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KDE Conquers Astrophysics With Kst
Telex4 writes "The Free Software community is constantly inundated with interesting new projects, but occasionally something crops up which is really special. Kst is just such a project. Started by Barth Netterfield, an astrophysicist, as a personal project to plot data from his experiments, it has now taken on a life of its own, being used in numerous academic projects, and finding funding from several government agencies. Intrigued by this project's success, and with a little prod from co-developer George Staikos, I interviewed Barth and George about kst, Free Software and physics."
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The same could be said for a lot of Windows applications using the Win prefix and Mac OS X apps using the i prefix.
I'm one of the grad students that uses kst every day for analyzing data for the Boomerang experiment.
;-)
Try using Grace to plot 1e6 data samples from 16 different sources in real time as it is acquired. Grace has some nice math features, but I believe that within the next year most of these will be surpassed by the features of kst.
Sometimes it's easier to build a new house that renovate an old one
You mean like your tax-funded congress, your tax-funded police department, or your tax-funded internal revenue service?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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and also it makes it easy to tell what works with what. xemacs clearly is the X version of emacs.
That's a perfect example of what is wrong with this approach. The difference between emacs and xemacs has nothing to do with X; yet everybody seems to think so. Both of them work fine under X. Xemacs just forked off ages ago because of disagreements with RMS.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
How about because they chose Qt as the toolkit because it makes development easier, and Qt is GPL licensed, so derivatives have to be?
Dumbass.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
In fact, I've heard some math guys voice the opinion that releasing your source code is just a waste. It takes a significant time investment on your part to get it all packaged up, perhaps cleaning up the code some, and then to answer questions people have about it etc. And when it comes time for tenure review, they don't ask you how much source code you released.
This makes absolute sense, if the goal in academia is the same as it is in corporate life: to make the most money and to be at the top of the food chain. On the one hand, people go into science claiming they're not in it for the money (and usually, there *isn't* that much money in it), but will hoard knowledge and backstab viciously to increase their position in the hierarchy. Why bother? They're just trading one type of greed for another.
I don't want to come off sounding completely naive, but I don't think cleaning code up, packaging it, sharing it with the world and answering questions is a waste of time. Similarly, it makes me sad that some professors view courses and lectures as an burdensome part of their job requirement.
No, all that matters is how many journals you published in. So while you were busy cleaning up your source code for release, fixing non-critical bugs and adding non-essential features, you could have been working on the next publication instead.
This really drives me nuts. It's the tragedy of the commons, on a smaller scale. Don't spend time teaching others when you could be advancing your own status. Chances are someone else will choose not to, and get ahead of you! Why help other people when you can put that energy into your own work? Hell, why do we even teach grad students? Before you know it, they have degrees and are competition! So be sure not to teach your Ph.D. students too much. And take their papers and put your name on them. And make sure your undergraduate lectures are boring as hell. That will slow them down.
As for the volume of papers, yes, "publish or perish." Yes, publication is incredibly important in science, and you'll fall flat on your ass if you don't make it a top priority. But the point is to share knowledge as well as get your name in print. Which means that the papers you write should actually SAY something. I think there's something seriously wrong with a system that rewards professorial diva-ism and 1-month publication intervals over sharing knowledge. Maybe this is why we now have hundreds of boring, poorly-written, dubiously constructed papers pouring out of every journal with a logo and a printing press. I'm not doing that much work right now and even so I can barely keep up with it. I don't even want to think about how many the peer reviewers chucked out before publication. Unless you actually have something interesting to say, it's just wasted time.
Hopefully, if the current trend keeps up, people will eventually stop evaluating by number of publications and start looking at their contents and impact. And who knows, maybe they'll even look at other things too.
WOW!
Gimp is now a Gnome program? I thought it only used gtk.