Our course instructor on "Estimation and Detection Theory" was a big fan of Scientific WorkPlace. It did such a great job at replacing the chalk-board during lockdown.
MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
51–60 of 143 posts
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#52I am so sorry to hear that. I wish that when companies such as this do go out of business that they should transition the licensing model to perpetual. It is gracious to keep running the licesnse server ut once it ends that is it. If the company is not going to lose any money because of it, which they will not since they are out fo the busness entirely, let the users have a chance to keep using it. (without support,…
One issue you hit, and it sounds like they may be hitting here, is the need to pay yearly royalties or other yearly licensing fees for some of the components in their software.
The company that they are paying fees to is unlikely to give them a a pass.
In these cases, which are not uncommon, there is not a lot they can do.
(Lots of companies have a mix of perpetual and non-perpetual users and pay royalties on the yearly folks and a one time fixed fee for the forever folks)
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
TeXmacs is better than Word for documents containing math.
Given that Word does LaTeX math, why would that be?
The math equations made by Word have a distinctive appearance. Partly because they’re objectively worse in some (a few) aspects, partly because people associate them with Word, the result feels amateurish. This isn’t purely an intrinsic technical quality of Word, it’s just how the cookie crumbles.
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#54It's a unique kind of business that commits to doing substantially more development work after announcing they have ceased sales with no plan to restart.
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#55That's a shame... science/math focused software is such a niche, and the people inside that niche(I imagine) _really_ appreciate that type of software.
There could be some type of consulting opportunity here though for licensees that are still wanting to pay for that type of software. Depending on their use case, a consultant could try to shift what they currently are dependent on to a semi-customized collection of jupyter notebooks etc.
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#56[deleted]
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#57Yes but was it able to share selfie and video ?
More importantly, was it collecting usage information and dumping it onto data markets?
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> It's a pity it's called "TeXmacs" when, as you say, it really has no connection to TeX Yep. It sounds like something that ties emacs and LaTeX together. That's not something I'd even want to look at, and have not for exactly that reason. My goto math tool is Maxima, but I don't write so typesetting isn't a thing for me - it does support MathML though IIRC.
TeXmacs doesn’t use emacs either.
Oh Lord, who thought that name was good
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#59What kind of alternatives there are for these? At least Matlab and Wolfram Mathematica come into my mind, but are there anything else?
The MuPad CAS that was used by this software has since been bought by Mathworks and integrated into the symbolic functionality of Matlab.
Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business
#60In the age of Jupyter, Pluto.jl, SageMath, LaTeX/Overleaf Wolfram (for rich) who needs this? Better to spend time and resources improving those.
Do any of those have a CAS which is as powerful and easy to use as Scientific Notebook/Workplace?