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Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

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Re: Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

#131

Post by drostie »

tripzilch wrote: post #123
drostie wrote: post #118

Thank you, Google, for making me uninstall some nVidia packages from Ubuntu that were apparently stopping WebGL from working. The tool you built is also kinda nifty, and I might even use it when trying to help people online with mathematics. Nonetheless, my day-to-day search traffic is still being offloaded to DuckDuckGo and my day-to-day image traffic is still going to Blekko. It's not you, it's me.

Blekko's good for images? I gave it a few tries a while back but I got distracted by the slash syntaxes and forgot what I was looking for :) I'll give it another try. Today I mainly use Yahoo's image search for images. Disabling JS on Google Search (with Opera's site-specific preference or NoScript) also does a lot of good to make this once-great search engine somewhat more usable (not for the results, of course, but…

I use Firefox's bookmark-keyword feature. It means that I type directly into the URL bar "i cute ducky" and it matches the following bookmark:

    Name: i jump
    Location: https://blekko.com/ws/%s/images
    Keyword: i
Thus it dynamically gets rewritten to "https://blekko.com/ws/cute%20ducky/images as it should.

As you can see, I call these "jumps" and I have a bunch of them. 'o drostie' takes me to http://www.drostie.org/ for example. 'wik Aharanov-Bohm Effect' takes me to the SSL-enabled Wikipedia pages (which used to be in a very ugly place, secure.wikimedia.org, but have now been moved to en.wikipedia.org like you'd expect). There's "def" to define a word, "ety" to look up its etymology, "ark" to look something up in the Wayback Machine, and of course, "s" to search. I like the idea of verbs in my URL bar.

Re: Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

#132

Post by muuh-gnu »

wcarss wrote: post #92

I didn't see anyone mention this specific fear, but a lot of people talked about this in the context of competition with Wolfram Alpha. What I fear is that google (on purpose or not) will outshine Wolfram's offering, push W|A out of the game, and then in 3-6 years decide it is not a feature worth keeping up. Just like code search, viable companies may fail due to Google toying with their entire industry, and then Goo…

> some issues of monopoly.

What monopoly? Google doesnt remotely have a monopoly on scientific visualisation, and a possible monopoly on search doesnt really overlap with that.

The problem small companies have with Google is Google's _size_, so many of their side projects are bigger than somebody else's entire business. This absolutely doesnt have anything to do with their headstart in search. Whatever project somebody else successfully starts, Google can simply outspend them and reach the goal first, but this isnt specific to Google, you have this problem with any other big solvent company. WA would have the same problem if a producer of toilet tissue with more cash reserves than WA suddenly decided to compete with WA.

Re: Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

#133

Post by backprojection »

smokinn wrote: post #94
wcarss wrote: post #92

I didn't see anyone mention this specific fear, but a lot of people talked about this in the context of competition with Wolfram Alpha. What I fear is that google (on purpose or not) will outshine Wolfram's offering, push W|A out of the game, and then in 3-6 years decide it is not a feature worth keeping up. Just like code search, viable companies may fail due to Google toying with their entire industry, and then Goo…

I don't fear Google dropping us behind where we are, I fear another IE6. IE6 back in the day was actually quite good. But because it was really good (among other other more shady things) everything else died off and it stagnated. What I fear is google keeping us in a local maxima of search and having us stagnate there for a decade.

Couldn't you say the same for anyone who's product is seen as quite good?

FB is holding us back because new, more innovative social networks can't get users to switch, for example.

Re: Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

#134

Post by bermanoid »

nkassis wrote: post #43
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic about it being super useful. If you are, it seems easier still to download Chrome to do a 3d render then it is to buy WA pro and download an apparently enormous plugin to do the same render

He might mean that this computer doesn't have a card/driver combo capable of running WebGL. This is actually fairly common from test Mozilla has carried out. Successfull WebGL context creation on Windows were bellow 70% (can't find the actual page with the real numbers right now). But Chrome now supports software rendering through swiftshaders which should help those people. I for one agree with you, even with the is…

This is actually fairly common from test Mozilla has carried out. Successfull WebGL context creation on Windows were bellow 70% (can't find the actual page with the real numbers right now).

[Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about the internals of WebGL, and I don't mean this to come off as a criticism.]

Does anyone know why it's so hard to get WebGL working on a lot of systems?

I'm just sort of surprised; I remember doing a lot of OpenGL projects many years ago (back when I still used Windows), and I never seemed to have any problems getting them running pretty much anywhere, regardless of graphics card or whatever. Even crappy systems with integrated graphics always seemed to do just fine.

Is there something about WebGL that makes it more difficult to support a lot of systems, or is it just that it's relatively new and nobody's gotten to adding support yet?

Re: Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

#135

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

tripzilch wrote: post #122
taliesinb wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think W|A is going to disappear (I work on W|A). We do a lot more than plot functions of one and two variables -- after all, Apple chose us to power much of Siri's factual question answering. We're pioneering automatic analysis of new kinds of input, from images to long-form text to raw data (what I work on). We can out-innovate Google, even if they do a really nice job of copying our old ideas. Of course, so…

Cool! Hey, a tip, and I think I mentioned this in the comment/feedback box on W|A as well: For some reason, every time I need information that makes me think "hey this would be the typical thing I'd expect W|A to be able to answer, I've seen it answer a similar question before" it hardly ever works ... And I think a lot of that is due to how most of the demos I've seen are somewhat USA-centered and W|A doesn't have t…

AFAIK Wolfram curates the datasets that Wolfram|Alpha uses. It doesn't do any scraping - although this means it provides generally good quality data,

Re: Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

#136

Post by pbhjpbhj »

backprojection wrote: post #133
smokinn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't fear Google dropping us behind where we are, I fear another IE6. IE6 back in the day was actually quite good. But because it was really good (among other other more shady things) everything else died off and it stagnated. What I fear is google keeping us in a local maxima of search and having us stagnate there for a decade.

Couldn't you say the same for anyone who's product is seen as quite good? FB is holding us back because new, more innovative social networks can't get users to switch, for example.

>more innovative social networks //

Such as? Or perhaps what would be better is if you can name-check some networks and say what you find so innovative about them.

Re: Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

#137

Post by hereonbusiness »

smackfu wrote: post #31
sceaj wrote: post #13

One of the differentiating factors of Wolfram|Alpha: Gone. Google's doesn't require a 250mb plugin to become interactive (just a webgl capable browser...). And it seems to be about 8 times faster than W|A... W|A still does a lot of things other sites don't do, but it tends to be unusably slow, and inconsistent (running same query twice in a row will sometimes not give all of the same results). I figure the end is pro…

Of course, since this is a Google result, it can just fail and say "3D charts require a web browser and system that support WebGL." Which is super useful to me.

I get the same using Chrome. It seems that there is no support for ATI/AMD cards on Linux: https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

Firefox (11) has no such issues and renders just fine for me.

Re: Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

#139

Post by Iv »

kaens wrote: post #110
Iv wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry. Little by little, politicians come up with ways that will make it impossible for google to continue its business...

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but most of the possible meanings I can think of aren't ones that would really stop us from having google be an (unfortunate) local maxima of search for too long.

I am thinking of laws that make it unlawful to publish certain links with an arbitrary property (containing or linking to copyrighted material) or laws that prohibits it to publish the result of statistical analysis (the whole auto-suggest debate). Note also that everytime that Google changes its ranking algorithm, some companies complain because, as they paid for SEO, they feel entitled to a high google rank.

Re: Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

#140

Post by backprojection »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #136
backprojection wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you say the same for anyone who's product is seen as quite good? FB is holding us back because new, more innovative social networks can't get users to switch, for example.

> more innovative social networks // Such as? Or perhaps what would be better is if you can name-check some networks and say what you find so innovative about them.

Wasn't the point, just a hypothetical example.
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