World: r3wp

From the FAQ:

Is Wolfram|Alpha a search engine?

No. It's a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by 
doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead 
of searching the web and returning links.

Does Wolfram|Alpha get its data from the web?

No. It comes from Wolfram|Alpha's internal knowledge base. Some of 
the data in that knowledge base is derived from official public or 
private websites, but most of it is from more systematic primary 
sources.

Where does Wolfram|Alpha's data come from?

Many different sources, combined and curated by the Wolfram|Alpha 
team. At the bottom of each relevant results page there's a "Source 
information" button, which provides background sources and references.

by using it a bit I realise that its not using very fancy NLP for 
the questions.

yes, some questions fail, even if they should make logical sense.

sometimes changing what, where or who gives the same replies, when 
they should be different.. so its probably using basic statistical 
based analysis, which doesn't understand the concepts.... where as 
current nlp systems really do understand the differences between 
places people and things.

It needs to loosen up a bit too:
   largest prime  ===> good answer
   smallest prime ===> confused wolfram

perhaps the people who coded it assumed that the persons asking the 
questions have the ability to understand the answers?

So, try and deal with the hard questions first and leave the easy 
stuff to google

I guess you should compare Wolfram Alpha to Spock in the beginning 
of the fourth Star Trek movie, where he's being tested by a computer. 
"How do you feel?" :-)

They should in fact just call it "Ask Mr. Spock".

You're not going to ruin the movie for us are you???

Not the new one. :-)

Gene Roddenbury or his estate executors might object ...

I can see why Carl says it's his favourite Star Trek movie. The computers 
that Spock uses are in fact Amiga 1000s. :-)

aw geez .. spoilers :(

The computer that Scotty uses to show transparent aluminum was originally 
going to be an Amiga, but Commodore would only provide a computer 
if they bought it. Apple was willing to loan them the Mac.
 <--- Commodore marketing in action.

someone lent them an Atari portfolio for Terminator

Reminds me of the START project at MIT.
http://start.csail.mit.edu/


Remember the strange hokus-pokus REBOL script, I wrote some years 
ago?

>> do http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/hokus-pokus.r
>> hokus-pokus "What is the highest point in Canada?"

Canada
highest point: Mount Logan 5,959 m

>> hokus-pokus "What is the volume of the Earth?"

The volume of Earth is 108.321  (1010 km3).

etc...

Other strange use:

>> hokus-pokus/quote "Hitchhiker"

Ford: [watching the Magrathean recording of Deep Thought] Is that 
it?
Zaphod: No, there's more. They go back.
Arthur: What, seven and a half million years later?
Zaphod: Yeah, they do.

>> hokus-pokus #00113f
== 0.17.63

>> hokus-pokus/translate "Yeah, they do." "en2de"

Ja, sie tun.

:-) I use this too little.

start is probably where wolfram got his idea from.

Surprising conclusion on Gregory Higley's blog?:

<....I’ve come to the realization that JavaScript is the language 
in common use that’s most akin to REBOL.>
http://blog.revolucent.net/2009/05/javascript-rebol.html

JavaScript is a strict subset of the R3 semantics, though there's 
hidden stuff that isn't hidden in REBOL, and particular implementations 
can include standard objects that have no analog in REBOL. There's 
no corresponding concept for JavaScript's objects in R2, but the 
R3 map! type is close enough.

The "hidden stuff" is the prototype message delegation, which can 
be done in REBOL explicitly.

On an implementtation level, JavaScript being compiled means that 
code really is code, rather than data for an interpreter. So JS is 
more like a subset of what R3 pretends to be, rather than what it 
is :)

Hmm, DOM (ok, not really what he means, but still vaguely similar):

	http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=xml-dom.r
	http://www.ross-gill.com/r/qxml.html(slightly newer)

Very cool project managment site.  http://www.attask.com/

Looks pretty good.

they have "View demo" button that leads to some not so small form 
to fill, on that page there is try @task that leads to even slightly 
bigger form

Shame there's no product tour (without, I presume, signing up)

You also need to have a minimum number of people to use it.  In other 
words, you have to sort of buy in all hog from what I understand...

But they do have some cool features...

You can get more of a feel for it here.  http://www.attask.com/overview/product-tour/project-management

Future spacecraft can use pulsars as an interstellar GPS with a precision 
of one meter:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23576/

Great, the aliens "will" find us....

Google's new collaboration tool http://wave.google.com/

Kind of underwhelming.

The spelling corrector spelly looks interesting.

I already pointed to in in Links group. Looks interesting. I thing 
that we might have here some chance with R3. Maybe, as a "killer 
app", we could think of alternative client frond-end for services, 
which have public APIs. That way such clients might be downloaded 
by millions, making REBOL a bit more popular :-)

Project Natal for XBox 360 looks very interesting:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/

utopia ....

http://kotaku.com/5274554/molyneuxs-milo-brings-a-virtual-child-to-the-xbox-360?autoplay=true

How it's used.

I like this one - http://www.camspace.com/- allows you to take any 
object for navigation ...

A new type of harddisk designed to compete with SSD. Very interesting:

http://www.dataslide.com/

that looks very cool!

Is it a magneto-optical drive ... like we had years ago?

No, it basically a harddrive with a rectangular magnetic plate, and 
instead of one head it has millions sitting in an array in another 
plate above the magnetic plate, placed on a very thin lubricant. 
the thing is that the heads can move up to 250 micrometers back and 
forth above the plate using a piezo actuator. Everything is tightly 
packed together with no loose parts.


There isn't much motion and the frequency of the motion is only about 
800 - 1000 Hz. However the head arrangement allows for massive parallelization 
of read and write ops. Currently only 64 heads can be accessed simultaneously, 
but I suspect this number will go way up. If the drive is idle, no 
power is used as nothing is moving. Due to the low frequency of motion, 
there can be a latency of about 0.5 ms, but the read/write speeds 
far exceed that of SSD. I suspect this frequency is used to avoid 
thermal and power problems.


The difference here from SSD is no need for specialized file systems, 
current manufacturing methods can be used and it uses even less power 
than SSD. It can also freely be scaled and adapted to 1.8", 2.5" 
and 3.5" drives, from what I can see. The durability for writeops 
on the same sector would be same or better than a harddrive.

I can see it reducing latency [head movement time] but rotational 
delay is likely to be the same. You could optimise for that, but 
that would need tweaks to the file system.

Maybe they got the inspiration from 1950's drum storage -- one head 
per track :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory

Nothing is rotating.

Sorry -- my mistake.

There's some interesting discussion of the device in the comments 
here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/15/dataslide_berkeleydb/comments/

seems, that digital signatures are becoming quite insecure these 
days http://www.secureworks.com/research/blog/index.php/2009/6/3/sha-1-collision-attacks-now-252/