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Mathematica 7.0 Released Today

blog.wolfram.com

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Re: Mathematica 7.0 Released Today

#41

Post by pg »

newt0311 wrote: post #15
delackner wrote: post #8

While I will probably never use mathematica, due to its breathtaking price, one can only wonder how many researchers the world over simply pirate it. I also doubt we will ever see Wolfram willing to set the price at a level that normal human beings can afford. Perhaps a client-server version that does all its computing back at Wolfram's servers, would give them the confidence to dabble with a sane price point...

researchers work in universities, almost all of which have site-wide licenses. Site-wide licenses for mathematica also start to approach reason. Its doubtful that that many researchers will have to pirate it.

researchers work in universities

Really? By definition? Was Erdos not a "researcher?"

Re: Mathematica 7.0 Released Today

#42

Post by lliiffee »

Dilpil wrote: post #38
ciscoriordan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go take that class at Johns Hopkins, then click on this link: http://store.wolfram.com/view/app/mathforstudents - $139.95 for a fully functional student version. You can also get a semester version for $44.95. "Note: Mathematica for Students is intended for students enrolled in accredited academic institutions and is for use on a student's own personal computer."

Of course, $139 is far too high for a student.

Tons of students pay $100 for books. Tons of students pay $10,000-$30,000 for tuition.

Re: Mathematica 7.0 Released Today

#43

Post by LPTS »

Eliezer wrote: post #23
LPTS wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google subgenius

Google Eliezer Yudkowsky.

You are said Eliezer Yudkowsky? Nice. I read and like that overcoming bias stuff. If anyone could prove me wrong about the singularity, it's gonna be young people working on their own like you. We need lots more people working on there own chasing there own ideas. I like your style.

I bet you find lots of useful stuff trying for it. It still seems to me to be more a religious then scientific endeavor, but I'm glad you are working to prove loudmouths like me wrong.

Re: Mathematica 7.0 Released Today

#44

Post by anatyx »

I just a attended a free webinar about using Mathematica for education (http://www.wolfram.com/services/education/seminars/s01.html) and the guy who was chatting with all of the attendees told me my college already had a site license. Turns out I can use Mathematica at school and at home for free and I had no idea...

You might want to check if your campus has something similar set up. The Mathematica folks might be able to direct you to the right place.

Re: Mathematica 7.0 Released Today

#45

Post by schtog »

How is the programming language in Mathematica?

How is it for Matlab stuff? Or perhaps it isn't for linear algebra at all?

Can you write real standalone applications in Mathematica or it is solely for prototyping, analyizng and modeling?

Re: Mathematica 7.0 Released Today

#46

Post by JulianMorrison »

gaius wrote: post #34
delackner wrote: post #8

While I will probably never use mathematica, due to its breathtaking price, one can only wonder how many researchers the world over simply pirate it. I also doubt we will ever see Wolfram willing to set the price at a level that normal human beings can afford. Perhaps a client-server version that does all its computing back at Wolfram's servers, would give them the confidence to dabble with a sane price point...

It's not a matter of "dabbling" or "sanity", it's a matter of making a niche product that takes a lot of very qualified people years of work. The market for individual consumers that would buy Mathematica is tiny. You might as well wonder why SAP don't "dabble" with a "sane" price point for R/3 for home users to balance their chequebooks.

"Shockingly rich professors of mathematics" - a harshly vertical niche, no wonder the per-unit price is high. But I think they've painted themselves into a bit of an unnecessary corner. Mathematica is a universal workhorse and math has huge applicability. I think they could cut the per-unit price and make it up on volume, selling into commerce and academia. Heck, I'd be inclined to offer "open source user" licenses free for private individuals who agreed to CC license their results and their code libraries.

Who makes more money, Toyota or Rolls Royce?

Re: Mathematica 7.0 Released Today

#47

Post by etal »

syntax-case wrote: post #25
etal wrote: post #4

Sweet Jesus. The image-processing capability is pretty hot, as is this: ProteinData["A2M", "MoleculePlot"] It's a shame Mathematica isn't open-source; I'd love to see the code.

Why? Do you think there's something special about displaying molecules? Or do you think Mathematica does it better than anything else? Try PyMOL - the most widely used molecular graphics software, probably.

Yes, I use PyMol quite a bit. The source code is hideous, and the author likes it that way. It would take an immense effort to smoothly incorporate PyMol into a larger system like SciPy or Sage; it would be very useful if that happened, but I don't think it will any time soon.

I haven't used Mathematica 7 yet, but it looks like the tools it implements in one small library are decent substitutes for what's currently implemented in several big hairy bioinformatics toolchains. Look at how we operate now -- NCBI offers a bunch of free standalone tools; BioPerl and BioPython do some good glue, and then there are a bunch of visualization tools, and we FTP copies of whatever databases we need and keep updated manually. The extensible tools each have their own extension language, so a RasMol script won't load in PyMol (the tweaks, not the PDB file). Mathematica 7 appears to offer the basic components of this in one clean, well-organized standard library, controlled by one powerful language.

All that's great, but the especially interesting thing is their claim that the design of the whole system made all of this easy. The image-processing tricks and the unassuming Parallelize function seem like very specialized features, but they cobbled all of this together in, I guess, 2 years and some change, on top of a codebase that's almost 20 years old. It's like the anti-PHP -- brilliant design decisions all along that make adding new features easier, not harder. I have a feeling the Mathematica source code contains some very interesting ideas, and if it were open-source, it would be relatively easy to add additional features that seem like a big deal in existing tools.

Re: Mathematica 7.0 Released Today

#48

Post by delackner »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #46
gaius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a matter of "dabbling" or "sanity", it's a matter of making a niche product that takes a lot of very qualified people years of work. The market for individual consumers that would buy Mathematica is tiny. You might as well wonder why SAP don't "dabble" with a "sane" price point for R/3 for home users to balance their chequebooks.

"Shockingly rich professors of mathematics" - a harshly vertical niche, no wonder the per-unit price is high. But I think they've painted themselves into a bit of an unnecessary corner. Mathematica is a universal workhorse and math has huge applicability. I think they could cut the per-unit price and make it up on volume, selling into commerce and academia. Heck, I'd be inclined to offer "open source user" licenses f…

"Who makes more money, Toyota or Rolls Royce?"

I'd leave off the automotive comparison. Porsche is rich enough to contemplate buying Volkswagen.

Re: Mathematica 7.0 Released Today

#49

Post by gaius »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #46
gaius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a matter of "dabbling" or "sanity", it's a matter of making a niche product that takes a lot of very qualified people years of work. The market for individual consumers that would buy Mathematica is tiny. You might as well wonder why SAP don't "dabble" with a "sane" price point for R/3 for home users to balance their chequebooks.

"Shockingly rich professors of mathematics" - a harshly vertical niche, no wonder the per-unit price is high. But I think they've painted themselves into a bit of an unnecessary corner. Mathematica is a universal workhorse and math has huge applicability. I think they could cut the per-unit price and make it up on volume, selling into commerce and academia. Heck, I'd be inclined to offer "open source user" licenses f…

I expect, like Oracle, almost all users of Mathematica are on their institution or employer's site licence.

There's plenty of cheap maths software (e.g. MathCad) and free (e.g. Sage, Octave) around.

Re: Mathematica 7.0 Released Today

#50

Post by syntax-case »

etal wrote: post #47
syntax-case wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Do you think there's something special about displaying molecules? Or do you think Mathematica does it better than anything else? Try PyMOL - the most widely used molecular graphics software, probably.

Yes, I use PyMol quite a bit. The source code is hideous, and the author likes it that way. It would take an immense effort to smoothly incorporate PyMol into a larger system like SciPy or Sage; it would be very useful if that happened, but I don't think it will any time soon. I haven't used Mathematica 7 yet, but it looks like the tools it implements in one small library are decent substitutes for what's currently i…

I haven't used Mathematica 9.0 and its chemistry-related functions, but from the presentations, they look like practically useless toys for dabbles.

Can Mathematica do raytracing, display secondary structure, semi-transparent molecular surface and allow you to select coloring patterns? Is it easy to predict protonation states of molecules at different pH levels and electrostatic potentials? Can it do molecular dynamics?

Who cares that they have built-in access to the melting point of caffeine?!

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