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Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

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Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#81

Post by lockhouse »

Roark66 wrote: post #58

I wonder who paid who in this deal. Is free Mathematica used to prop up an OS no one uses, on boards no one can buy(for their normal prices). Or is it raspberry pi foundation taking part in Wolfram advertising? Mathematica is a very nice product, but it's expensive. They tend to "get" people by offering cheap licenses through universities. Then there is free and open source Octave. It is just as good for everything I…

Why do you assume money changed hands at all?

Raspberry Pi Foundation gets another high profile and very desirable piece of educational software to include in their OS so it's a big win for them (and some of their users).

Wolfram gets a bunch of potential paying users when the children/college students/hobbyists get into the workforce and decide to use Mathematica in a commercial setting or pay for licenses of their own to use on their own more powerful workstations at home.

Looks like a win-win for everyone. I'm not really understanding all the negativity here. If it's because Mathematica is closed source, the Raspberry Pi OS image already includes closed source software like Minecraft education edition.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#82

Post by Dalewyn »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #49
Dalewyn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux quickly becomes a quagmire of impracticality once you dare to step outside of the distro-provided or -recommended repositories, so much I would argue it's functionally a walled garden at that point. By contrast, on Windows you can install, run, upgrade, and downgrade whatever you want whenever you want however you want without sacrificing practicality.

I actually think you have a point. Linux is far less of a walled garden in principle . And it seems a lot of people are assuming "walled garden" is a statement from developers perspective (no cost license or difficulty in developing for platform). I think what you're saying though is that your choices and options are far easier and wider with windows as a regular user, than with Linux, and if so I see your point. I'v…

Yup!

A walled garden isn't just about developer lock-in driven by financial incentives. As far as the end-user goes, if the choices provided outside of the garden are wholly impractical it might as well be walled in practice even if it's not in theory/principle.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#83

Post by jodrellblank »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #43
Dalewyn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux quickly becomes a quagmire of impracticality once you dare to step outside of the distro-provided or -recommended repositories, so much I would argue it's functionally a walled garden at that point. By contrast, on Windows you can install, run, upgrade, and downgrade whatever you want whenever you want however you want without sacrificing practicality.

This is among the most insane mind acrobatics that I have read in many years. Twisting meanings to make one of the biggest straight jackets among server and desktop OSes that I have ever encountered in my career sound like it's some kind of heaven of freedom is just outright disgusting. (edit: grammar)

> “one of the biggest straight jackets among server and desktop OSes that I have ever encountered in my career”

Speaking of insane mind acrobatics, it’s like you’re arguing a parody of windows you read on slashdot twenty years ago and have never encountered it at all.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#84

Post by SomeHacker44 »

danuker wrote: post #72
neltnerb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be the big differentiator was the ability to do symbolic math and actually solve equations. Maple could also do it, as could the TI89, so I never really got into it. It was just a huge difference from Matlab. But if I have an actually nasty equation to solve, like a system of differential equations with erf functions or something, I do actually go to wolfram alpha for help. It happens more often than I'd l…

The reason I might find Mathematica interesting is its language, which I found to be on my popularity-brevity Pareto frontier. https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html#non-math-ma... So, it can express an average Rosetta Code non-math task in ~180 bytes, compared to Python, ~270, or Java, ~420. I guess this is because of its vast libraries of "batteries included". Where it all falls apart is sharing. Nobody c…

I bought a one time home license for like $200ish a number of years ago and it still works, and will likely work forever. I have transferred it between computers and even OSes over time. Worth it. I pay as much for JetBrains annuallt and way more for the Adobe stuff I use maybe twice a year.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#85

Post by SloopJon »

fsiefken wrote: post #37

I wonder if you could run it on a Orange Pi board or Nvidia Jetson board (or perhaps even the Nvidia Grace arm CPU) as well or does it check for the RPi chip?

I toyed with trying to get it running on a Jeston Nano a couple of years ago. At the time, Raspbian was still 32 bit, JetPack was 64 bit, and running 32-bit Debian software on 64-bit Ubuntu was more of a pain than I wanted to deal with.

If it still ships with 64-bit Raspbian it might be worth another try, but I would not be at all surprised if it's somehow tied to the Pi.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#86

Post by rcarmo »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #80
rcarmo wrote: post #28

This has been a thing for a while, and if you have enough Pis, you can even run it on a clustered kernel setup - I did that a few years ago with 5 Pi 2 boards (20 cores in all): https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/08/10/0830

What is the relative performance of a five-cluster Pi2 setup? I would imagine much less than even a comparable expense spent for a basic home desktop.

You would be correct, which is why I don't own it anymore.

Doing it with Pi 4s would be interesting, but if I had to set up a sub-EUR 1000 cluster I'd go and grab 2-3 Celeron N5105 mini PCs, which would _in total_ have less than 90W consumption (although physically powering them would be a hassle - I was able to power all the Pi2s from a single Anker charger, which was great).

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#87

Post by layer8 »

323 wrote: post #35
msla wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Linux is a "Walled garden" the phrase has no meaning.

What does it mean then that Windows is a walled garden? That it can only run Windows software? How is then Linux also not a walled garden?

Windows is slowly getting more walled. For example, it’s not possible anymore to freely define file type associations in the registry. Windows only enables the user to do so via a very limited UI, which for example doesn’t allow custom icons, command lines, or custom groupings or forwarding of associations. Someone reverse-engineered the protection to defeat it [1], but it’s still a pain. Another example is that it’s almost impossible to change the UI look in ways not intended by Microsoft (which are much more limited now than 20 years ago).

[1] https://kolbi.cz/blog/2017/10/25/setuserfta-userchoice-hash-...

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#88

Post by paraph1n »

lordgrenville wrote: post #64
milkthefat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely versatile which makes it able to solve some neat problems. My favorite example is this was a CodeGolf to find if a goat in an image is upside down. - https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/71631/upgoat-or...

For those who didn't click: Mathematica stdlib contains a "detect goat" function.

That's not quite true. The function call in question is

> ImageInstanceQ[x,"caprine animal",RecognitionThreshold->i/100]

I think it's less misleading to say it has a generic image recognition function that supports goats, among many other recognition targets.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#89

Post by rcarmo »

UncleSlacky wrote: post #56
rcarmo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It checks for Pi-specific hardware devices, so you’re unlikely to get it going there.

I've run it on a PC using QEMU a few years back, though maybe the hardware detection has improved. I followed instructions similar to this: https://blog.agchapman.com/using-qemu-to-emulate-a-raspberry...

When I ran a cluster of it (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/08/10/0830) it was checking for the Pi hardware devices.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#90

Post by dragonwriter »

Dalewyn wrote: post #31
pca006132 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is more like a walled garden than Windows? Maybe you have a different definition of walled garden or something...

Linux quickly becomes a quagmire of impracticality once you dare to step outside of the distro-provided or -recommended repositories, so much I would argue it's functionally a walled garden at that point. By contrast, on Windows you can install, run, upgrade, and downgrade whatever you want whenever you want however you want without sacrificing practicality.

> Linux quickly becomes a quagmire of impracticality once you dare to step outside of the distro-provided or -recommended repositories

That’s not my experience with using third party repos and building third-party software from source on Linux. Heck, much of the time that I use Linux is fit software where I need to do the latter and it isn’t practical on Windows.

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