Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months or mistook it for a new version of Wolf, you’ve probably heard of the Wolfram Alpha engine and the (wrong) comparisons to Google.
For starters, Wolfram Alpha is NOTa search engine – its (what they call) a “computational knowledge engine“ – it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.
Slight detour to StoreGrid…
StoreGrid has a feature called “Local to Remote Migration” (LtoR) wherein you can ‘seed’ a backup server with the 1st full backup and can therefore start with doing only incremental backups from day 1 itself. You’d typically take advantage of this feature for ‘first full backups’ that you think would take a long time.
How much time will the first backup take? Ask Wolfram Alpha…
For example, if you had 10GB and wanted to know how long it would take over a 1Mbps line (For asymmetric broadband plans, remember that you should need to look for the upload speed – NOT download), simply enter “data transfer time 10GB, 1Mb/s” – try it out using the box above.
See the answer, and if you don’t have the time, go the LtoR way! Go ahead, give it a spin.
Click here for more examples of “Web & Computer” stuff you can use Wolfram Alpha for. A larger list of possibilities is here – and includes things like knowing how many calories you had for breakfast and getting information about satellites.
What’s more, it even knows the meaning of life!
Have fun!
