And Russia! Let's not forget the same holds there, for very good reasons. Particularly as they managed to be the leaders of the unpopular men leading America, and they're squandering what wealth Russia has in mad imperialism for purely ego reasons while also seeking to crash the US no matter what that does to the world economy. Pure table-flipping.
It's called the Swan Lake moment: Swan Lake on loop on the state media TV. That's what happens when everything is turmoil and nobody knows what will come next.
Wow… incredibly expensive… at minimum another 26€ a month. Wolfram really enjoy milking their customers dry (and I’m a customer). I think this is highway robbery.
With a bit of creativity you can run something similar for free. It's worth noting Raspberry Pi comes with a free Wolfram license. The assistant part can come from something like Perplexity, which in my experience is decent at writing Mathematica code.
I also have a Mathematica license which I think is worth paying for. One of the few closed software that has no good equivalent in the libre world. Nonetheless, I wish Wolfram had come up with a different business model that made Mathematica more mainstream, as I feel it has not realized its potential in certain areas.
Totally agree that they have unrealized potential. It was amazing when I was in grad school. Then when I started running a corporate data science team, I struggled to find a use case to recommend it for purchase. There are so many other tools that are better at loading a messy dataset, cleaning it, doing EDA, building a model, and productionizing and monitoring the model, which is the process we spend a lot of time doing.
It’s only expensive if you’re getting less than 50$/month of value from it, at which point don’t subscribe. This isn’t something I’d pay for right now, but when I was doing this kind of work regularly it would have been an easy purchase.
Subscription models don’t mesh well with casual users. However, if it’s going to save you hours of work every month then it’s a perfectly reasonable price point.
For me, it's like days, weeks, or months of distraction trying to get the license renewed, through the multiple bureaucracies that are involved: IT, purchasing, and accounting, to name a few. And a second license for the lab, or a site license, or one for home use? That's crazy talk. And now that software is sold by subscription, it's an annual headache, per app.
I get it that "single user at single computer" is the majority of use cases, so I'm not asking for accommodation. But for me, free means free site license, and I do like to have my tools installed on every computer that I touch.
Sure, there are work-arounds, but it's hard to keep using the proprietary stuff when the free stuff is so easy to deal with.
Disclosure: Wolfram user from 1993 to 1997. Also, when colleagues want to use proprietary software tools, I always go to bat for them, to get the expense approved, because I believe that people should have a choice.
Yeah i totally do understand what you're saying. I miss having mathematica available on any machine for instance on a campus site license, which i used for years overlapping yours too!
I still remember the day that AT&T came out and discounted all Fire phones to 99 cents on a zero-term contract for postpaid customers.
The phone had only been out for a few weeks at the point, the sales and return numbers must have been awful.
AT&T tried really hard to push that product like they did with the Nokia Lumias, but with specs worse than a Samsung Galaxy S3, a crummy app store, ancient Android, and going head to head against the Galaxy S4 with a 1366 by potato screen it was a fools errand to launch that product.
You could for a while get a Fire Phone for something like $100, which included a year Prime subscription. That meant that you were paying around $20 for a phone and what were actually some pretty good pack-in wired earbuds at a time when wireless earbuds weren't a thing. I did this, and the phone was serviceable once you rooted it, so long as you remembered the price you paid for it.
This is practically the same management that produced Fire Phone. It's actually quite something. This division of Amazon management produced Fire Phone, was forgiven and produced Alexa to superficial success so were allowed to then produce this. When now we know that all these projects were huge money trash fires.
Sorry, but the team that produced Alexa (& Echo) were completely separate from the team that produced the Fire Phone. There were distinct product teams, design teams, software engineering teams, hardware teams, and GM-equivalents (Amazon didn't really call people GM so much in those days.)
(Unless you're talking about the entirety of Dave Limp's organization, which produced a lot of things...)
I can only make informed guesses. My feeling is the phone was shipped as a contractual obligation on both sides. Think the Microsoft kin phone and Verizon as an analog.
It was delayed a looooong time and the hardware/OS was locked fairly early. If it had been released when originally planned, it would not have felt so old. I still don't think it would necessarily have rocked the world; too many other issues.
Shipping a 1366 by potato screen phone with an outdated version of Android, and an app store that was missing most apps.
AT&T could only push that pile of crap so far, they really did have their sales teams push it hard though. Very hard to convince a customer to get a Fire phone rather than a Galaxy S4, or even an S3.
They did court apps with AWS credits and things (at least they did for the one I was working on). I think they didn't realize (or plan for) the part where apps had dependencies on other Googley stuff. Can't just push the apk to Amazon too, if Amazon doesn't have a workalike maps api, etc.
When the Fire phone was on Fire sale, it was a pretty good value for users though. The launcher was weird, but you could smuggle Google Play store on it, and it had a good processor.
I think that's actually worse. It's several disparate teams failing in similar ways. It makes Amazon looknfoolosh with their hiring process and "principles".
Amazon can never keep people long enough to actually ship a video game.
No one involved trusts Amazon to actually employ them 2 years from now, thus Amazonians have an extremely short-term mindset.
It's not like they can't look across the lake to Bellevue and see Nintendo, Microsoft, Valve and others delivering consistently. The Amazon culture is just too toxic to allow this to actually grow into a popular product.
IDK, the pirate software guy said Amazon was worlds better than blizzard, and the gaming industry isn't known for job stability. Lots of fire after game is shipped and rehire under another contract.
- Appears a very well documented, well researched (in that he does his homework) author
- This might sound trite, but ... his per-book websites have this '90s internet feel to them, which is grand. (And, in a way, an indicator of quality ...)
Facebook and its ilk are barred from issuing notifications on my devices. There’s so little real ‘friend’ interaction these days I don’t miss anything and they abused notifications so thoroughly by literally spamming me random group stuff that I’ve just disabled notifications as a way of counteracting the lack of granularity. Must be five years now.
A guy keeps going to the newsagent: he scans the headlines and then leaves.
The newsagent sees him do this a few days in a row and finds it to be strange behaviour, so one day he asks him:
“Comrade, what are you doing? Can I help you?”
“Thank you comrade, but I’m only interested in the obituaries.”
“But comrade, the obituaries are at the back!”
“Not the ones I am looking for, comrade!”
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