Note that the instructions say you can have either the normal install ISO or the Install-Dev ISO in the optical drive, but this does not seem to be correct -- using the Install-Dev ISO causes an error trying to read /etc/init. You need to use the normal install ISO instead.
"SapphireDb also supports running in an NLB with multiple instances and scales very good."
In English, when speaking of actions you must say "well" instead of "good", ie. "scales very well". While there are a million weird things about English, this particular mistake is used as a cultural marker of "childish" or "low-intelligence" speech, so you probably want to fix it ASAP.
That was my first thought. I’m sure I’ve seen some unsolicited re-design of the Firefox icon that looked very similar to this, but with an orange palette.
Seems pretty easy to write an essay saying "screens are old news, let's use our hands!" containing not a single word about how that would work, technically or design-wise.
I'm going to write an essay saying "screens are old news, let's use free-floating holograms like in Iron Man!" with no indication how that would even be possible, and see if I can get on HN.
Yes, that's why I called it a rant, not an essay — it describes a problem, not an idea. (And FWIW, that's not the sort of thing I typically publish, or want to.)
The solution isn't known, and I didn't think making stuff up would help.
The point of the rant was that the solution will be discovered through long research, and that research won't happen without an awareness of the problem. My intent was to hopefully coax a few potential researchers and funders into tangible interfaces, dynamic materials, haptics, and related fields that haven't been named yet. If that happens, then mission accomplished.
None of the things BV has worked on -- smart tiles or putting pieces of paper under a camera/projector -- do ANYTHING AT ALL like what he's talking about here. They don't change their size, shape, weight, feel etc. in response to data. Because that would be incredibly hard. I don't think you should get points for saying "we should do this impossible thing, that would be better."
I must admit I find BV's writing to be really facile... like he'll compare a piano app on the iPad with a real piano and shit on the entire idea of the iPad... without addressing the obvious point that an iPad can be a million things other than a piano.
His point is not about what we should do, it's about what we should aspire to. He's criticizing a video showing a Vision Of The Future, not the current status.
> shit on the entire idea of the iPad
That's not at all what he's doing. He's saying the iPad was the Vision of the Future in 1968. Now the iPad is here. It's no longer part of the Future, and we should stop talking about it as if it is, because we need to reach beyond it.
> I don't think you should get points for saying "we should do this impossible thing, that would be better."
When the other contenders at visionaries are saying "we should do this thing that has already been done", saying "we should do this impossible thing" is worthwhile.
> None of the things BV has worked on -- smart tiles or putting pieces of paper under a camera/projector -- do ANYTHING AT ALL like what he's talking about here.
Sure they do. At Dynamicland there are turn tables that can be manipulated, joysticks on springs, books with pages that turn, and pieces of paper that are manually rearranged on surfaces by groups of people. All of that involve physical devices, and using hands for something other than sliding on a 2d surface.
Does it solve all the issues he raises here? No, of course not. But it's clear that he's working on it, and providing rich avenues of exploration for other people.
>> without addressing the obvious point that an iPad can be a million things other than a piano.
I think you're missing the point. He's saying we should work toward creating a new kind of technology where the ipad would really feel like a piano when you're on the "piano app", but feel very differently for other apps.
What you're saying is that you don't think that such technology could ever exist; BV thinks otherwise and he's working toward that vision. He's also saying that we shouldn't take the future for granted as if a technology will just suddenly appear. It takes hard work, funding and a clear vision.
I can think of a few ways about how we could add tactile touch to a dynamic interface (I.e. turning a piano 2D screen to a real experience). VR is going in that direction (to see 3D from a 2D screen) and you can imagine some sensors at the tip of your fingers where depending where you touch you'd feel something different. Again, that's just an idea, there are many ways it could be achieved.
iPad cannot be any of those million things, no more so than a map of Paris is Paris; all it can be is a picture of those things under glass. Pictures of things might be the best we can build today, but it's a limited and unexciting dream for the future.
I don't think you should get points for saying "we should do this impossible thing, that would be better."
When everyone else seems happy to accept that a picture of a piano is a piano, maybe you should get points for pointing out that the Emperor's New Clothes are lacking many important features.
"We are inventing a new computational
medium where people work together
with real objects in the real world, not
alone with virtual objects on screens."
"For a number of years now, work has been proceeding in order to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a transmission that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters..."
Honestly, this is how I read every quantum thing. Not because I don't believe it's real, it's just so far outside of my area of education that it might as well be describing the turbo encabulator.
I know SW is famous for his arrogance/egotism, but it still kills me how he always discusses everything in terms of Mathematica's programming language, instead of mathematical notation or pseudo-code. It's like giving a linguistics lecture using the made-up language you invented with your twin.
I don't think your criticism is very accurate here. Wolfram Language code doesn't show up until the second half of the (very long) article, in the sections where he is explaining how to represent the mathematical concepts in the Wolfram Language. In fact, in several cases he mentions the traditional mathematical notation and follows it with the Wolfram Language notation. What's strange or arrogant or egotistical about this? Yes, he's the founder and CEO of the company that created the language, but that doesn't strike me as a problem. It's a good language for doing this sort of thing, and it's pretty clear that he's genuinely interested in both the mathematical concepts and how to create a programming language to represent them. This is hardly just content marketing blogspam.
Every single piece Wolfram writes, without exception, is arrogant content marketing blogspam. Even his books. Sometimes very clever, sometimes interesting (though I'd find him 1,000x more interesting if say 1 article in 10 made no mention of how clever he and Mathematica are); always arrogant and self-promotional. This piece is no exception - because it's Turing I made exception to my usual personal hard-ban on reading Wolfram. It's no exception to the above. It is, however, interesting despite being arrogant and self-promotional.
If you asked Stephen Wolfram what time it was, he would be arrogant and self-promotional, and mention Mathematica at least as much as the time.
It’s definitely self-promotion, but I don’t see why this is a bad thing. He’s clearly spent a large portion of his life developing a programming and computing environment to handle mathematics (and other things). What is he supposed to do? Write a blog post about something he's interested in, without using the programming language he has intentionally developed to deal with the things he’s interested in?
> So, OK, if I mounted a project to try to find the fundamental theory of physics, what would I actually do? It’s a complex project, that’ll need not just me, but a diverse team of talented other people too.
It's illuminating that, in order to explore the nature of space and time, he mentions Euclid, Einstein, but most of all himself and his work. The self-absorption encompasses all of existence.
That said, dismissing all of his writing as "arrogant content marketing blogspam" feels uncharitable and too reductive - I don't disagree, but still consider it arrogant self-promotion of the highest order, by one of the most productive and insightful thinkers of our time.
You manage to neatly encapsulate why I find him so frustrating.
"feels uncharitable and too reductive"
I'm old enough to remember when the law suits, a flagged throwaway comment briefly mentions, were going - my recollection is of a lengthy effort to deprive the other developers of the fruits of Mathematica labours. That colours later impressions. Charitable isn't necessarily always the right take...
Still, that's an aside here, and perhaps I was too sweeping. It's difficult as there are rare times, like this one, where the topic is fascinating and well explored, and the self-promotion is, for Stephen, light touch. It's well known he was a child prodigy, so I'm sure many people and events had part in boosting his ego and innate sense of exceptionalism, resulting in the personality we know. So I don't entirely blame him for it...
"arrogant self-promotion of the highest order, by one of the most productive and insightful thinkers of our time."
You're not wrong. He'd probably be well served employing someone to bring a lighter touch, via an editing pass to all output. I end up not finishing articles he writes on topics I might otherwise find hugely interesting. Solely because too much prose is spent telling me he's brilliant, rather than simply showing it. For me at least, the style of delivery has cost the message - as I stopped regularly reading him as far too frustrating, ages ago. :)
Ehhh, you know, he's not a journalist. He's the founder and CEO of a company that he is very hands on at. What you view as arrogance and self-promotion is really just a man who is obsessed with the technology he builds and works on every single day. No one is forcing you to read his stuff or pay attention to him.
I found his relentless self-promotion really distracting and annoying. And presenting lambda calculus in terms of his own language only makes it more confusing.
However, I am impressed with the tenacity it took to trace the paper to its origin and there's a lot of interesting story in the process.
This seems unsurprising to me. Presumably the language he designed fits his way of thinking, and he uses it to express his thoughts.
As long as you still understand it he succeeded in using it to communicate, and with some people that's a lot better than them not communicating at all because they have to use someone else's language.
If someone comes up with an amazing construct in an invented language and gets any outside eyeballs on it that can understand it, someone will transcribe it into a more common notation anyways.
“Made-up language” is a bit harsh. The Mathematica company has hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, right? It makes sense for his public communications to use it, just like you’d expect to see the guy who wrote Haskell to give examples in Haskell.
Have a look at this page [1]. Mathematica is exceptionally powerful and has a very rich vocabulary. In so far as expressing ideas across the computational paradigms - you will struggle to find a match.
It's just a pity that its grammar/syntax is unintuitive to people who come from conventional programming languages.
It's not reflected in OP's screenshot, but there was a period where Encarta (and a companion product called Microsoft Bookshelf) used a very flat, Swiss-design aesthetic that was catnip to graphic-designer-wanna-be kid me. You can draw a direct line from that era through Microsoft's Neptune UI experiments down to the Metro design language.
Here's a talk by Bill Flora who was a lead designer for many of the products along that line, from Encarta through to Windows Phone: https://vimeo.com/56764845
My first walkman was a WM-22, not that much smaller than the first model. My last was a WM-150, which was just a few mm larger than the actual tape in each direction. It felt amazingly elegant.
(Took me a while to find out the model numbers by looking at image searches... Sony always had the worst product "names".)
I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, but several years ago I read that the original was a little bigger than pocket sized, so Sony had shirts with slightly bigger pockets made to demo it.
Somehow Sony made a cassette player that was barely bigger than a typical cassette case. You rarely see engineering like that.
Today electronics can be made smaller, thinner and so on, but this was a complex, intrinsically mechanical device. That's the amazing part. That player is like a well-made watch.
It was probably an off-shoot of their camcorder miniaturization efforts. Those got incredibly tiny considering they had to act like a VCR, helical head and all.
The sad thing is that as soon as Sony perfected the cassette player the CD was the popular medium and they had to do it all over again. When they perfected that MP3 showed up.
It's like how they made a perfect CRT and then flat panels hit hard.
