[rlx0x]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik "Stephen™ Wolfram™'s Introduction to the Wolfram™ Language"

That Wolfram™ Language and the Wolfram™ Cloud is going to change the world forever, the language is so great because its Wolfram™ Symbolic and since it all just runs in the Wolfram™ Cloud its really fast. You can put all your financial data in the Wolfram™ and do things. You know they worked 30 years on this, and it must be good because it runs in the Wolfram™ Cloud. Cloud Cloud Cloud Bla Bla Bla Bla Buy Buy Buy Wolfram™ Wolfram™ Wolfram™.

[brudgers]

That this is a top rated comment is fucking pathetic.

His name is on the door. Unlike the late beloved Steve Jobs, he does not afford himself the opportunity to blame others for product problems. It's a higher standard - one without "Hold it another way" copouts and buy our products to show your good taste values. He built his startip into a company that makes amazing products that can be used to really change the world because they help solve really hard problems in ways that scale. He's putting knowledge into the world not peddling caveat emptor planned obsolescence and digital whoopie cushions.

Now he's taken his life's work and is shipping it on the Raspberry Pi instead of taken a 30% cut of the creative output of developer and musicians.

That's the difference between what is rightfully called "great" and what is called so only insanely.

[jakobe]

No need to shit on Steve Jobs in order to praise Steven Wolfram. Both are good businessmen that built great products and successful companies. And they had great respect for one another.

And it's not like Wolfram is giving stuff away for free. Have you seen how much a Mathematica license costs? I loved using Mathematica at my university, but now I just can't afford a license anymore.

[GregBuchholz]

>And it's not like Wolfram is giving stuff away for free.

I think he is...

http://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

[sourcex]

So Wolfram for raspberry Pi is available for free with NOOBS ? eye rolls and Wolfram is chargeable ?

[brudgers]

Steve Jobs built a business around charging students full retail and encouraging educational institutions to promote Apple computers to them. Freshman are encourage to take out loans to buy Apple products with a support life cycle that ends before they graduate. Any admiration for Mr. Jobs is based on something other than human community.

[staunch]

If you can't acknowledge Steve Jobs massive contributions to technological progress you're extremely confused about the history.

[lutusp]

Wait, what? Jobs didn't create technology, he sold it to people (and did that very well). Before you reply, consider that I was there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer) and I knew Jobs personally. I watched how he operated. He was very good at what he did, but he was a promoter, not a creator, of technology -- technology created by others.

[enraged_camel]

>>Jobs didn't create technology, he sold it to people

I don't understand what you are trying to say. Selling technology is a great way to facilitate its progress. Or do you believe that technology just sells itself?

I know that this is a forum primarily for developers (err, sorry, where are my manners... I meant creators), but the fact is that most developers would not have jobs if salespeople did not sell the products they created. I know that's a difficult thing to grasp for some, but it's true.

[siglesias]

Creating a collaborative organization to design, engineer, and massively produce this stuff is absolutely nothing to scoff at. Process is essential to modern human enterprise--ask any of the hundreds of endlessly delayed Kickstarter projects that routinely fail to turn a prototype into something that can be shipped. If this were simple, there would be many Apples run by many "promoters." Instead there is only one.

[astrodust]

By that definition nobody creates technology since all they're doing is iterating on work done by other people.

He may not have written code or laid out circuits, but the work he did is extremely important in the process of creating technology. He wasn't just a promoter, he was also a shaper, he would steer the engineering team towards the types of solutions he was looking for and push them to achieve beyond what they would ordinarily do.

Having a vision of some kind of technology and then driving a team towards that goal is, undeniably, "creating technology".

[coldtea]

>Wait, what? Jobs didn't create technology, he sold it to people

Technology has many levels. A cpu is a technology as is a touch sensitive panel -- but a specific arrangment of cpu and touch sensitive panel etc, is also technology. The one who makes decisions about how it should be made, also creates technology.

Apple also wrote their own software, and even designed their own chips and parts a lot of the time. And of course they also found lots of ingenious solutions to lots of engineering problems in creating smaller/more efficient/more battery power/etc devices.

So, what does "Jobs didn't create technology, he sold it to people" mean? Isn't iWork techology for example? Or you mean, he wasn't a coder or engineer, he was the head of the company making it? Well, that's true, but duh!

[siglesias]

Apple offers educational discounts.

[nswanberg]

Don't worry about it. Every thread needs a kids' table, and in some threads they're just more prominent.

[taliesinb]

Nicely put.

[programnature]

If all you know is buzzwords, buzzwords are all you hear.

Personally I found the idea and explanation of knowledge-based computing where my attention went. Does your favorite language have knowledge about the world built into it?

[pseut]

Almost any language can throw a query to google, so yes.

[seanmcdirmid]

It is bad form to TM every mention of a word, you should only do the first one.

Anyways, invariably someone bashes Wolfram's ego whenever talking anything about Wolfram. This should be an internet law already.

[maxerickson]

Obviously, it should be called Wolfram's law.

[primitivesuave]

I think he trademarked the word "Symbolic" as well.

[tremols]

I had the same impression.. and whats with the body language of the guy? waving his hands like a populist dictator... signs of "oh no we really need marketing because the product sucks".

The product can be good actually... but this kind of narcisistic marketing is better suited for weight loss products, self help, pick-up techniques e-book, etc (anything that gets money on your insecurity).

[gituliar]

How I love irony...