Wolfram Alpha Development Intensifies over the Summer

A couple of months ago Wolfram Alpha was launched with much fanfare. The new search engine tried to be different and for the most part it succeeded. But different doesn't necessarily mean better and, while it did bring some very interesting features to the table, it failed to get much traction and traffic numbers have died down recently. Still, the development team has been hard at work over the summer, adding an impressive number of changes and fixes. 

 
“I just looked up what’s actually happened to the Wolfram|Alpha codebase since launch. And I have to say that I’m quite astonished: it’s grown by a staggering 52%—adding well over 2 million lines of Mathematica code,” Stephen Wolfram, the creator of the search engine, wrote. “There have also been nearly 50,000 manual groups of changes to our data repositories over the past 3 months.”

But it's more than just adding new code; the development team has also been working on making the best of the powerful features that it already had available. One area that has seen a lot of focus is on understanding what the users are asking. Because Wolfram Alpha uses natural language, semantic search users can simply “ask” the search engine a question instead of entering a few keywords. But computers can have a hard time understanding human language; in fact, half of the time Wolfram Alpha can't give a result because it doesn't understand what it is being asked to do and not because of the lack of data or a faulty algorithm. 

Things are getting better though and the progress so far is actually quite impressive considering the scale of the problem. In the few months since it was launched the search engine has reduced the number of queries it doesn't understand by 10 percent and Wolfram is confident that it can go a lot further.

Despite the powerful technology the traffic numbers haven't been that great. This isn't too much of a problem as the engine was launched just as a way of getting real world usage results and is still pretty much in the early stages, hence the “Alpha” moniker. But even if the traffic numbers increase there are many who believe that scaling would be too expensive for the search engine to do it by itself. There is some good news though, as it now seems that Microsoft has reached an agreement with Wolfram to license some of its data. 

Microsoft Certifies GeForce Driver for DirectCompute in Windows 7

Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA has announced today that it has received the Windows Hardware Qualification Lab (WHQL) certification for a driver that has been designed to support the DirectCompute technology and Windows 7 operating system. The announcement represents another milestone for the company, which has been actively promoting the performance capabilities of its GPUs in general-purpose  
computing-enabled applications. The certification will enable users to see increased performance for a 
number of apps that take advantage of the company's GeForce GPUs in the Windows 7 OS environments.

“Windows 7 combined with applications that take advantage of the new DirectCompute technology have the potential to transform the personal computing experience for millions of customers using GPUs to turbo-charge scenarios in digital media applications,” said Mike Ybarra, general manager for Windows Product Management at Microsoft Corp. “We've already seen some applications come to market that take advantage of the GPU, Windows 7 and DirectCompute will make it even easier for developers to write applications and deliver these benefits to millions of additional customers.”

The chip maker has announced that the new driver will be made available through its website later this week, enabling the DirectCompute technology to work on systems running on GeForce GPUs and Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system. Applications that are optimized for DirectCompute are to deliver smoother and an overall better quality in NVIDIA GPU-enabled systems.

In addition to the DirectCompute feature, which will be part of the upcoming DirectX 11 API, Windows 7 will also provide users with an increase in performance for gaming applications. According to NVIDIA, using its SLI technology and the new OS, users should see a 14% increase in performance across top gaming titles, compared to previous generations of GPUs. Windows 7 is also expected to bring H.264 high-definition video playback to Windows Media player, which will also take advantage of the performance delivered by the system's graphics processing unit.

How the First Planets Formed

Questions related to how the solar system appeared some 4.7 billion years ago have been around since the first people started using their brains for more than capturing their next meal. Science has only recently been able to provide some preliminary answers to this type of questions, although numerous ones still remain unanswered. Now, experts at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, solve a small piece of the mystery, by proposing a theory on how the planets in the solar system today formed. 

 
Astronomical observations have thus far revealed the fact that young stars, which have just formed, are generally surrounded by a ring of debris left from their own formation, called the protoplanetary disk. These structures are the precursors of large-scale planets, in spite of the fact that they are only made up of dust at first. According to a leading theory on how planets formed, grains of dust would orbit the newly formed star at high speeds, bumping and clogging with each other, until they formed larger grains of dust. 

Through numerous cycle repeats, the grains would eventually reach the size of small rocks, and so on. After a while, the theory goes, some of these rocks would grow to asteroid sizes, and then beyond, to small planets. The problem with this line of reasoning is that space rocks larger than one meter (three feet) in diameter would have been significantly slowed down by gas in the protoplanetary disk, which would have caused them to spiral down into the Sun and get vaporized. According to the new theory, it may be that the small rocks “jumped” in size suddenly, from one meter to several kilometers in diameter. 

The newly formed objects would have had enough drag to plow through the protoplanetary disk under these circumstances, overcoming the influence of the gas, whilst having their own orbits only slightly modified. The data used for this conclusion was drawn from astronomical observations, which show that asteroids less than one kilometer in diameter can be found in abundance, while the number of those over this limit is extremely limited. The JPL experts propose that the asteroids we see today are what was left behind after the original, much larger ones, broke apart

Automatically Answer Your Phone on LoudSpeaker

It seems that very often people that drive need to answer their incoming calls and do it by using some handsfree equipment. SymbianGuru has developed a special application that enables users to talk using the phone's loudpskear. The LoudSpeaker piece of software can answer any incoming call automatically and turn your phone's Loudspeaker on, according to your profiles settings. The application is compatible with Symbian S60v3 and S60v5 devices. Bear in mind that for the latter you will need to download an additional application called VoipAudioServer. The additional software needs to be installed only after the LoudSpeaker piece of software has been correctly installed on your Symbian smartphone.

 
LoudSpeaker can easily replace your car wireless handsfree or your Bluetooth headset. The software is fully customizable, starting with the possibility to select the profile to use the loudspeaker with, to the amount of time a specific call should be answered. Users will also be able to choose what sound to use when answering or closing a call. The application can be set to Autostart every time their smartphone is powered on. There is also a downside to the application, namely the fact that it won't work as it will be inactive as long as the phone is locked.

Some of the advantages of this application are simply based on users preferences: answering an incoming call automatically, an excellent alternative to a Bluetooth headset, customizable sounds, availability for new Symbian touchscreen devices with Symbian S60v5. LoudSpeaker can be acquired for only 9.99USD, but a ten-day, fully featured trial can also be downloaded for testing purposes.

Free Exchange Server 2010 Training Available

Earlier this week Microsoft has reached an important development milestone with the next iteration of Exchange Servers. As of August 18th, 2009, the Redmond company is offering testers the Release Candidate build of Exchange Server 2010, a clear signal that the gold bits of the products are not that far off in the distance. As is the case with major Microsoft software products, Exchange Server 2010 is accompanied by a range of resources, including content designed to help customers get an insight into the solution. In this regard, Microsoft has made available free Exchange Server 2010 training, in an effort to feed the market’s hunger for the successor of Exchange Server 2007. 

 
Just as it was the case for Windows 7, the software giant is offering customers free Learning Snacks, nothing more than training content served in bite size chunks with the help of Microsoft Silverlight. Tamir Bar-Haim, Microsoft audience marketing manager, pointed out that two Exchange Server 2010 learning snacks could already be accessed: Unified Messaging in Exchange 2010 and High Availability and Storage in Exchange 2010. 

At the same time, Microsoft is offering for download a consistent portion of the Exchange 2010 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant, namely Chapter 1: Exchange Server Administration Overview and Chapter 6: Mailbox Administration. In addition, there are no less than three eLearning Clinics from the software giant, also made available at absolutely no charge:Collection 6899: Exploring Features in Exchange 2010 (2-hours); Collection 6900: Introduction to Exchange 2010 (1-hour) and Collection 6901: Exchange Server 2010 in an Enterprise (1-hour).

The training and learning content offered by the Redmond company along with the first Release Candidate of Exchange Server 2010 make an excellent combination. Customers interested in the next version of Exchange should not hesitate in the least when it comes down to grabbing the Exchange Server 2010 RC bits and turning to the content to help discover the best that Exchange 2010 has to offer. 

Also, I’m hearing that Microsoft has a few more surprises up its sleeve, covering multiple products, all designed to help customers leverage its technologies as best as possible. But more on that in due time.