vedios working audios working have a greatweakend - daveccorey

More shameless plugging................ - Kevin J Hatton

Robert Scoble

craigslist is right on to be suing South Carolina's attorney general. That guy is over the line. Way over the line. - http://blog.craigslist.org/2009...

May 20 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Norm McKenzie, Travis Koger, Thomas Hawk and 31 other people liked this

Go get 'em CL! - Fred Garrett

7 more comments

sue him for bad naming an awesome company (with just a bad website) - sadiq kassamali

That is insane... CL knows that they have done nothing wrong and the AG is just trying to scare them. Cmon... - Manny

I read this post on TC last Tuesday. I found the comments quite entertaining, though ;) - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - Gambit Fauri

I've been following this story, its one of the more entertaining items in the news in a long time, albeit with some very serious consequences depending on how the saga ends. - jcunwired

Good ol' South Carolina. They still don't allow sorority houses at universities on the grounds that six or more women in a residence constitutes a brothel. - charlestm

charlestm, et al.: I know this is off-topic and further that SC isn't the most advanced of states but: USC at least has a Greek Village with 9 sorority houses and 11 fraternity houses. The land belongs to the university, though the houses are privately owned. Are you referring to house ownership particularly? - Steve Lowe

Hill Billy Barristeers at their best! So glad I live in California where the politicians at least pretend to understand tech! - Sonya

I just find sentiments over North and South between Northerners and Southerners very entertaining. Isn't the civil war over - really over?! Try living in different countries and I guarantee one will have a bigger picture of the world, not regions of US! :) - Moushumi Kabir

Paul Buchheit

Like Google, Only Much, Much Worse. Wolfram Alpha is yet another pretender to the search giant's throne. - http://www.slate.com/id...

May 18 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Vesna Gerintes, Darren Heydon, Yaroslav Nikolaev and 91 other people liked this

"Wolfram has discouraged comparisons between his new site and Google, insisting each serves different purposes. But that doesn't make any sense; you'll use both sites to look up stuff you don't know, so it's irresistible to compare the two. On a side-by-side test, Google wipes the floor with Wolfram Alpha. Using the search engine, I found life expectancy information for California and Kansas, the murder rate in South Africa and Baltimore, M.I.A.'s album sales, economic data for San Francisco, and the top speed of a Veyron: 253 mph. When you ask Google how many calories you'd burn on various sports, you find this page on NutriStrategy.com, which lists caloric measures for all those activities and dozens more, including playing drums, horse grooming, and raking the lawn. That example illustrates the difficulty Wolfram faces in trying to match Google. Much of the data that we look for online aren't found in formal, structured tables like the CIA Factbook. Even Wikipedia misses mountains... more... - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

81 more comments

When I met with Microsoft's search team a couple weeks ago, they said most of tech media covers search engines "wrong". So I have held off on giving this a full spin, but I've been quite underwhelmed with the tests so far. Why should it be so difficult to determine what is the right kind of query and the wrong kind? Why should I feel like it's user error when the product doesn't easily define what it is supposed to do? - Louis Gray

I disagree, I think this is a great tool for research-based searches but not so great for trying to find a specific item - mjc

It still doesn't seem like a search engine to me. And it's actually hard to define what is and, specially, how to use it. - Arnaldo M Pereira

@Michael, inspecific research is almost an oxymoron - Freylekhe dreydl

Yes but can google divide the amount of calories burnt playing drums by the weight of a slinky and provide the output in joules per slug-fortnight? - Mitch

"That example illustrates the difficulty Wolfram faces in trying to match Google" --- a complete straw man, disingenuous and foreshadowed by the opening commentary. Who said Wolfram was trying to match, or even play in the same game as, Google? - Isaac Hepworth

His test queries were very similar to the Wolfram demo queries though. I ran into the same thing -- it seemed like a cool idea, but I couldn't get it to actually give me any interesting answers even though I tried to construct problems that it should be good at. - Paul Buchheit

The most succinct response to this question that I've heard comes from Tim O'Reilly: "Why are you asking Wolfram Alpha questions that would be answered by a search engine. Kind of like using excel as a word processor" (http://twitter.com/timorei...) - DeWitt Clinton

@Alex, I didn't say nonspecific research. what I meant was if you are looking for a specific piece of content, wolfram alpha doesn't have a big enough index yet. if you are however looking for data on a subject that doesn't have to be from a specific piece of content (eg, plotting/solving equations, data about persons or trends...) then you will likely do very well with alpha. it's of course not as mature as google yet though. don't knock it until you've used it for a math course! - mjc

@DeWitt++ - Isaac Hepworth

DeWitt, I agree with the idea of it being something else, and like the concept, but it just doesn't work very well for me. Have you actually gotten anything useful out of it? (not using a suggested search, but one you thought of yourself) - Paul Buchheit

Criticism is easy. Innovation is hard. - Gregg Scott

I wouldn't think of Alpha as a search engine any more than I would consider Wikipedia to be one. - Gabe

wolfram alpha is much closer to public semantic data and querying platforms such as freebase than to search engines like google - Mike Chelen

Gabe: further innovation exists in mathematic queries and comparison to wikipedia is apt because of integrated data set - Mike Chelen

Paul, try searches that take disparate pieces of data and compute an answer, e.g. http://www91.wolframalpha.com/input... (or try population of USA/population of India) - Deepak Singh

You need to use your imagination a little bit to grasp that the comparison of life expectancies in all US states, or all countries in the world, is really within the reach of Wolfram|Alpha, even if "it doesn't know, *just now*, what to do with your input", when you ask it about these things. Same remark about homicide rates. Sure, those may not be easy numbers to get at for some... more... - François Dongier

Paul: practical usage similar to online spreadsheets, for calculation of frequent tasks such as finding equations by regression http://bit.ly/18FZD7 - Mike Chelen

I get the concept Deepak, but was that an actual query for something you wanted to know, or a demo of Wolfram? My question remains, has anyone actually used it to answer an actual question they had? When I tried (something about the mass of oxygen in a 20cm sphere), it didn't answer. I go to go to Google for answers. I go to Wikipedia for answers. I could go to Wolfram for answers. In that sense, they all compete. - Paul Buchheit

@Paul -- in response to have I gotten something useful out of it? -- no, nothing other than a contrived query for weather data (http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input...) that I heard would work well (it did). But I don't see that as a failing of Alpha. I don't use Excel much either, and never Mathematica. But I do know what they're good for, and if I ever needed a spreadsheet or a computational software I'd know where to turn. I'm fine with Alpha being designed for a specific need. - DeWitt Clinton

Google (and Wikipedia of course) were in a much less advanced state than Alpha when they launched. - François Dongier

I agree that it could be very useful as "Mathematica on the web", but the demo video and other hype made it out to be much more. Hopefully it will get better though -- I do like the concept of what they are trying to do. - Paul Buchheit

Forget the hype, think for yourself. Alpha is Mathematica 7, 8, 9 on the web. - François Dongier

It's qlpha, right? Let it go through beta and then full release--and then if it doesn't execute mathematical computations go ahead and dismiss it. - Gregg Scott

So you're waiting for WolframBeta Gregg? :) - Paul Buchheit

Yes! Gmail is still in beta after 5 years. I don't think it was intended for widespread use by non-academics anyway. It's machinery is for researchers, mathematicians and scientists. We should always support the innovators. Remember those black and white Apple ads? - Gregg Scott

Raise your hand if you use Google or Yahoo to search the web. Keep your hand up if you think Alpha is overrated. Now put your hand down if you *don't* use Mathematica or NumPy or Maple or Matlab on a regular basis. How many hands are still in the air? - DeWitt Clinton

Gregg, do you think the media coverage was an accident, and that they only intended for academics to use it? - Paul Buchheit

When Alpha (or Beta) will incorporate some simple logical reasoning ability, its applicability and overall usefulness will explode. - François Dongier

Paul. I don't know about their media strategy. I do know that tech journalism loves a new story so they may have inflated expectations by misunderstanding it's application. Or that could've been WA's marketing mistake. I heard Leo's interview with Paul Wolfram and I didn't get that he believes this is an app for the masses at all. - Gregg Scott

Leo's interview was excellent: go 2/3 towards the end of http://www.podtrac.com/pts... - François Dongier

Paul, WA may be guilty of inhabiting that bubble that all of us who love new technology inhabit by thinking that all the world is just like ourselves. It's a niche but potentially very powerful application. I think over time it will become more non-academic friendly. I could be totally wrong. Of course. - Gregg Scott

It didn't help that Doug Lenat gave a ringing endorsement. :) - Ray Cromwell

Comparing Google to WA is like comparing a cell phone to a graphing calculator. - Gregg Scott

Search engines always have this problem where you don't know their domain coverage exactly. If you don't like the results, are you asking the question wrong, or does it not have the answer? Even Google has this problem, but when you can't tell who has what, you end up always using the search engine with the broadest coverage -- which is Google right now. - ⓞnor

What I would like from WA is a nice hierarchical directory of all the data they have broken down by subject area. Their directory of examples is close, but isn't quite authoritative enough. That way I could really get my head around what they have. A well-curated set of general data banks with a good calculation engine on top seems like it could be really useful, especially if they make it possible for the community to participate in the data curation process. But it's not a search engine. - ⓞnor

The thing which seems to be missed by a lot of people is that Google has a pretty decent "computation engine" right now. See, for a useless example http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub... vs http://www30.wolframalpha.com/input... Obviously Google isn't exposing many entities ("facts") to it now, but the possibilities are pretty clear (See Google Squared...) - Nick Lothian

Wolfram|Alpha reviews seem to be a very interesting litmus test... there are those that grok the concept who may be disappointed by what it delivers - in this very early incarnation - but they don't write off the ideal. Those that don't grok it end up comparing the service directly to the Google in one way or another (often while proclaiming that they aren't) and write off the company... more... - David HC Soul

I think the underlying thread in this thread, as it were, is that we want to believe in something innovative and new, but we are frustrated as to how we are expected to modify our behavior to work around its limitations (intended or otherwise). - Louis Gray -- Think so too. I tried lots of things for kicks and was unable to get to anything really interesting, I had to look elsewhere for... more... - ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,

Pretty good for crosswords though ;p http://www22.wolframalpha.com/input... - ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,

I agree with François. It is just "Mathematica on the web". And only this "mathimatica" part of the system works well. Other parts are data integration/inference and NLP they both are unsolved problems now. Wolfram|Alpha does not propose any new solution to these problems. It uses state-of-the-art methods and as result it does not work. - Maxim Grinev

Nor: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathema... gives a good idea of the currently available datasets. Clearly incomplete. The interesting question is whether making it complete enough to be useful is or not realistic. - François Dongier

From what's new in Mathematica-7: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathema... , the fun exercise is to imagine what new computable datasets will be included in future versions. Things could go very fast if the community contributes. - François Dongier

Most of my searches,questions and answers are on Twitter and FriendFeed based on my trusted friends(experts).Main trend. - Igor Poltavskiy

The data representation is great but the problem is that Wolfram expects the user to learn about it instead of it trying to learn about the user - Kiran Patchigolla

I see Wolfram Alpha more as a competitor to Wikipedia than Google. The media are the ones who are pitching Wolfram Alpha as a Google competitor, yet they are the same ones that are saying that it can't compete... crazy. - Stuart Maxwell

I hope the arrival of Wolfram Alpha will make Google start asking themselves the question "are we infallible." And I wouldn't be surprised if, in the near future, Google would begin paying more attention to how it presents what it emits. WA's one big and DISTINCTIVE advantage over typical search engine's output, is that it attempts to enhance and embellish the flow in graphically-palatable chunks (even though they've gotten few things wrong, and abuse small type in graphics-tables far too much). - ianf ⌘

Has anyone tried searching for "swine flu" - Peter Stuifzand

It is not "a great tool for research-based searches" even because it does not provide references to the sources where the answer was taken - Maria Grineva

Wolfram Alpha is a good first attempt at building a computational knowledge engine, but it needs to massively expand its database to become useful and appealing for most people. It is still a demo, a tantalizing taste of things to come, not a fully realized product. At a minimum, it needs to convert all the facts in Wikipedia into a computational format. - Sean McBride

"Maria - it does not provide references to the sources", yes it does, clik "source information" - Anders

Sean: Wikipedia data could easily be imported through DBpedia right? Haven't heard much about how to bring data from the RDF web (LOD) into Alpha, but that should be relatively easy. The hard part is what to do with it, as long as Alpha doesn't do logical reasoning. Maybe the best way of merging the two would be to extract RDF from the web of data through a SPARQL query, send the data to Alpha's API and have it return some useful interpretation of that data. - François Dongier

Compare Google and Wolfram Alpha for searches on the population of Pakistan: 1. search[Google; pakistan population http://www.google.com/#q=paki...] 2. search[Wolfram Alpha; pakistan population http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input...] The Wolfram result is more elegant and directly informative -- but takes quite a long time to produce. - Sean McBride

Compare searches on GOOG YHOO: 1. search[Wolfram Alpha; goog yhoo http://www46.wolframalpha.com/input...] 2. search[Google; goog yhoo http://www.google.com/#q=goog...] The WA search results are clearly superior. - Sean McBride

I like the concept, but I see two major flaws that need to be addressed. The first is probably easy: You can't, afaict, compare two disparate data sets over time (can you get it to give you a graph of russian gdp vs crude oil price?). The second is that they're asking for "curators" to help shepherd new data sets, but they don't seem to make them publicly available in raw form. I'm not going to volunteer to maintain their private database. - Joel Webber

Sean: Actually I don't really mind Alpha taking a long time to produce its answer, I even seem to enjoy it... Feels like watching the machine thinking, trying to guess what sort of calculation and graphs it will come up with :-) - François Dongier

I'm curious how long it would take google to approximate pi to a million decimal places... Mathematica 6 did it on my x2 3800+ w/ 2gb ram in about 8 seconds. Alas, 2gb of ram was not enough to approximate it to a billion decimal places :( - LarchOye

I think that Farhad Manjoo just wanted to create buzz with this header. It's no sense to compare Google and Wolfram|Aplha. Its like comparing Word and Corel. They can do some same things, but would you use Word to create a graphic? Would you use Corel to write long text? I would use Google to see what food is good for me, and I would use WA to calculate a sum of its calories. If WA weren't any good, Google would not be showing us some of its not-working search experiments lately. - Pablo Yamamoto

Thanks for that rational comment, Pablo. - Christopher A Carr

Pablo summed it up pretty well. Besides WA just launched a couple of days ago and as the users themselves its still in a learning phase. I just wish i had an iphone + WA back in school during all my horrible maths exams lol - Pretty Monkey Studio

@LarchOye: 0.34 seconds: http://www.google.com.au/search... - Nick Lothian

I'm not listening to anyone's take on Alpha who isn't a Mathematica user. The rest of you tech journalists can go find something else to hype. - Mr. Gunn

FD: the problem with WA often taking so long to fully display its results: I'll wager that many users move on to another web page without realizing that they've seen only partial results. - Sean McBride

If WA still processes results "behind the window" after first showing them to the user without indicating it explicitly, then this is clearly a design error. - ianf ⌘

hmm... do you always stop thinking after answering a question? - François Dongier

at least they don't have the deletionist cabal ruining it for everyone. - Jon

cuil, anyone? - dario

No, François, but I look extra pensive to indicate more may be coming. Anyway, comparing lifeless computer output to a human answer is taking anthropomorphizing one step too far. - ianf ⌘

ianf: was joking :) - François Dongier

Thx, reading this article an thread give me some insights of the usefulness and reach of this tool - Luis Enrique León

Convention is scary-powerful. We're so used to putting our strings of text into a box and clicking Search that we assume everything with a box and a go button are Google. WolframAlpha seems to be a different beast entirely, and I don't envy the creator(s) in trying to describe what it does. That's not to say it'll catch on if it fails to answer questions, because I believe the majority of people are too lazy to tailor what they ask, to the style that suits the oracle. - Rick Cogley

Stephen Wolfram himself put it best, I think, in his interview with Leo the other day. He said basically that it's going to take some time for people to get used to the kinds of questions that WolframAlpha is going to be good at answering. And I have to add to that, over time the people on that project will discover and add new data sources to the engine, and come up with new techniques... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

That said, I thought this was a poor article, written by someone who really didn't try to understand the project. "Wolfram has discouraged comparisons between his new site and Google, insisting each serves different purposes. But that doesn't make any sense; you'll use both sites to look up stuff you don't know, so it's irresistible to compare the two" Wrong. It's just irresistible to... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Wrong. - Chris Spizzirri

We noted your cute one-liner, Chris. - ianf ⌘

Rob: I agree with your conclusion (poor article). The structure of the argument is this: 1. Alpha is an answering engine, not a search engine. 2. Alpha does not answer most of our questions (although answers are on the web). Therefore: Alpha is not a good search engine. - François Dongier

I'm compiling some queries that work or don't, either way. Please add a couple if you experiment with WolframAlpha. http://friendfeed.com/rickcog... - Rick Cogley

I agree with Pablo, besides its good to see inventive new services, I will try to get benefit of it instead of comparing to Google. Like I was doing to Google when using Altavista. - Jacque

I like the new service. I can compute my motgage very easily with it. - Derek Wei

There is one thing wrong with WA: I dont want to be trained to use a search engine. - Burcu Dogan

But you've already been trained by your experience to know how to ask Google a question, and get the answers you seek. Why should a different tool be any different? For that matter, don't you need training to use any kind of tool? (even self-training) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)