How about Fortran vs C?  Python vs Perl?  Chicken vs Beef?  Alien vs Predator? 
Genuine Help-seekers vs Deliberate Time-wasters?

On 02/07/2011, at 11:38 PM, Timmy Siu wrote:

> Hi Friends,
> How do you rate Maxima and SciLab?  Both are open source. :-\
> 
> Faithfully,
> Timmy
> 
> 
>> Advice to math users -
>> Develope a hand calculated test case to check the accuracy of the SW.   This
>> should be something like what you want to calculate.
>> A few years ago a SW company tried to sell the Engineers at GE Engine Control
>> Systems a do it all package.   In front of the audience and Developers I put
>> up a test case with a trivial answer that was known as a truth.   It failed
>> miserably due to errors in the input translation from the GUI to the real
>> calculations.
>> So before you use a Math Package build a test case - all you need is bad
>> answers to waste time, money or destroy machinery.
>> 
>> Sign on my wall - "To error is human it takes a computer to really foul things
>> up". !
>> 
>> I'm not being picky but just be careful in applying it.
>> 
>> Try "R" for fun and games.
>> How about a fast Fourier transform to convert time domain stuff to frequency
>> domain.   Helps exercise the neurons.
>> 
>> Larry Linder
>> On Friday 01 July 2011 11:50 am, Alain Péan wrote:
>>> Le 01/07/2011 17:16, Timmy Siu a écrit :
>>>> Dear All SL User:
>>>> I found this mathematics software.  It is very big in size (about 1GB
>>>> after extraction).  It doesn't have any GUI.  It only comes in Linux
>>>> binary, no windows binary.
>>>> 
>>>> Can anyone give some hint to using it and what task can it compute?? :-(
>>>> 
>>>> http://www.sagemath.org/index.html
>>> Hi Timmy,
>>> 
>>> If I remember correctly, Sage has indeed a GUI, but through a web
>>> interface. See :
>>> http://www.sagemath.org/tour-graphics.html
>>> 
>>> It is in fact a Python software mixing a lot of scientific tools (Numpy,
>>> scipy, Matplotlib and so on...). It has indeed a windows version (why
>>> not, it is Python, and web interface ?), and also for mac osx, solaris...
>>> http://www.sagemath.org/download-windows.html
>>> 
>>> Alain