I'm not sure what's beta about it--it looks normal to me. (Beta means experimental, right?) Anyway, I asked it to Search for Hawking, and only had a clue to two of the first six entry explanations. The other four:
One can evaluate the action for a gravitational field on a section of the
complexified spacetime which avoids the singularities.
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The quantum state of a spatially closed universe can be described by a wave
function which is a functional on the geometries of compact three-manifolds ...
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The development of irregularities in a single bubble inflationary universe
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Zeta function regularization of path integrals in curved spacetime
Suddenly I feel very stupid...
Jackie
Beta means it's in development and not ready for general release. But I say it's beta because they say it's beta, and to explain why I would post it.
alpha and beta release, also called pre-releases, usually come with even fewer guarrantees of worthiness than exist in officially released software. Usually alpha and beta releases of a program are free with the agreement that any bugs found by the user will be reported to the producer.
Despite the movement towards mathematically provable software, there is a realization among most developers that when a system is 'sufficiently complex', they can't reasonably test all of the possible things that could go wrong. And so they release it to the general public - or those among them who are willing to undergo a bit of risk.
Usually the risk is not that great. Software breaks. Reboot required. In some very rare cases, there might be gradual corruption of databases in a way that cannot be readily detected until well after the last good backups have been overwritten. Well, that's the potential anyway - but I've never seen or known it to occur. Usually when beta stuff breaks, it's not even a nuisance.
I used to get daily irritated with MS until I just learned to think of every version of their OS as being alpha, even though I payed for the software. It has the reliability and security of most other alpha software that I'm familiar with.
<<I used to get daily irritated with MS until I just learned to think of every version of their OS as being alpha, even though I payed for the software.>>
And this seems to have been built in to their marketing/development strategy of XP, going through Win2k; as also seems very much to have been the case with Apple's development of OSX through the current version. Economics may dictate these board room decisions, but the expense to the consumer can be annoying, and I'm sure there is a good amount of hand wringing done about how much the consumer can be made to pay these development costs. Or so I surmise.
Despite the movement towards mathematically provable software, there is a realization among most developers that when a system is 'sufficiently complex', they can't reasonably test all of the possible things that could go wrong.
rant/ I offer that they were just too lazy/complacent to test it along the way and are primarily driven by the rewards forthcoming and not by the "product". Complexities are exactly what testing is all about. It's a wonderful ball of corporate mentality that continues to roll when the consumer is trained by the "product". / the rant never ends...
x I offer that they were just too lazy
Or either that or the salesmen had already sold 10,000 copies of it, one.