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Re: How does Octave shine?
From: |
Tom Holroyd |
Subject: |
Re: How does Octave shine? |
Date: |
Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:41:34 -0400 (EDT) |
One of the things that I have been doing with Octave is running
it on the large cluster we have. I routinely run Octave
simultaneously on 128 CPUs. Mathworks has given us a deal where
we could get a license to do that for $36,000. We currently pay
$96,000 for 11 licenses! It's like airplane tickets. But to date
nobody is interested in buying the cluster license even though
it's supposed to be cheaper (and it's out of my control anyway).
There are alternatives, such as the compiler license or the
distributed toolbox (both of which cost mucho bucks), but I can
do development with Octave on my laptop (which I would need a
separate licence for) for free, and run it on as many CPUs as I
like.
Furthermore, beyond just being free, if you've ever been
prevented from running Matlab by a misconfigured license manager,
despite having paid for a license, you'll know what a royal
fcking pain it is to fix it. A program whose sole purpose is to
prevent you from using software is just evil.
Not to mention the excellent support that Octave has. Just as an
example, I found a bug last week (not a bug per se but rather an
incompatibility related to a lack of functionality), and it was
fixed three days later. This is quite typical and I can give
examples of 1 day turnaround-time on bugs (the longest I've had
to wait was a couple months or so). Just forget about similar
times from Mathworks.
Beyond that, there have been times when I needed something
specialized, and I was able to write it myself in short order
owing to the availablity of the source code (not always the best
documentation, but certainly the last word, and more importantly
I was able to copy some existing code and modify it for my
purposes).
Tom Holroyd, Ph.D.
We experience the world not as it is, but as we expect it to be.
- Re: How does Octave shine?, (continued)
Re: How does Octave shine?,
Tom Holroyd <=
Re: How does Octave shine?, Tom Holroyd, 2006/09/20
Re: How does Octave shine?, Peter Cloetens, 2006/09/20
Re: How does Octave shine?, Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso, 2006/09/20
Re: How does Octave shine?, Michael Creel, 2006/09/21