On Thursday 17 November 2005 06:17 pm, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Wolfram has as much right to be personally proud of Mathematica as Bill Gates has to be personally proud of Windows. In both cases, they're managers or executives, not technical contributors (at least not for a long time, now), so in my book, pride of accomplishment is not warranted.
I believe what Wolfram originally contributed to Mathematica is still essential to what it does today. The same cannot be said of the technology Gates contributed to Windows NT.
This makes me curious about who you are or represent,
I'm just a reformed juvenile delinquent who gave up drugs for math, computers and physics.
what has been the nature of Wolfram Research's largesse towards you and / or your organization and why it was granted.
I purchased an upgrade to Mathematica a couple days before the next version was released. They let me get the second $250 upgrade for free. There have been other cases where they have been pleasant to do business with. I will say they have, in the past, been overly proud of their Motif GUI. There was a time when that pride was justified, but the GUI is now among the worst I use. That, however, is merely a wrapper around the improtant stuff. Furthermore, they are now in the process of redesigning it, or so they claim. I believe the Notebook interface can also be improved upon, and have provided significant feedback in that area. But, as it stands today, with all it's clunkyness, it is a very powerful tool.
I assume you have concluded that I share your postion on this. I have no reason to complain about my dealings with Novell over the years. That is, until they took a swipe at the KDE. I'm dead serious when I say that much of my reason for supporting the KDE for the past 7 years (IIRC) is a direct result of my experience with Novell products in the Windows NT environment. When I saw that Novell execs were double talking about remaining behind KDE development, well...
I don't know why you'd assume that. I cannot and do not pretend to know how you feel about Novell,
I thought that would be clear from the discussions regarding the KDE, and the fact that I have advocated supporting them, and trying to do what we can to improve their cash flow so that they aren't forced to cut people, and/or projects. Steven