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General Software Discussion / Re: strange problem: impossible to launch new windows.
« Last post by urlwolf on December 22, 2007, 10:35 AM »I think I found it. it was trayIt!, an app to minimize things to the tray.
Thanks
Thanks
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urlwolf: do you, by any chance, have a recent Nero version installed? I've heard it b0rks the control panel for a lot of users.Nope. The only crappy program that interacts with others in bad ways is nvidia nview (controller for the video card, gets me shortcuts for flipping portrait/landscape; SFFS cannot live together with that; go figure).-f0dder (December 13, 2007, 06:20 PM)
This app appears to start down that road
But this should be done at the OS, not application level. Metadata is going to be useless in Noah when all your other applications know nothing about Noah's way of doing things. Metadata is my hobbyhorse. I've long campaigned for Opera to unify its data stores; currently we have page history, bookmarks, mail, RSS, IRC chat all in their own little fiefdoms. I wanted all this to be stored together with rich metadata, and the browser to be broken down into a data miner, in much the same way Noah is structured. But really that just pushes the problem one step further, because then that data is inaccesible to my file manager, my global search interface, and any other software that could take advantage of it.-nontroppo (December 05, 2007, 03:32 PM)
"mapping a 12-dimensional object to calculating rainfall patterns under global warming"
I can do that in Perl, C, assembler, and any other Turing complete language. But I use Mathematica because it is full of functionality, fairly reliable, and has a very elegant programming paradigm. Also, as a student, it'll cost me $100-150, depending on where I live, for the lifetime of my studentship, assuming no site license; the kinds of business that run this software commercially really don't care too much about a $2500 license fee.
This is just like GIMP trying to take on Photoshop. When you're a kid, Adobe prices seem so off-putting that you can't see why people wouldn't flock to the free alternative. When you're doing a real job involving print work, you simply don't think twice about paying Adobe for the required feature set, intuitive UI and better workflow.
So, kids will carry on pirating Adobe or paying a much reduced student price, then paying for it when they go into the real world; and the same goes for Maple, Matlab, Mathematica, or whatever.
Oh, yeah, the whole "open source" thing. Excepting core functionality, some of Mathematica and the majority of Maple is provided in source form. You can whine about needing peer review of implementation at all levels, but how many of you have inspected your CPU's microcode or circuit diagrams? At some point the line is drawn, and you combine a trust in the reputation of your vendor with the fact that usually you're prototyping and modelling. Things will be re-implemented and tested in many ways before your "final product" is out of the door (whether that's theoretical physics or an aeroplane).
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Re:FLOSS misses the point again (Score:5, Informative)
by mhansen444 (1200253) on Saturday December 08, @10:25AM (#21624065)
Since you specifically mentioned Mathematica, I'd like to address some reasons why Sage was created when something like Mathematica exists. While good for some types of problems (calculus, solving equations, etc.), Mathematica is not so good at a number of other ones (linear algebra, abstract algebra, number theory). Many of these are important to the Sage developers who need this type of functionality. Mathematica's programming language is a whole lot less flexible than a "real" programming language like Python. Plus, with Mathematica, you aren't allowed to change the internals -- you're stuck with what you get.
These were all reasons that led William Stein to start up Sage.
Oops - the email version doesn't have links for the forum postingsyeah, I'd like it to be still text-only, but with links-f0dder (December 07, 2007, 05:20 AM)