Oh, wow this is really awesome. Shame I could never use it, since it's out of my price range as a hobbyist. Seems insane they don't offer pricing that covers my use case, especially with stuff like home robotics being such a big thing these days. There's no way I could afford even 1/10th of the $3.5k they want for the full version, and I'm not a student so I couldn't buy the $75 student version. I'd have no problem paying $150-200, just to play around with this.
You could always register for a class at your local community college to get the necessary student ID. But I agree, a 'home user/general nerd' version would be great, possibly with limitations on export or suchlike.
I'm interested in playing with it too, although strangely there doesn't seem to be any way to get audio or MIDI into or out of it, which is a pity. I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to add on, since Mathematica has that sort of thing built in.
Hm, it's not a new problem to them... Mathematica has a hobbyist license called "Home Edition" at u$d 295. Maybe if many people show interest in the same kind of licensing for this new product they'll think about it.
"Seems insane they don't offer pricing that covers my use case..... I'm not a student so I couldn't buy the $75 student version."
They do offer pricing for your use case. You simply locate a student and have them buy it for you.
They understand people are going to do this. They just don't want Boeing to get that pricing they really don't care if you do. But they aren't going to say that.
Seems neat. It's really hard to know whether Wolfram is a visionary or a lunatic (and by extension, whether the suite of Wolfram products are ahead of their time or just shiny recapitulations of existing tech).
For example, in his "A New Kind of Science", he basically takes credit for the entire field of complex systems theory and presents lots of previously known information (very verbosely) as though it were original research.
While mostly agree with your criticism of NKS, in Wolfram's defense, I have personally found Mathematica to be a joy to use. Under its unfortunate syntax, there's a great functional programming language there. While you can do many of the same things in Matlab or Octave, I always prefer to use Mathematica.
Simulink was the major reason for choosing Matlab for a current project. Hope this move by Wolfram also results in improves for Simulink or in a lower price. It currently sells for around 6k.
Matlab+Simulink had no competing alternative until this.
Paired with the recent free online Model Thinking class, this could help introduce complexity concepts to beginners possibly ... $35 is nice for a semester license. I wonder if you could really expose a "swiss cheese" model of a problem situation? Anyway... complexity is of course complex, but not necessarily insurmountable or unknowable, so it is really wonderful that we're ever pushing the bar higher to educate about normal accidents and such (this has been the bane of my existence in stupid enterprise software sometimes :P)
Yep, its must be as awesome as Simulink. But in most real world examples you should use more basic programming languages in order to feel all process (handle discretization or numerical integration manually). In Simulink you connect couple block and thats it... everything important are hidden behind the scene.
Well, since both are implementations of the Modelica standard I would guess they are pretty much the same, though I do not know MapleSim or your problems with it.
if it's like Mathematica vs MATLAB, then it will be much less unpleasant to use. one of the reasons i like Mathematica is the consistent respect for UI/UX
"Symbolic-numeric" could be BS, but I'm pretty sure it's not. What might be triggering your BS alarm is the "symbolic." However this word has a precise meaning, especially in Mathematica et al's case. It basically means "replacement rules on arbitrary expressions." For example, we could define a derivative rule in this kind of way:
x^n -> n*x^(n-1)
If you have enough of these kinds of rules and a smart infrastructure around them, you can perform sophisticated "symbolic" calculations. The whole setup is similar in essence to a Lisp macro system. As a specific example, type the following into Mathematica (or WolframAlpha):
E^(I 2 Pi)
The result you get is "1". Not "1.000001", not "1 in floating point", but "1" as an exact symbol. So when they say they are using "symbolic-numeric" methods, what they mean is that they are using a combination of exact mathematical calculations (exact according to pure mathematics - thus invariably symbolic) in combination with numeric approximation/heuristic methods
[+] [-] TylerE|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmlorenzetti|14 years ago|reply
The language is quite complicated, though, and not all programs can run all well-formed simulation problems.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|14 years ago|reply
I'm interested in playing with it too, although strangely there doesn't seem to be any way to get audio or MIDI into or out of it, which is a pity. I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to add on, since Mathematica has that sort of thing built in.
[+] [-] pvarangot|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrys|14 years ago|reply
They do offer pricing for your use case. You simply locate a student and have them buy it for you.
They understand people are going to do this. They just don't want Boeing to get that pricing they really don't care if you do. But they aren't going to say that.
[+] [-] xaa|14 years ago|reply
For example, in his "A New Kind of Science", he basically takes credit for the entire field of complex systems theory and presents lots of previously known information (very verbosely) as though it were original research.
[+] [-] hendzen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spitfire|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvarangot|14 years ago|reply
Matlab+Simulink had no competing alternative until this.
[+] [-] th0ma5|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draggnar|14 years ago|reply
It seems like being able to model enterprise apps could be important for complex legacy systems.
[+] [-] phenom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ori_b|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfrank|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokipin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marmaduke|14 years ago|reply
Reason there is modeling an art be.
"new generation of hybrid symbolic-numeric methods,"
a sense of B.S., this does alerts strongly in me.
- yoda
[+] [-] tokipin|14 years ago|reply