hi, I'm not a developer, just interested in sage, i don't speak for the development team - I only wanted to point out that there is this unique possibility of a webinterface which would make it somewhat easier.
On Dec 21, 1:18 pm, mabshoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED] dortmund.de> wrote: > [begin rant] Well, we support OSX, too, and that isn't exactly Open > Source either. for me the same holds true for osx, but since it is unix like, porting is easier. > I could bash Apple for another couple paragraphs... I hate the narrow-minded ipod hype, kills competition > firefox i was actively involved in OpenOffice, which is also a good example. > I am a huge supporter of Linux and Open Source in general,... me, too. using linux more or less since 1998. > What is the point in telling people not to use Windows, but to lock > them into Linux or OSX on the other hand? I'm just telling that there is the possibility of using sage on windows without having to install it there, because in the surroundings of an institute (first post suggested this to me) getting a pc with linux is easy. at least here where i work. Maybe my assumptions are wrong, because here where I work, university of vienna, mathematics department, linux is even fully supported by our centralized IT-department. In the mathematics institute, linux users are about 80% - and nobody is anxious about using it. The pc labs for students, about 150 PCs, dual boot linux and windows with linux as default. no problems there, too. Therefore I'm used to an other environment. Sorry for my wrong mindset. > Just ask for example the Singular team if they > want a 64 bit native port of their application using MSVC. I can > assure you that they would be quite happy if somebody did the work. If > things work out as planned on my end I will certainly try to make that > happen. In the end we will all win if Sage and its components work > well on *all* operating systems. Great, but, this is just one component and for me this sounds like a Singular project. sage only uses the result. That's my point of view, sorry. > > The vast majority of users on the desktop use Windows and do not have > access to Linux or OSX. The vast majority of users on the desktop give a damn of calculating anything!! ;) > Microsoft will be *the* dominating desktop > operating system for easily the next decade. yes, no doubt about that > While the install base of > Linux is growing quicker in relative terms the absolute increase of > Windows desktops each year *dwarfs* the Linux desktop install base. If you translate it from absolute numbers into each market share, i think the picture is different. Here at my department windows users have to excuse when they use it and send wrong formatted text files (latex). I am in the hope that the scientific community is more "open" to new stuff. [ ... running ... ] I don't see the need for such an extreme view of competition. If there are 98% happy with buying windows, being passive users and being experts at software-firewall-workarounds-registry-hacking-anti-virus- xyz - have fun. They are also happy buying "state of the art" software like mathematica or matlab. > > To get somewhat closer to on-topic again: Another target group for > Sage is the general educational sector [by which I mean high schools > and non-major math college education, not professional mathematicians, > graduate students in math and so on] Well, good point. Since about nearly two years ago I was giving a lot of math tutoring lessons for that group. age 16+-2. There were also those who are using mathematical software in their education - and that was the first time ever i have seen the reality behind that! There a classes full of laptops, each one with mathematica for school (some simplified syntax + reduced commands) - and nobody is able to use it. After 3 month of education in school, they solved linear equation systems (2 with 2 variables) in that way, that they wrote both equations in mathematica, calculated the result by hand, and typed the result back into the notebook. (i was tutoring three of them from the same class, so this is not a single sample) Their teacher was not aware how this could be done in mathematica and nobody had the idea to open the documentation and look up the solve command. i was totally confused!!! And i definitely don't want to know how much wolfram res. was paid. (The same happened a year earlier, this time with derive. But there was slightly more knowledge about that, but still solving by hand) Therefore, if [EMAIL PROTECTED] should work, there must be an entire project assigned to that. There must be somebody who understands sage's internals to help those, who teach sage with a pedagogical background, because there needs to be a feedback to the developers. Then a lot of good documentation, with many examples, screenshots, handbook for teachers, scripts, ready- to-use notebooks and so on. Just telling them that sage uses a slightly modified python main loop for entering commands which call everything written in the references is not enough! I'm also thinking for example of a learning path, as a SCORM package - ready to import in something like claroline ( http://www.claroline.net ) Since the current adoption of sage in schools is exactly 0, this should be done right from the beginning. So, in my point of view, this education target needs a lot of work and time. (at first, there have to be user accounts, managed by LDAP and so on, admin interface, teacher-admin-interface, permissions ...) > ... but we have to > work with the situations that is often called "reality", exactly, and the reality is, that some marketing+lobby effort is seemingly enough to end in a f****up situation where nobody knows how to use the software. that's nothing i want to see again. sorry for my ideological ambitions! > > As mentioned above I think that cross platform code makes Open Source > independent of the underlying operating system which is much more > important than a somewhat purist opinion that excludes the majority of > the target audience just because they "haven't seen the light yet." no, well, that not what i have wanted to say. more choice is always better, but in my opinion there a sacrifice. > This rant is not intended to flame you, thx ;) > ... because they can > use all those cool Open Source applications like Firefox on Windows. > The vast majority of users will finally see that Open Source works > because of Firefox, not be kept on Windows because they can use it > there. They may switch, they may not switch, but at least they might > have learned something in the process. yes, but on the other hand the need to switch from win to linux is gone. and yes i understand, you don't see the "but". i hope they learn something, too - especially to be part of a group of users who can express their problems/needs and help each other. tit- for-tat principle, because "help other" means in turn "somebody helps me" > > In the end feel free to disagree with me, and many people certainly > do. Me spending my time on a native Windows port doesn't hurt anybody > out there, except that there is some cost of opportunity since I > didn't spend my time on fixing some bug in Sage I could have worked on > in that time. But it is my experience that porting code exposes bugs > that will hit you sooner or later on the platform you already run on. good, well, than everything is ok and the code quality is increasing. i just know the situation with "R" a bit (the statistic thing) where everything is linux centric, but the windows user base is huge. they get ready-compiled packages to install - but the problem is, not everything is available for linux! so, after singular, you can help porting R packages - there are thousands ;) h --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
