You’re projecting a ‘modern’ concept onto a bygone time. Applications could (and in unfortunate cases, would) monopolise the system and if they got themselves stuck in a loop they’d never relinquish control of system resources back to the operating system. Your system would freeze or you’d get a blue screen of death. You can call it wait/async if you really want, but it’s hugely misleading in the present context of the term. It was a more fragile system, not a more robust one.
There was much marketing directed at the fact that as of Windows 95, applications developed with the 32-bit API onwards would benefit from preemptive multitasking. Legacy 16-bit applications coexisted in some kind of virtual machine (maybe it was called Windows On Windows, WOW for short, or maybe that was an NT thing) but they could accidentally trip each other up and bring each other down, but in theory the system and the 32-bit apps were safe. So yes, the text in the article is pretty confusing and misleading. I exited Windows in the XP SP1 days (2003) and by then most of the mishaps happened due to third-party drivers.
It was outcompeted two decades ago. Friendster, Google+, Orkut… they were all outcompeted by the Facebook juggernaut, and even that has become stale in absence of real competition as younger generations have migrated to Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and others.
Friendster was early to the game but it died, and it died for a reason. Let it rest.
No, I’m assuming that social networking follows Metcalfe’s Law, and that there’s no real way to migrate users en masse, so there’s no incentive to migrate individually if there’s nobody you know there to network with.
Fair enough. I guess that’s a kind of reason. I’d be satisfied with a reason if it specified how it had been outcompeted, and speaking personally from somebody who lived through the era it was kind of clunky and at least when I used it there was no notion of ‘networks’ (that Facebook initially had, and then retired probably more than a decade ago) or ‘groups’ — I have memories of user accounts named after organisations or common interests with lots of ‘friends’ linking to them… and also the notion of user ‘walls’ and status updates was very embryonic. My girlfriend at the time was utterly engrossed but really it failed to draw me in. Facebook a few years later however was like a syringe of blue dopamine straight to the brain.
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!
