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Re: Woctave-another gui front end


From: Sergei Steshenko
Subject: Re: Woctave-another gui front end
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 08:52:57 -0800 (PST)




----- Original Message -----
> From: edmund ronald <address@hidden>
> To: Sergei Steshenko <address@hidden>
> Cc: Stephen Montgomery-Smith <address@hidden>; c. <address@hidden>; 
> "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
> Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2012 4:49 PM
> Subject: Re: Woctave-another gui front end
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I have a PhD in computer science, and used to teach AI. I wanted to
> re-learn some Fourier stuff so I hunted down Octave. I don't think I
> count as a beginner with computers.
> 
> The experience of getting this thing to work on the Mac was horrid.
> First I found a package, then I had to swap out Gnuplot, then it
> couldn't show do image stuff, then I had to install Macports and
> recompile and in the end it still couldn't do some stuff because of a
> bug iof the Mac Gnuplot terminal if I remember rightly so I had to
> switch to X11 and learn how to set the terminal yadda yadda. As for an
> environment I use the mac Terminal.app which thankfully has cut and
> paste ...
> 
> Frankly, Octave is a beautiful piece of work, but  it suffers from
> the Open Source mentality that you need to earn what you use. This is
> a piece of software which one cannot recommend to anyone at a decent
> university where they have a budget, simply because the time to get it
> to work is 3 or four days which is more than a Matlab license would
> cost. On a sidenote, the lab where I used to work dropped Matlab
> because it was too expensive, but I am starting to see what they are
> charging for.
> 
> Edmund
>

Yes, Mathworks changers for convenience.

Yes, people are lazy to learn.

Yes, you are right about FOSS croud mentality. Yes, the mentality often prefers 
writing new code (new wheels look so sexy !) rather than packaging existing 
pieces of code and making them work together out of the box.

Regards,
  Sergei.



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