14 ms·

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes... I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts... I don't get it... Wolfram is a money-hungry egomaniac. For example, unlike the

by jordigh 13y ago

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes... I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts... I don't get it... Wolfram is a money-hungry egomaniac. For example, unlike the other big Ma competitors (Maple, Matlab, Magma) not a single source line of Mathematica code is exposed. He's litigious, he labels everthing "mine", he endlessly praises himself. He wrote this insulting "don't worry your pretty little head with our source code, it's too complicated for you" piece: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUsuallyNeedToKnowAboutInternals.html http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/WhyYouDoNo... So... gratis Mathematica on Raspbian... what's the catch? Is it to lure us to the cloud? http://www.wolframcloud.com/ http://www.wolframcloud.com/ Edit: To clarify, my guess here is that they want to give people a taste of Mathematica on weak hardware in order to lure them to a subscription model on "the cloud" where much more processing power will be available, just like widespread university site-wide licenses and turning a blind eye to student piracy are great marketing strategies. Is there any evidence to support my wild theories?

glifchits 13y ago
Totally agree. The kids who are fortunate enough to be part of the computer based math movement really should be learning scientific computing on FOSS... not building their foundation on restrictive, typically very expensive software.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  If the kids today happen to learn a love for higher math thanks to Mathematica, I hardly begrudge Wolfram a few extra licenses down the road.
- aray 13y ago
  I first started exploring advanced math, graphing, and basic programming using Mathematica, and as much as I love OSS and FOSS math software, I think 12-year-old-me would have a much harder time with FOSS software today than even the Mathematica of more than a decade ago. Having good free software is very important! But I wouldn't pull back on providing this software, especially where it could be used to provide a real benefit on learning, based on free software ideals. Octave & co. could see this as encouragement to get better support for themselves on the raspberry pi as well! I see no reason why they can't all coexist.
  - hdevalence 13y ago
    Sage already works on the Raspberry Pi, today, and unlike Mathematica, after you use it for a while, you can actually take it apart and see how it works, making it much better for the purpose of "learning, based on free software ideals". Since it's actually, you know, Free Software.
    - Pxtl 13y ago
      I haven't used sage. How does it measure up vs. Mathematica and Maple? What impressed me with the commercial offerings is the ease-of-use in the first-year use-case. You can just type in formulas they come back pretty-printed, and plotting/solving/whatever functions are easy to learn thanks to the good features of the editor (instead of digging through docs or man-pages).
      - hdevalence 13y ago
        Versus Maple, there's really no contest in my opinion, but that's mostly related to the rather poor quality of Maple. I remember even five years ago, when Sage was considerably less mature, Sage was able to outperform Maple on first-year calculus problems (i.e., there were symbolic integrations that Maple choked on but Sage did perfectly). Sage is not only better than Maple at symbolics, but also at numerics, and the gap only widens as the mathematics level increases. As an amusing anecdote, I had to use Maple for a course once, and compared the speed of a simple algorithm to find the order of an element of Z/nZ (by taking x, and adding it to itself in a loop until you get to 0). The Maple code ran approximately 100x slower than the Sage code, even though the Maple code used machine integers but Sage uses bigints by default. With Mathematica, the general impression that I get is that for making interactive graphics, Mathematica is slightly better, but otherwise they're mostly approximately even for the first-year case, with a slight edge to Mathematica. Sage's friendly user interface is a web-based notebook, whereas Mathematica has a native application, but it's pretty good. Sage has very good documentation for common use-cases, but I haven't used the Sage notebook in a while, so I can't really say how discoverable it is. There are some resources on using Sage in an undergrad curriculum here, if you're interested: http://www.sagemath.org/doc/prep/index.html http://www.sagemath.org/doc/prep/index.html though the examples presume you're actually running a Sage notebook, so they don't show what happens, for instance, when you add an @interact decorator to make an interactive thing, like so: http://wiki.sagemath.org/interact/ http://wiki.sagemath.org/interact/ which has a nice example of an interactive Taylor-series approximation.
- mathattack 13y ago
  How transferable is the learning? If they are learning real math, won't they be able to switch to FOSS (or anything else) soon thereafter?
JackFr 13y ago
I find Wolfram endlessly amusing, in an uber-nerdy way. He is a money-hungry egomaniac. In interviews I have read and from what I understand, he is utterly devoid of charm. But he is a brilliant man. And Mathematica is an amazing piece of software. (Or at least was -- I haven't used it about twenty years. Twenty years ago it was mind-blowingly good. Nothing was even close.) And 'A New Kind of Science' was a fascinating book. It hasn't quite ushered in the revolution Wolfram still seems to expect, but it was fascinating nonetheless.
- mcguire 13y ago
  "And 'A New Kind of Science' was a fascinating book. It hasn't quite ushered in the revolution Wolfram still seems to expect, but it was fascinating nonetheless." Possibly because, from what I remember of the reviews, most people said something to the effect of, "It's brilliant! Well, the part I know anything about is garbage, but the rest is great!"
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  > And 'A New Kind of Science' was a fascinating book. Indeed... A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...
hyperbovine 13y ago
What a ridiculous post. The quote in question is a reference the Trojan horse, so unless you are suggesting that loading Mathematica onto the Pi will, in fact, destroy it, I don't see any merit to this analogy. And while it's true that Steve Wolfram is incredibly arrogant, so too is the act of publicly shaming him for refusing to share his code, no? The man has spent the last 25 years perfecting his product and along comes you, acting like you have some God-given right to inspect its inner workings. Gimme a break.
- malandrew 13y ago
  No, this is actually valid criticism. People are generally adverse to learning new software programs, when the one they've been using for years has served them so well. With this in mind, we'll be exposing thousands of students to closed source software when the open source alternatives are more than adequate for teaching. By the time students need features in Mathematica that are not present in the open source alternatives, they will have the skills to contribute those features back as pull requests. This is a Trojan horse. It undermines the open source alternatives. The Pi foundation here is betraying its open source roots.
  - hdevalence 13y ago
    > The Pi foundation is betraying it's open source roots. No, it's not betraying it's open source roots. It has none. The Raspberry Pi has been a proprietary environment dressed up in open source clothing from the beginning. The Raspberry Pi has most of its processor silicon devoted to a chip that you are not allowed to touch -- the ARM6 core is really more of a coprocessor to the GPU, which comes with a big binary blob. OK, you say, forget the GPU, I'll just use the little ARM core. Nope! You can't boot the system at all without the blob. Then we've got their laughable attempt to pass off a shim that delegates function calls as an open-source driver. Or their support for software patents, with patent-restricted chip features that require separately purchased licences. The Pi foundation's roots are with Broadcom, a company known very well for its hostility to open source.
    - TheCraiggers 13y ago
JosephHatfield 13y ago
Agreed. I couldn't even re-install a licensed copy of the app without requesting permission from Wolfram support.
taliesinb 13y ago
> I don't get it... Wolfram is a money-hungry egomaniac. That's kinda funny. Our revenue per employee is lower than the industry average. If the company was interested in money uber alles, there are many more profitable and less interesting ways of doing it than what we do now. > not a single source line of Mathematica code is exposed Well, not sure what you mean by 'exposed'. But you can read large swathes of our code by looking in the right place in the installation. We also have some official open source projects, like our HadoopLink: https://github.com/shadanan/HadoopLink https://github.com/shadanan/HadoopLink
- ethomson 13y ago
  Obviously he was talking about Stephen, the person, not Wolfram Research, the company.
  - sesqu 13y ago
    I assumed he was talking about Conrad, the person making this announcement.
- lutusp 13y ago
  >> I don't get it... Wolfram is a money-hungry egomaniac. > That's kinda funny. Our revenue per employee is lower than the industry average. That's true for investment banks too (i.e. lower than comparable management positions in other fields), but this doesn't mean the higher-ups aren't money-hungry egomaniacs. In fact, it can be argued that when the salaries of mid-level employees are low compared to industry norms, that fact may be used to argue that the company is top-heavy, even possibly money-hungry. > But you can read large swathes of our code by looking in the right place in the installation. This is misleading. One can read all sorts of user-level script code, but no source code at all. It's not an accident, and it explains why Mathematica cannot be used in serious mathematical work, work meant for technical and scientific publication and peer review.
  - taliesinb 13y ago
    > In fact, it can be argued that when the salaries of mid-level employees are low compared to industry norms Read my post again: revenue / employee, not salary / revenue. > One can read all sorts of user-level script code, but no source code at all. What? Probably half of the Wolfram Language is written in the Wolfram Language. How is top-level code not source code? > it explains why Mathematica cannot be used in serious mathematical work, work meant for technical and scientific publication and peer review. You keep saying that... I think the truth is more subtle. A tool like Mathematica might play a crucial role in some result, but the proof or result itself doesn't a priori need to rest on any black box software at all to be reproducible. A nice family of examples would be the class of NP problems, for which the discovery might have been difficult, and achieved via proprietary tools, but the verification is possible via open-source tools or with direct human insight. And that's not even considering physics, biochemistry, engineering, and astronomy, where many of the tools you use will always be expensive and built by industry, and have no impact on peer review. Especially if they are a means to visualizing data to generate hypotheses, or processing or wrangling data into a tractable form.
lutusp 13y ago
> Is there any evidence to support my wild theories? Certainly. Wolfram was once a near-monopoly in computer-aided mathematics, but their exalted position is fast eroding, diminished by free alternatives like Sage¹. Wolfram's response has been to package their product in increasingly ingenious ways, as with Wolfram Alpha², which has been quite successful. But in the long term, these methods will fail, because for mathematics to be both valid and understood, it must be transparent. 1. http://www.sagemath.org/ http://www.sagemath.org/ 2. http://www.wolframalpha.com/ http://www.wolframalpha.com/
- taliesinb 13y ago
  An entire country (Estonia) recently bought a Mathematica site license.. I don't see that as evidence of monopoly erosion. Look, Sage is great, I hope Sage does really well and eventually duplicates the entirety of our functionality. But at the current rate it'll take probably hundreds of years. Sometimes, profit-subsidized research is just much, much more productive at driving innovation.
  - ethomson 13y ago
    This seems like an odd comparison since one doesn't really buy Sage licenses. This just suggests that Conrad is good at Business Development.
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > This seems like an odd comparison since one doesn't really buy Sage licenses. True in a deep sense. In principle one could collect all the open-source components that make up Sage and recreate it independently. Sage resembles gluons more than it resembles protons and neutrons -- it holds together things created by others.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > I don't see that as evidence of monopoly erosion. If I were you, I would want to avoid describing Wolfram's present circumstances as a monopoly. The word has certain legal implications one would do well to avoid.
iconjack 13y ago
That was my first reaction too. I say that as a fan of both Stephen Wolfram and his baby, Mathematica. If there's one thing I've learned over ten years of using this product, it's that Wolfram does not give away Mathematica. They enforce their student- and home-version rules like nothing else I've purchased. And it's damned expensive in a pool full of very powerful, free alternatives. But I don't know what he could be up to. Getting people hooked? Seems like running Mathematica on underpowered hardware could leave a bad taste in people's mouths.
- lovemenot 13y ago
  >> But I don't know what he could be up to. A couple of things come to mind. Not necessarily nefarious. Firstly, I remember watching a TED video[1] by Steven's brother Conrad, which was passionate about using computers for teaching Mathematics. Perhaps this Pi initiative is less commercial than philanthropic and was initiated by Conrad. Secondly, if you look at Wolfram's own blog post[2] on the Pi release of Mathematica, he talks about his new Wolfram Language far more than about the Pi platform. I suspect Steven Wolfram is as successful a business-person as he needs to be now, but he intends for his legacy to be as a revolutionary. I don't know this for sure, but Wolfram Language seems to be a beachhead for NKS in usable form. I also speculate the common Britishness of these two organisations might have helped move this project forward. [1]http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_m... [2]http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/11/21/putting-the-wolfram-language-and-mathematica-on-every-raspberry-pi/ http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/11/21/putting-the-wolfram-langu...
hjek 13y ago
They could have just put it in the non-free repositories, but noooo-nooo it comes preinstalled. Obviously an attempt to push non-free software - just like MS pushing VS with Dreamspark. Looking at the frighteningly informative article on the Wolfram page, your theory doesn't seem far out at all.

by jordigh 13y ago

glifchits 13y ago

Totally agree. The kids who are fortunate enough to be part of the computer based math movement really should be learning scientific computing on FOSS... not building their foundation on restrictive, typically very expensive software.

sliverstorm 13y ago
If the kids today happen to learn a love for higher math thanks to Mathematica, I hardly begrudge Wolfram a few extra licenses down the road.
aray 13y ago
I first started exploring advanced math, graphing, and basic programming using Mathematica, and as much as I love OSS and FOSS math software, I think 12-year-old-me would have a much harder time with FOSS software today than even the Mathematica of more than a decade ago. Having good free software is very important! But I wouldn't pull back on providing this software, especially where it could be used to provide a real benefit on learning, based on free software ideals. Octave & co. could see this as encouragement to get better support for themselves on the raspberry pi as well! I see no reason why they can't all coexist.
- hdevalence 13y ago
  Sage already works on the Raspberry Pi, today, and unlike Mathematica, after you use it for a while, you can actually take it apart and see how it works, making it much better for the purpose of "learning, based on free software ideals". Since it's actually, you know, Free Software.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    I haven't used sage. How does it measure up vs. Mathematica and Maple? What impressed me with the commercial offerings is the ease-of-use in the first-year use-case. You can just type in formulas they come back pretty-printed, and plotting/solving/whatever functions are easy to learn thanks to the good features of the editor (instead of digging through docs or man-pages).
    - hdevalence 13y ago
      Versus Maple, there's really no contest in my opinion, but that's mostly related to the rather poor quality of Maple. I remember even five years ago, when Sage was considerably less mature, Sage was able to outperform Maple on first-year calculus problems (i.e., there were symbolic integrations that Maple choked on but Sage did perfectly). Sage is not only better than Maple at symbolics, but also at numerics, and the gap only widens as the mathematics level increases. As an amusing anecdote, I had to use Maple for a course once, and compared the speed of a simple algorithm to find the order of an element of Z/nZ (by taking x, and adding it to itself in a loop until you get to 0). The Maple code ran approximately 100x slower than the Sage code, even though the Maple code used machine integers but Sage uses bigints by default. With Mathematica, the general impression that I get is that for making interactive graphics, Mathematica is slightly better, but otherwise they're mostly approximately even for the first-year case, with a slight edge to Mathematica. Sage's friendly user interface is a web-based notebook, whereas Mathematica has a native application, but it's pretty good. Sage has very good documentation for common use-cases, but I haven't used the Sage notebook in a while, so I can't really say how discoverable it is. There are some resources on using Sage in an undergrad curriculum here, if you're interested: http://www.sagemath.org/doc/prep/index.html http://www.sagemath.org/doc/prep/index.html though the examples presume you're actually running a Sage notebook, so they don't show what happens, for instance, when you add an @interact decorator to make an interactive thing, like so: http://wiki.sagemath.org/interact/ http://wiki.sagemath.org/interact/ which has a nice example of an interactive Taylor-series approximation.
mathattack 13y ago
How transferable is the learning? If they are learning real math, won't they be able to switch to FOSS (or anything else) soon thereafter?

JackFr 13y ago

I find Wolfram endlessly amusing, in an uber-nerdy way. He is a money-hungry egomaniac. In interviews I have read and from what I understand, he is utterly devoid of charm. But he is a brilliant man. And Mathematica is an amazing piece of software. (Or at least was -- I haven't used it about twenty years. Twenty years ago it was mind-blowingly good. Nothing was even close.) And 'A New Kind of Science' was a fascinating book. It hasn't quite ushered in the revolution Wolfram still seems to expect, but it was fascinating nonetheless.

mcguire 13y ago
"And 'A New Kind of Science' was a fascinating book. It hasn't quite ushered in the revolution Wolfram still seems to expect, but it was fascinating nonetheless." Possibly because, from what I remember of the reviews, most people said something to the effect of, "It's brilliant! Well, the part I know anything about is garbage, but the rest is great!"
ForHackernews 13y ago
> And 'A New Kind of Science' was a fascinating book. Indeed... A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...

hyperbovine 13y ago

What a ridiculous post. The quote in question is a reference the Trojan horse, so unless you are suggesting that loading Mathematica onto the Pi will, in fact, destroy it, I don't see any merit to this analogy. And while it's true that Steve Wolfram is incredibly arrogant, so too is the act of publicly shaming him for refusing to share his code, no? The man has spent the last 25 years perfecting his product and along comes you, acting like you have some God-given right to inspect its inner workings. Gimme a break.

malandrew 13y ago
No, this is actually valid criticism. People are generally adverse to learning new software programs, when the one they've been using for years has served them so well. With this in mind, we'll be exposing thousands of students to closed source software when the open source alternatives are more than adequate for teaching. By the time students need features in Mathematica that are not present in the open source alternatives, they will have the skills to contribute those features back as pull requests. This is a Trojan horse. It undermines the open source alternatives. The Pi foundation here is betraying its open source roots.
- hdevalence 13y ago
  > The Pi foundation is betraying it's open source roots. No, it's not betraying it's open source roots. It has none. The Raspberry Pi has been a proprietary environment dressed up in open source clothing from the beginning. The Raspberry Pi has most of its processor silicon devoted to a chip that you are not allowed to touch -- the ARM6 core is really more of a coprocessor to the GPU, which comes with a big binary blob. OK, you say, forget the GPU, I'll just use the little ARM core. Nope! You can't boot the system at all without the blob. Then we've got their laughable attempt to pass off a shim that delegates function calls as an open-source driver. Or their support for software patents, with patent-restricted chip features that require separately purchased licences. The Pi foundation's roots are with Broadcom, a company known very well for its hostility to open source.
  - TheCraiggers 13y ago

JosephHatfield 13y ago

Agreed. I couldn't even re-install a licensed copy of the app without requesting permission from Wolfram support.

taliesinb 13y ago

> I don't get it... Wolfram is a money-hungry egomaniac. That's kinda funny. Our revenue per employee is lower than the industry average. If the company was interested in money uber alles, there are many more profitable and less interesting ways of doing it than what we do now. > not a single source line of Mathematica code is exposed Well, not sure what you mean by 'exposed'. But you can read large swathes of our code by looking in the right place in the installation. We also have some official open source projects, like our HadoopLink: https://github.com/shadanan/HadoopLink https://github.com/shadanan/HadoopLink

ethomson 13y ago
Obviously he was talking about Stephen, the person, not Wolfram Research, the company.
- sesqu 13y ago
  I assumed he was talking about Conrad, the person making this announcement.
lutusp 13y ago
>> I don't get it... Wolfram is a money-hungry egomaniac. > That's kinda funny. Our revenue per employee is lower than the industry average. That's true for investment banks too (i.e. lower than comparable management positions in other fields), but this doesn't mean the higher-ups aren't money-hungry egomaniacs. In fact, it can be argued that when the salaries of mid-level employees are low compared to industry norms, that fact may be used to argue that the company is top-heavy, even possibly money-hungry. > But you can read large swathes of our code by looking in the right place in the installation. This is misleading. One can read all sorts of user-level script code, but no source code at all. It's not an accident, and it explains why Mathematica cannot be used in serious mathematical work, work meant for technical and scientific publication and peer review.
- taliesinb 13y ago
  > In fact, it can be argued that when the salaries of mid-level employees are low compared to industry norms Read my post again: revenue / employee, not salary / revenue. > One can read all sorts of user-level script code, but no source code at all. What? Probably half of the Wolfram Language is written in the Wolfram Language. How is top-level code not source code? > it explains why Mathematica cannot be used in serious mathematical work, work meant for technical and scientific publication and peer review. You keep saying that... I think the truth is more subtle. A tool like Mathematica might play a crucial role in some result, but the proof or result itself doesn't a priori need to rest on any black box software at all to be reproducible. A nice family of examples would be the class of NP problems, for which the discovery might have been difficult, and achieved via proprietary tools, but the verification is possible via open-source tools or with direct human insight. And that's not even considering physics, biochemistry, engineering, and astronomy, where many of the tools you use will always be expensive and built by industry, and have no impact on peer review. Especially if they are a means to visualizing data to generate hypotheses, or processing or wrangling data into a tractable form.

lutusp 13y ago

> Is there any evidence to support my wild theories? Certainly. Wolfram was once a near-monopoly in computer-aided mathematics, but their exalted position is fast eroding, diminished by free alternatives like Sage¹. Wolfram's response has been to package their product in increasingly ingenious ways, as with Wolfram Alpha², which has been quite successful. But in the long term, these methods will fail, because for mathematics to be both valid and understood, it must be transparent. 1. http://www.sagemath.org/ http://www.sagemath.org/ 2. http://www.wolframalpha.com/ http://www.wolframalpha.com/

taliesinb 13y ago
An entire country (Estonia) recently bought a Mathematica site license.. I don't see that as evidence of monopoly erosion. Look, Sage is great, I hope Sage does really well and eventually duplicates the entirety of our functionality. But at the current rate it'll take probably hundreds of years. Sometimes, profit-subsidized research is just much, much more productive at driving innovation.
- ethomson 13y ago
  This seems like an odd comparison since one doesn't really buy Sage licenses. This just suggests that Conrad is good at Business Development.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > This seems like an odd comparison since one doesn't really buy Sage licenses. True in a deep sense. In principle one could collect all the open-source components that make up Sage and recreate it independently. Sage resembles gluons more than it resembles protons and neutrons -- it holds together things created by others.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- lutusp 13y ago
  > I don't see that as evidence of monopoly erosion. If I were you, I would want to avoid describing Wolfram's present circumstances as a monopoly. The word has certain legal implications one would do well to avoid.

iconjack 13y ago

That was my first reaction too. I say that as a fan of both Stephen Wolfram and his baby, Mathematica. If there's one thing I've learned over ten years of using this product, it's that Wolfram does not give away Mathematica. They enforce their student- and home-version rules like nothing else I've purchased. And it's damned expensive in a pool full of very powerful, free alternatives. But I don't know what he could be up to. Getting people hooked? Seems like running Mathematica on underpowered hardware could leave a bad taste in people's mouths.

lovemenot 13y ago
>> But I don't know what he could be up to. A couple of things come to mind. Not necessarily nefarious. Firstly, I remember watching a TED video[1] by Steven's brother Conrad, which was passionate about using computers for teaching Mathematics. Perhaps this Pi initiative is less commercial than philanthropic and was initiated by Conrad. Secondly, if you look at Wolfram's own blog post[2] on the Pi release of Mathematica, he talks about his new Wolfram Language far more than about the Pi platform. I suspect Steven Wolfram is as successful a business-person as he needs to be now, but he intends for his legacy to be as a revolutionary. I don't know this for sure, but Wolfram Language seems to be a beachhead for NKS in usable form. I also speculate the common Britishness of these two organisations might have helped move this project forward. [1]http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_m... [2]http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/11/21/putting-the-wolfram-language-and-mathematica-on-every-raspberry-pi/ http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/11/21/putting-the-wolfram-langu...

hjek 13y ago

They could have just put it in the non-free repositories, but noooo-nooo it comes preinstalled. Obviously an attempt to push non-free software - just like MS pushing VS with Dreamspark. Looking at the frighteningly informative article on the Wolfram page, your theory doesn't seem far out at all.