OK, so a while ago they started burbling about the "transcendental new 
functionality which will fundamentally revolutionise the way people use 
Wolfram|Alpha".

Well, now it's here:

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2012/02/08/announcing-wolframalpha-pro/

As you can see, it /won't/ revolutionise or in fact alter the way people 
use Wolfram|Alpha at all. Because Wolfram|Alpha is staying exactly the 
same. Instead, they've launched Wolfram|Alpha Pro.

Which costs money.

So what's new? Well, the big thing is that you can now grab any random 
spreadsheet file on your computer and upload it to the WA Pro website, 
and get an automatic statistical analysis:

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2012/02/09/launching-a-democratization-of-data-science/

The idea of the original WA was that you could type in some free-form 
text, and WA would figure out what the hell that's supposed to mean, 
possibly go look up some raw data from its vast curated data stores, and 
then do some computations with it. Now WA Pro lets you chuck data at the 
system, and it will try to figure out what the hell all the data 
columns, labels, units, etc. actually mean, and how best to analyse that 
to give you something meaningful. (Presumably you can still use the 
query field to /select/ which analyses you're particularly interested in.)

WA Pro is extremely cool. And like most extremely cool things, it has NO 
USEFUL PURPOSE. Seriously, it's a very neat toy, but I cannot begin to 
imagine what useful task you could possibly use it for. (Not helped by 
the fact that the majority of useful "real world" data covers the USA only.)

As well as raw data input, you also get to customise the interface, and 
download interactive versions of the output. If you I ask WA about the 
weather in Cambridge, it is smart enough to work out from my IP 
geolocation that I mean Cambridge UK, but it is too stupid to figure out 
that in the UK we use Centigrade, not Fahrenheit. So now (for $60/year) 
I can set Centigrade as my default. Thanks, but I'll pass on that one.

For a long time, it's irritated me that simple queries work, but as the 
query complexity increases, at some arbitrary point WA either pretends 
not to understand any more, or otherwise refuses to answer the query. 
It's not that the system /cannot/ answer, it's that it's been programmed 
not to. Because, you know, we're a commercial entity here, and we want 
to encourage you to give us your money in exchange for answers. Free 
computational knowledge for everyone, my foot!

As an example of what I'm talking about, if you ask for the standard 
deviation of, say, six numbers, it tells you. But if you supply too many 
numbers, it refuses to do the calculation. There's no technical reason 
for it to refuse - certainly it understands the question, and knows 

a copy of Mathematica, with its unlimited input size, when you can do 
the same calculation for free without even installing any software?

In short, the software fails on purpose, for commercial rather than 
technical reasons. And I despise such anti-features.

Well, now they're offering WA Pro, which presumably doesn't have these 
arbitrary restrictions. Or maybe it does? I don't know - mainly because 
I'm not paying money just for the privilege of a new toy to play with. 
It's entertaining, but not entertaining enough to warrant the price tag.

Don't get me wrong, it /is/ very cool that you can just type in some 
text, or - now - input a big chunk of data, and see the computer 
automatically analyse it, Star Trek style. But other than being an 
amusing toy, it's not especially /useful/. And it doesn't /work/ 
particularly well either. It knows about so many subjects that if you 
enter a query, it often struggles to comprehend which topic your talking 
about.

For example, I'm trying to figure out the nutritional information for 
cheese on toast, and I eventually get a result telling me that the 
distance from Cheddar, Somerset to Toast, North Carolina is 3,828 miles 
- which is also 6,160 km, by the way. And at the speed of light, that 
would take 20.5 ms to cross. Fascinating, but utterly unrelated to my 
actual question. :-P

(Also: America, why the *hell* do you have a city named Toast? What is 
*wrong* with you people?!)

Then there's my repeated attempts to make it tell me what the wavelength 
of a sound of a specific frequency is. WA knows what the speed of sound 
is. It knows how to do wave computations. But it WILL NOT answer the 
damned question! You have to manually figure out how to do the 
calculation yourself, and then ask WA to do that, because it's far too 
stupid to figure this out for itself. Which is silly, because that's 
kind of the whole /point/ of WA. Google can tell me what the speed of 
sound is, and even do the arithmetic for me. WA is supposed to make it 
automatic. It fails too often.

Still, even with all that said, I keep hoping that at some point, 
somebody will make something just like WA, but less sucky. Something 
which never refuses a query for commercial reasons. Something that 
returns results as text and vector graphics rather than GIF images. 
Something which lets you interactively build large queries from smaller 
ones, rather than each question being a new, separate interaction. And 
lets you specify a context in which to interpret a query, to give the 
machine some hope of answering sensibly.

But hey, who's going to build that? What would be in it for them? Who 
would pay for it all? Yeah, it's not gonna happen. :-P

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