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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

#121
post #8

What exactly is the boundary between commercial and non-commercial use? E.g. say you make an educational video that contains a portion of using Mathematica on RPI, and you could get ads income, is that indirect or direct commercial use? What if you use it to compute dimensions of some woodworking art piece that you sell later? What if you make a scientific or mathematical discovery thanks to it that you later use in…

The zeroeth boundary is "what your conscience will enforce." The first boundary is "what Wolfram is willing to enforce". The second boundary is "what a judge is willing to enforce". Likely the 0th boundary will kick in before the other two. If too many people misuse this, Wolfram may decide it was a bad idea and end the program. In practical terms, an overwhelming percentage of revenue comes from large institutions.…

Those boundaries are pretty stressful.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#122
post #9

Has this not been a thing for 10 years?

https://xkcd.com/1053/

News - newly received or noteworthy information, _especially about recent events_.

Perhaps I’m taking the “News” part of this site’s name too literally.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#123

The fact it's free is really cool but the choice to limit this to Raspberry Pi is rather weird because Raspberry Pis are painfully slow (can't even navigate YouTube comfortably) and even fairly hard to acquire in the first place. They should rather make it free for all individual non-commercial tinkerer no matter the hardware they use. I believe this would ensure popularity sustainability and the raspberry-only way m…

... it was painfully slow on the original Raspberry Pi, but it is usable on the Pi 4. You probably wouldn't want to use it for serious work or even serious course work (e.g. post secondary), but it does demo the product and is fine for high school level math. The biggest hurdle is the startup time and, depending upon how patient you are, visualization.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#124
post #31

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.

Neither Windows nor Linux are walled gardens in any reasonable definition of the term. A “wall” is a barrier constructed to prevent you from passing.

Windows and Linux are just forests or farms, or however you want to expand the analogy. That somebody hasn’t cut a path for you doesn’t make them a walled garden. Different paths have been cut for each operating system, and people familiar with the particular paths on those systems will have an easier time navigating the terrain. But nobody has constructed a wall. A forest is “functionally” walled off only to the extent to which the person doesn’t know how to navigate. This is not a property of the system but the user.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#125
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…

That’s not really a walled garden though. A wall is something out there to impede progress. Linux and Windows are not walled gardens, they are forests. A forest doesn’t necessarily have easy paths to every destination, some are far, some are just hard to get to. But there’s nothing artificial to prevent you from figuring out how to navigate through the forest.

Calling the inherent difficulty of things a “walled garden” removes any meaning from the term. I’m bad at picking up human languages, I don’t know lots of programming languages, I don’t know anything about overland navigation, I’m bad on MacOS and I’ve never used an Amiga, so is most of the world a walled garden?

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#126
post #18

The old tactic of trying to get children hooked by making the first doses free.

Wow, did Freecell, solitaire, and Pinball in windows cause addiction to gambling in children? That's how it sounds. Me and brother were into RPis since 2B and always used Raspbian. Never did we once even clicked on Mathematica, I know many people in the community who never clicked Mathematica. Rpi also has a good Python integration, which is very well endorsed by the community and and obvious choice for many.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#127
post #108
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you illustrate some footguns of Mathematica/Wolfram Language?

The error handling is atrocious. The language isn‘t just untyped - everything that‘s not defined is symbolic, and builtins will silently operate on symbolic expessions even if you don‘t expect them to. Consider this: myfunc[x_] := {2*x, 3*x}; myfnuc[5][[1]] Without the 'fnuc' typo, this would create the list {10, 15} and take the first part, giving 10. With the typo, it returns 5 without warning. Why? myfnuc[5] is no…

This sounds like the job for a linter or intellisense editor.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#128
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I'm impressed on the speed of the new i3-N300/N305 at 7w or 9w/15w

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/231806/...

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#129
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You don't have to pay anyone to sign a driver you write to use it yourself. With Windows you can write some software, but not all software. You have to pay Microsoft to sign drivers. The code that enforces that is the wall. No such code exists in a Linux. All is possible.

Just to clarify - this is main difference between Windows and Linux, and this is why Windows by definition is walled garden? Actually, I think I'm ok with it. As far as I understand you don't need to sign USB drivers, and for other drivers signing is additional level of security.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica Free on Every Raspberry Pi

#130

The fact it's free is really cool but the choice to limit this to Raspberry Pi is rather weird because Raspberry Pis are painfully slow (can't even navigate YouTube comfortably) and even fairly hard to acquire in the first place. They should rather make it free for all individual non-commercial tinkerer no matter the hardware they use. I believe this would ensure popularity sustainability and the raspberry-only way m…

Without a Raspberry Pi, at least you can use the wolfram engine for free [0] and integrate with your applications, although without all the benefits of the wolfram notebooks environment. [0] https://www.wolfram.com/engine/

As long as your application is not commercial.
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