On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 6:20 AM, mark mcclure <mcmcc...@unca.edu> wrote: > > On Apr 28, 8:49 pm, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: >> http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10229202-76.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1 >> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/wolfram-alpha-veil-lifted/ > > Both these sites contain a link to Stephen Wolfram's > presentation at Harvard yesterday: > http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/wolfram > > The presentation is 1 hour 46 minutes long, including a > Q&A session. The Q&A session includes several pointed > questions surrounding open source and freedom of access > to data. Some folks here might find the responses > interesting. The first such question occurs about > 1 hour 19 minutes into it. >
Somebody asks why Mathematica/etc. is so closed, and he basically answers that for 10 years a lot of the Calculus code was included with Mathematica, but "*nobody* read it ...". Then he says about one function "it would take many Ph.D. theses of work to go through and figure out what all this code is doing." He's asked by the moderator whether he has is philosophically against including source code, and he says "no". When asked about his worries about Wolfram Alpha having an open source competitor (like Wikipedia is open), he answers "that would be great..." then explains at length that Wolfram Alpha is extremely hard to implement... -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
