Re: How does Octave shine?

[Mike Miller]

On Thu, 21 Sep 2006, Cameron Laird wrote:

> It's the more technical observations that have most helped me this week, 
> though, as the audience for this demonstration seems immune to our 
> arguments about scientific method, portability, and so on.  My thanks 
> for all your remarks.

They might not need portability, but they might like money.  I think "free 
as in speech" gives us a great community and a great product.  I think 
"free as in beer" is also very important when I read about people who run 
dozens or hundreds of instances of the program at once.  It sounds like 
Octave can save a department a million dollars in the course of a decade. 
In many cases, I'll bet, you just wouldn't do the work at all if you had 
to use MATLAB because the cost of running MATLAB on 100 processors is 
prohibitive.

Mike