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If you really want this support, get the user contributed package from matlab central. That wasn't too hard was it?

I may be biased, but I prefer this article by numerical analyst and mathematician Cleve Moler.

You don't have to be successful to survive.

I have a few "projects" out on Mathwork's site. I wouldn't call them full fledged "projects" but snippets of functionality that saved myself a ton of time and now they're hopefully saving other people time.

BSD licensed, anyone can do with the code what they want, if I die tomorrow the code will still survive without me. (Hline and Vline are probably the two functions that should be built in, but they were uploaded and last updated in 2001.)

I've found a ton of nifty projects at github that maybe didn't do what I wanted, but had pieces of code I used. It's what motivated me to get one myself. Until github goes under, anyone who wants to see how I've implemented my bashrc scripts can. Just like I borrowed code from someone else's bashrc project. Sounds 'survived' to me.

I keep reading these "I need a job, I'm a programmer" stories or slashdot and can't help but think... "yeah so what, I can do that".

I have a Mechanical Engineering degree. I honestly don't do much more than 'program' all day. But all my for loops and if statements have physical implications in the real world.

I took CS120 (Java) for kicks because I liked programming. I also took CS240 (C/C++) again just for fun, but I was depressed to find out that I graduated top of both classes. Those were my ELECTIVE classes.

If you have the ability to pick up concepts, why not try for a Mechanical or Electrical engineering degree. Your programming skills won't become useless, but you will be able to use them in other ways.

If you understand how a For Loop works and you can pick up ANY of the Mechanical Engineering concepts (Thermo, Fluids, Controls, or Mechanics) you're going to be non-unemployable. I write code to dig through TBs of field data looking for events. I even have quite a few submissions to Mathworks Central and Git Hub

Don't limit yourself to just Programming. There are other skills that require "programming" but are not just limited to being able to program.

Preemptive operating systems are becoming increasingly common in automotive.

Then that's just plain stupid.

However given that Toyota uses Simulink/RTW, I doubt that they've moved away from Real Time OS yet...

A pathway to innovation. Toyota released a revolutionary hybrid electric vehicle in November 1997. “Simulink had a remarkable effect,” on Toyota’s HEV program, says Mr. Ohata. “It even allowed software developed in Simulink and autocoded with Real-Time Workshop to be used on a real ECU well into the development cycle.”

SAE Document on how Caterpillar uses Auto Code Generation for all of their products.

Utilizing hand-coded software in our previous process had caused long, time-consuming,
iteration cycles that imposed severe limits on the
number of iterations we could perform to
develop a system. This in turn required control
system designers to make final design decisions
without adequate information. The solution
identified and implemented was to utilize a
model-based, rapid-prototyping capability.

Is that one of your customers? If you don't mind my asking, what industry are you in.

Care to back that up with any facts? Matlab/Simulink definitely DOES drop into such systems. In fact, by using RTW Embedded Coder as mentioned by another poster, you can (and usually do) generate the entire binary in Simulink.
See here: http://www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/en/data/1-4Z7I7F/?solution=1-4Z7I7F

And it conforms to a myriad of automotive and software standards that I'm sure involve more testing than the OP would have time to accomplish in any reasonable amount of time.
See here: http://www.mathworks.com/automotive/standards/maab.html

Care to back that up with any facts? Matlab/Simulink definitely DOES drop into such systems. In fact, by using RTW Embedded Coder as mentioned by another poster, you can (and usually do) generate the entire binary in Simulink.
See here: http://www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/en/data/1-4Z7I7F/?solution=1-4Z7I7F

And it conforms to a myriad of automotive and software standards that I'm sure involve more testing than the OP would have time to accomplish in any reasonable amount of time.
See here: http://www.mathworks.com/automotive/standards/maab.html

It's not 100M lines of handwritten code! Every time this comes up everyone (especially those that work with embedded systems) seem to think that there are a ton of code monkeys locked away coding in C or assembly.

I'd be willing to bet that almost all of it is auto generated. Toyota (and nearly everyone else) uses Matlab & Simulink extensively.
The MathWorks tools help Toyota design for the future (PDF)

Toyota Racing Development Makes Faster and More Efficient Engineering Decisions with MATLAB

A simple PID controler with saturation and limits could easily take up 50 "lines of code".

And it's not like Toyota is Mathworks' sole customer. Boeing, GM, Chrysler, Ford, etc ALL use Mathworks.

Just like nearly everyone that works with CAN uses Vector CANape. Everyone that develops ICE powertrains uses AVL

When you start to get to specialized software like what Matlab, CANape, AVL, etc all do, there aren't a ton of options (and no open source solutions). It's cheaper for all of these companies to buy X product and use it than try to write their own.

It's not 100M lines of handwritten code! Every time this comes up everyone (especially those that work with embedded systems) seem to think that there are a ton of code monkeys locked away coding in C or assembly.

I'd be willing to bet that almost all of it is auto generated. Toyota (and nearly everyone else) uses Matlab & Simulink extensively.
The MathWorks tools help Toyota design for the future (PDF)

Toyota Racing Development Makes Faster and More Efficient Engineering Decisions with MATLAB

A simple PID controler with saturation and limits could easily take up 50 "lines of code".

And it's not like Toyota is Mathworks' sole customer. Boeing, GM, Chrysler, Ford, etc ALL use Mathworks.

Just like nearly everyone that works with CAN uses Vector CANape. Everyone that develops ICE powertrains uses AVL

When you start to get to specialized software like what Matlab, CANape, AVL, etc all do, there aren't a ton of options (and no open source solutions). It's cheaper for all of these companies to buy X product and use it than try to write their own.

Most of that code is auto generated. Except for some low level stuff, nothing is written by hand in assembly or C. It's all auto coded from some sort of control toolbox. Most likely Matlab/Simulink.

Sure enough this is one of the first hits on Google.

Writing that many lines of code would be damn near impossible in the relatively short development cycle.

Even a simple PID controller could take up a few dozen lines of code even though on screen it's simply represented by 3-4 blocks.

So you used someone else's money to atone for you not paying for something? Do you even hear yourself? Do you honestly think no one ever gets a job using Matlab if they didn't have the benefit of pirating it in college, and that there is no way to learn about the special toolboxes without pirating them first? It's not like a company that successful would think of letting people try out something that expensive before agreeing to purchase it. The rationalizations I see on this topic never cease to astound me.

So there's a start... but what about Simulink? IMHO the REAL power of Mathworks is Simulink. My company, and I imagine most others have compilers for their ECMs built in. You make a model. Mathworks compiles it, and you can flash it to your ECM. Beats the hell out of Raw Assembly :) (Especially for some of the non linear PID, rate limiting, saturation controllers that most people run these days).

For those that aren't familiar, this is a list of the Matlab/Simulink Toolboxes Available: http://www.mathworks.com/products/product_listing/

My group has probably cut some of our project man-hour times in half with System ID toolbox. No more step response stuff, feed it U and Y and it gives you the Nth order system and delay. Toss that into your simulink model as your plant, start swinging your controller around and full off line system minimal time.

This article from MATLAB News & Notes that came out on the 30th anniversary is pretty interesting - there are some nice details in it about the original system. It was co-authored by Dick Gran, one of the engineers who helped design the real thing. I saw Dick Gran give a talk on this subject and it was really interesting. Full disclosure: I work for the MathWorks.

BTW, a very ill-advised design choice of Python: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0211/ Ask any numerical analyst to know why it is a terrible idea to solve a linear system with inv(A)*b. But make sure you have at least half an hour free.

To make a long story short; solving Ax=b by calculating x=inv(A)*b is a terrible idea because calculating inv(A) is an inherently difficult thing. While it would be extremely useful to have inv(A), it's not strictly neccessary to obtain in in order to solve Ax=b.

At the most basic level, the technique which most would be aware of to solve Ax=b is basic Gauss Elimination, with an augmented matrix and back substitution. In fact, this is often the very first thing people learn how to do in a linear algebra course. It isn't much better than finding the inverse, but it saves a lot of computation in the long run.

Of course there are many other techniques. Happily however, most packages can now automatically make the best choice on which technique to use, depending on the properties of A. In Matlab and Octave, it all boils down to using the left division operator like so
x=A\b
instead of the inverse calculating
x=inv(A)*b

Using the first command, Matlab and Octave will choose a technique that best suits the matrix A. This page has a list of all the techniques that Matlab can use to solve the linear system. To my knowledge, Octave has a number of techniques as well, but I'm not sure if it's as comprehensive as Matlab. Also, Octave's left division operator has been known to have bugs.

And to return to the main topic, Octave and Matlab both use LAPACK extensively, which is written completely in Fortran(and based on BLAS). There's really no other language for linear algebra.

Except I'm pretty sure that there are modern languages and libraries that can handle this without Fortran. I don't have much experience with it myself, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly what MATLAB is for, for one.

Dude, what do you think the libraries Matlab uses are written in? Check out netlib to get an idea, ATLAS, BLAS, LAPACK, LINPACK, etc. Matlab stands on the shoulders of the giants of scientific computing (implemented for the most part in Fortran).

Matlab is now the de-facto language of choice for Engineers. It has a huge set of domain-specific libraries. That should be the first thing non-comp sci Enggs are taught... They can learn Fortran or Python much later if required.

but for math geeks FORTRAN is probably the easiest language to get from pencil-n-paper to computer. Math functions in FORTRAN translate nicely from their paper counter parts.

Nope, the easiest one for that purpose would actually be MATLAB (or octave, for that matter). If you want decent O-O with that, you can also use PyLab. Anyone who needs FORTRAN for whatever reason down the road can easily pick it up having been exposed to any of the above, but it should not be taught as a first programming language.

Except I'm pretty sure that there are modern languages and libraries that can handle this without Fortran. I don't have much experience with it myself, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly what MATLAB is for, for one.

I've found that I can substantially reduce VHDL development time using Xilinx System Generator and its toolbox for Matlab's Simulink . Writing VHDL graphically makes understanding and testing substantially easier (for me, at least).

It has hand-coded VHDL equivalents for each Simulink function. Generate testbenches, hardware in the loop, etc. You can merge it directly with your own code by writing a simple high level wrapper. It interfaces easily with Chipscope as well (generates files to label each of your inputs).

The problem is that people have come to expect features that can't be easily delivered without a general purpose OS, and the issues that come with that are pretty much invisible to anyone who would be likely to scream about it, including the FDA. Users get used to periodic failures and work around them, just like desktop users do.

We can't expect Mr. Surgeon, who's been rebooting his Wintel boxen for two decades, who thinks it's "natural" for computers to get a "virus" to scream about it.

However, the physicians, engineers and computer people who make the devices and softwares should display a higher standard. IMHO, for instance, it's unacceptable to just "hack away" at C/C++ in such systems. At the very least some formal methods should be applied. Safe(r) languages, like SPARKAda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)
Code analyzers with formal theory behind them, such as PolySpace
http://www.mathworks.com/products/polyspace/index.html
Etc.
If a system needs rebooting in the middle of surgery, than it's criminal.
There's cultural barrier against safer languages and formal methods and we need to overcome it.

If this was the case, how do you explain the fact that independent of some large-scale environmental insults which left temporary reductions in species there has generally been ever increasing numbers of species filling ever greater numbers of evolutionary niches.

How do I explain this "fact" ? First of all your "fact" is wrong. One might notice how fast non-researched facts get quoted when they fit political opinion on slashdot.

But I will refute your fantasy (it's not a fact) simply by stating that evolution increases the number of species for a very long time. It will start slowing down once you get near the "natural selection" part really kicking in. Then you will get a mass-dieoff massively reducing the number of independant species, which will leave a vacuum for the remaining "more fit" species to fill up. After the dieoff less species will be left.

So your fact predicts a monotonously increasing number of species. I predict regular mass-dieoffs. We're being scientific here, so let's look up what happened in reality :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

Oops, seems your fact is not a fact at all, but rather something you made up to support your political view.

Here's a graph of "biodiversity" :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_biodiversity_blank_01.png

Note the regular cliffs, with several distinct cliffs eliminating over 50% of all species alive.

Note also the exponential slope upwards (the "trendline"). It doesn't take a genius to understand that this cannot last. That is because evolution is still an accelerating process, that's improving species at ever-increasing rates (note that the wikipedia article states that the mass-extinction events are a necessity for this process, or at the least very useful). But once it gets close to optimality you will see the number of species drop of drastically.

Take a genetic algorithm and observe what happens :

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fx_files/15164/20/happyCurve.png

Clearly we are on the slope in the lower left corner, meaning that, currently, huge "fitness variations" are "allowed" (do not immediately result in an extinction), but the lowest survivable bound on efficiency is rapidly ramping upwards. Today, you can be half as efficient as another human being and nobody cares (though there are limits, even today. The excessive cost of some treatments is already moving : "welfare" states prohibit those (life-saving) treatments, e.g. holland. Other nations, like America, are restricting them to richer individuals due to market forces, but at least they're not illegal. So if you're really ill, at least in America you get a chance, whereas in Europe many diseases are death senteces, point). Within 100.000 years 10% less fit than the best adapted human being will be a death sentence. Within a few million years 0.1% less fit than the optimal human being will be a death sentence.

Pretty soon (meaning "at best another 100.000 years from now") many species will start failing to improve themselves fast enough, meaning they will be quickly drowned out by species that reproduce faster, if they're lucky enough to not outright starve to death.

And your other "fact" is also ... equally false :

Granted, humans are now doing a bang-up job of wiping them out, but we will either learn how to stop doing that, and thus su

Note again, how this obvious lie is perfectly in line with your political viewpoint, and blatantly contradicts science. You expect this to somehow not matter, since you present your political viewpoint (which is less realistic than that of the average creationist I might add) as fact.

Let's look at the same graph

Have you tried plotting in matlab?

http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/index.html?/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/ref/surface.html&http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/ref/f16-6011.html

... by Hagan, Demuth, Beale.

Amazon link

Most of my other favorite books have been posted here already, but no books on this topic have appeared yet.

I will be taking this course next term so I already got this MATLAB based book. I've already been reading it and it definitely deserves all the 5 star ratings it is getting on Amazon.

- as

Mathematica 7 has launched, as noted in Stephen Wolfram's blog post. Among the new features are huge equation typesetting, transcendental roots, and discrete calculus. Looking back at the version 6 discussion, it's perhaps inevitable that comparisons will be made to CAR, CGsuite, GAP, Geogebra, Geometer's Sketchpad, Geometry Expressions, Geonext, LaTeX, Magma, Maple, Matlab, nauty, noneuclid, Pari, Sage, or SeifertView. In other news, the Wolfram Demonstrations project now has over 4000 interactive math demos.

DC lines can be higher voltage than AC lines. one line is +345 kV while the other is -345kV and so you have a 700kV line without all the funny things that start to happen when you have AC lines that are 700+ kV.

higher voltage means more power for the same current or less losses for the same power if you want to look at it that way.

Then also since it is DC there is no capacitance and I think you get further reduction in losses from that.

Here is a model for an AC transmission line showing all the capacitance etc

One language that is being used in the sceintific community right now is CUDA - which runs on a GPU and is C based.

In addition, Fortran to C tools have been around for some years. To say that Fortran is the only scientific language is BS. R, S Plus, Octave, matlab, perl and CUDA to name a few. Taking R as an example - it provides an code interface that allows you to write optimised C/C++ routines and utilise those in the language itself.

Here's a photo of the robot in action.

That wouldn't work, because if you write something in a wiki, it's not a publication. But textbook you can add as a publication and you are rewarded for publications in academia.

It's sad, really. Wikis would be very efficient way to do research, but they are not used at all. And contests like http://www.mathworks.com/contest/ show that even Wiki-style contribution can be measured.

Straight-up UML seems to be a bad match for most embedded systems - embedded systems tend to be built on procedural design principles, and matching them to object-oriented principles is often an exercise in frustration. Bruce Powell Douglas ( Doing Hard Time , Real Time UML ) seems to have the best handle on which core diagram types make sense for most of the embedded systems out there - I can't recommend his work highly enough.

There is no definitive diagram standard for the embedded systems industry - the industry is still trying things out. In my corner of aerospace, Matlab Simulink is rapidly becoming our de facto standard for low-level algorithm requirements and design, with Rhapsody UML diagrams used everywhere else.

Whatever you decide on, make sure it is a technology that will be around when you need to re-visit your code. Many legacy programs are littered with the remnants of the diagrams from the SASD movement (structured analysis, structured design) which paved the way to UML. If you need to maintain your diagram system in-house, that's fine - the only reason I see people gravitating towards UML-type diagrams is the warm fuzzy feeling that UML is a well-documented diagram system that will be understood in two decades' time.

Don't forget Polyspace, which I personally have never used - but I would love to. Polyspace is a Standard ML (a higher-order functional programming language) success story, because it relies heavily on the SML MLton compiler. Another thing that makes it a success story is the fact the Mathworks (makers of Matlab) bought it.

The C/C++ version does MISRA-C (the C used in the automotive industry) too.

There's also a version for Ada, of course.

Don't forget Polyspace, which I personally have never used - but I would love to. Polyspace is a Standard ML (a higher-order functional programming language) success story, because it relies heavily on the SML MLton compiler. Another thing that makes it a success story is the fact the Mathworks (makers of Matlab) bought it.

The C/C++ version does MISRA-C (the C used in the automotive industry) too.

There's also a version for Ada, of course.

Let us understand something. There is a free (public domain) set of software that does this very thing. This library is basically a reimplementation of some the same APIs that optimizes it for the AMD processor. Note that Intel has a similar offering already called Intel Math Kernel Library. The APL has always been a free download for evaluation purposes. Now, companies like The Mathworks can use the library for free.

Kid you may, but Mathematica is a computer algebra system, which means its good at manipulating symbolic mathematics.

the first 'hacking' started just after the contest went into daylight, when Hannes Naude was able to clear the beam count via use of a regexp. This started a whole different 'contest' for some of the competitors, who were able to find some very ingenious methods for either returning information from the test suite or crashing the queue. Understanding these attempts can be very educational, and thus I've listed many of them below...

If Mathworks stopped screwing around with license restrictions, that are even worse than Wolfram

Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 11:14:42 -0400 Subject: Re: Case ID: ****** other

This is in response to Case ID: ******

Dear ******,

Thank you for the additional information, unfortunately, MATLAB Student Version is only available for the Windows platform for our International customers.

For more information about the Student Version please visit us online at: http://www.mathworks.com/products/studentversion/

Sincerely,

/Removed/

I call bullshit. Check out the price list, which I have only picked items that make sense for tasks that I do regularly (and hence this is not too broad of a scope):

The bare minimum for signal processing stuff:
MATLAB: $1900
Simulink: $3000
Signal Processing: $800
Signal Processing Blockset: $1000
Subtotal: $6,700

A few more helpful tools that almost every engineer can make use of, not very extravagant:

Control System Toolbox: $1000
Filter Design Toolbox: $1000
Subtotal now: $8,700

I do a lot of RF comms stuff, so the following are very useful for me:

Communications Toolbox: $1000
Communications Blockset: $1000
RF Blockset: $2000
RF Toolbox: $1000
Subtotal now: $13,700

Implementing algorithms in the real world almost always involves fixed-point computation, so:

Simulink Fixed Point: $1000
Fixed-Point Toolbox: $1000

Grand total: $15,700

In fact, if you look at the MathWorks product listing for each category:

MATLAB CATEGORIES:
Math & Optimization: $4,100
Statistics & Data Analysis: $9,800
Control System Design and Analysis: $6,700
Signal Processing and Communications: $7,800
Image Processing: $2,900
Test & Measurement: $4,900
Computational Biology: $4,000
Financial Modeling and Analysis: $5,500
Application Deployment: $5,200
Application Deployment Targets: $12,000 (.NET, Excel, and Java each are $4k)
Database Connectivity and Reporting: $1,500

SIMULINK CATEGORIES:
Fixed-point Modeling: $1,000
Event-based Modeling: $5,800
Physical Modeling: $11,000
Simulation Graphics: $1,700
Control System Design and Analysis: $4,000
Signal Processing and Communications: $5,000
Code Generation: $30,300
PC-Based Rapid Control Prototyping and HIL: $10,000
Embedded Targets: $12,000 (Each processor is $3k apiece)
Verification, Validation, and Testing: $9,000

Find their product price list here:
http://www.mathworks.com/store/default.do

And you can add up what they recommend for signal processing applications yourself (Hint: just getting the recommended Matlab, Simulink, and Real-Time Workshop is $12,400.)
http://www.mathworks.com/applications/dsp_comm/products.html

They have recommendations for other fields of R&D also if you want to look.

Wow, I can't see how ANYONE could POSSIBLY rack up a $15k MathWorks bill. My educated guess is that you are not a moron, but that you are uninformed about more than just the moron status of this guy's "math guy." Maybe you got a very nice academic discount. Maybe you just got Matlab and a couple of toolboxes. But that's not the situation a lot of folks face when they actually want to accomplish something with Matlab/Simulink.

I call bullshit. Check out the price list, which I have only picked items that make sense for tasks that I do regularly (and hence this is not too broad of a scope):

The bare minimum for signal processing stuff:
MATLAB: $1900
Simulink: $3000
Signal Processing: $800
Signal Processing Blockset: $1000
Subtotal: $6,700

A few more helpful tools that almost every engineer can make use of, not very extravagant:

Control System Toolbox: $1000
Filter Design Toolbox: $1000
Subtotal now: $8,700

I do a lot of RF comms stuff, so the following are very useful for me:

Communications Toolbox: $1000
Communications Blockset: $1000
RF Blockset: $2000
RF Toolbox: $1000
Subtotal now: $13,700

Implementing algorithms in the real world almost always involves fixed-point computation, so:

Simulink Fixed Point: $1000
Fixed-Point Toolbox: $1000

Grand total: $15,700

In fact, if you look at the MathWorks product listing for each category:

MATLAB CATEGORIES:
Math & Optimization: $4,100
Statistics & Data Analysis: $9,800
Control System Design and Analysis: $6,700
Signal Processing and Communications: $7,800
Image Processing: $2,900
Test & Measurement: $4,900
Computational Biology: $4,000
Financial Modeling and Analysis: $5,500
Application Deployment: $5,200
Application Deployment Targets: $12,000 (.NET, Excel, and Java each are $4k)
Database Connectivity and Reporting: $1,500

SIMULINK CATEGORIES:
Fixed-point Modeling: $1,000
Event-based Modeling: $5,800
Physical Modeling: $11,000
Simulation Graphics: $1,700
Control System Design and Analysis: $4,000
Signal Processing and Communications: $5,000
Code Generation: $30,300
PC-Based Rapid Control Prototyping and HIL: $10,000
Embedded Targets: $12,000 (Each processor is $3k apiece)
Verification, Validation, and Testing: $9,000

Find their product price list here:
http://www.mathworks.com/store/default.do

And you can add up what they recommend for signal processing applications yourself (Hint: just getting the recommended Matlab, Simulink, and Real-Time Workshop is $12,400.)
http://www.mathworks.com/applications/dsp_comm/products.html

They have recommendations for other fields of R&D also if you want to look.

Wow, I can't see how ANYONE could POSSIBLY rack up a $15k MathWorks bill. My educated guess is that you are not a moron, but that you are uninformed about more than just the moron status of this guy's "math guy." Maybe you got a very nice academic discount. Maybe you just got Matlab and a couple of toolboxes. But that's not the situation a lot of folks face when they actually want to accomplish something with Matlab/Simulink.

One of the reasons I haven't moved my students completely to Scilab or Octave is an excellent implementation of 802.11 in Matlab. It uses a bunch of toolkits and blocksets. I'm not even thinking of translating it.
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=3540&objectType=FILE

I wonder how many other such applications there are.

The Core line of processors is based on the Pentium M, which was developed in Isreal.

One of these skills is keyboarding, and honestly, how many typing training packages have you seen on 'nix? Or even Mac?

That is a valid point. The point should not mean every computer capible of running Windows needs a copy. How many copies of KStars have you seen in the science lab? There is no reason to have every computer a clone of each other. A keyboarding class is OK to license some machines to run educational software. The license should not exclude other very fine educational software simply because it is not Open Source. Schools having kids play Where in the world is Carman and The Oregon Trail because it might have some valid history or geography is no replacement for real educational software, much of which does not run on Windows.

There is a place for Kickstart software. There is also a place for Linux chemestry, astronomy and physics software.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/genchemlab/
http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~noel/linux4chemistry/
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004APS..MARW38008R
http://www.mathlab.cornell.edu/support/m434_support/gap_info/
http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/whatsnew.html
http://edu.kde.org/kstars/
http://edu.kde.org/

Some of the above can run on Windows, but it is not a requirement. The valid complaint is the requirement to license all Windows capible machines, even those without Windows, or even needing Windows. It's like getting a pre-paid Texaco credit card for your kid's car and they require you to buy a Texaco license for any hardware you have that is capible of burning gasoline including your weed eater, hedge trimmer, chain saw, your boat, and all other cars. Maybe you want to run Flex Fuel on your PT Cruiser.

Ob. plug for FOSS software. After having used Matlab in school, I just started using Octave. I was pleasantly surprised by how compatible the two are. In fact, the GNU Octave developers actively strive to make their updates follow updates to Matlab, so that the two can be as drop-in compatible as possible.

Nice for people who want a powerful but easy-to-use calculation package without going through the hassle of trying to buy Matlab --heck, to even find out what the actual price is on that web site, you have to log in!

Of course, a slide rule is also Free and Open Source. I remember finding the idea of a slide rule being very cool, and making my own out of two strips of cardboard by drawing marks according to logarithms.

• Maya
• ModelSim
• MatLab
• MentorGraphics
• Cadence

Except for cosd, sind and tand And I was always told that engineers came up with gradians, but I have never seen them being used in any of my engineering classes.

Except for cosd, sind and tand And I was always told that engineers came up with gradians, but I have never seen them being used in any of my engineering classes.

you are given the task of preparing for an upcoming election in the state of Rectanglia. As the director of redistricting, your job is to divide the state into N districts of equal population. Therefore, given a matrix A in which each element corresponds to the population in a given square mile, return a matrix B that indicates which voting district each square mile belongs in.