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KDE Conquers Astrophysics With Kst

Posted by simoniker on from the winner-is-you dept.

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."

10 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Lets not let this go to our heads by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The author used Linux/KDE because that is what he was familiar with when he developed it. Its not suprising since universities are very UNIX centric. But that doesn't necessarily mean KDE is better suited for this type of application. In my opinion, no operating system/window manager will really have any significant advantages since the bulk of the work is number crunching. It could of easily been done in Win32.

    1. Re:Lets not let this go to our heads by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Unix systems have had a historical advantage in scientific computation. Netterfield mentioned that he had first used XForms, looked at gtk+, felt queasy and decided to use KDE instead.
      As Kst is primarily a plotter of data, his choice of graphics toolkit is of some importance.

  2. I'm sure many will ask this... by ZuperDee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why didn't the article headline read, "KDE Konquers Astrophysicists with Kst?"

    On a more serious note: This question wouldn't arise if KDE people didn't insist on prefixing EVERYTHING with "K." Of course, same goes for GNOME folks prefixing everything with "G." Why is this necessary?

    1. Re:I'm sure many will ask this... by zapp · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This has all been gone over before, but it isn't new to kde/gnome.

      X*, win* go back farther probably.

      I think it's both a style thing (recognizable 'gAIM, on that must be AIM for gnome'), and also it makes it easy to tell what works with what. xemacs clearly is the X version of emacs. winamp clearly doesn't work on linux or mac, and konquerer clearly doesn't work on gnome.

      --
      no comment
    2. Re:I'm sure many will ask this... by Azureflare · · Score: 4, Interesting
      So we know easily what WM libraries a package requires without looking at the depends.

      Personally I don't like it when packages don't prepend their names with k or g if they are specifically for KDE or Gnome. It's annoying when you try to install it and it says it wants to install gnome libraries, or KDE libraries (whichever WM libraries you don't like installing, maybe both if you're limited on HD space)

      It's consistent, and it works. It may seem a bit lame sometimes, but it makes things really easy for me (And others).

      Also from an ease of use standpoint, it makes it easy to know what to expect from a package. "Oh, that has a k before it, that means I'll be seeing KDE themes on that app if I'm running XFce."

      Sure, we should probably have a unified theme so things are pretty seamless and you can't tell if something is for KDE or Gnome (or more specifically, using qt or gtk). But we're not there yet, and it would be really confusing if we didn't keep things the way they are.

      I think eventually a distro will successfully make it possible for all apps to look similar to each other in all WM, and I think it would be a good thing to do that.

  3. Re:An interesting take on the GPL by aeoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    For the uninformed ones like me, why exactly are you required to sign an NDA? Isn't science based on sharing information? What am I missing here? How can a researcher be told how to run their research? I don't understand where that power comes from.

  4. Re:An interesting take on the GPL by pyite · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Can't do research without money (for the most part). Can't get published unless you have credibility. Can't have credibility unless you have peer review. Can't have peer review unless you have peers. Can't have peers unless you're at a University from which you get funded.

    --

    "Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman

  5. Re:Funding by updog · · Score: 3, Interesting
    You may be trolling, but that is an interesting question - there are definitely arguments for releasing it as BSD licensed. I don't agree at all with the moderators for modding the comment as Flamebait.

    Here's one reason to make it GPL - it makes financial sense. Since they have invested money and time into this project, they should strive to maximize their potential return.

    By making it GPL, their initial investment can be improved upon by anyone, and the Kst project can reap the benifits.

  6. Gnuplot? by bsd4me · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Can anyone comment on this compared with Gnuplot?

    LaTeX and Gnuplot got me through college without having to pay for laser printing papers (the laser printers on the unix machines were free, but the ones on the PCs and Macs were a nickel a page.).

    --

    (S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))

  7. Re:Ever since Igor by infolib · · Score: 2, Interesting

    However, making advanced graphs and plots with ROOT requires a whomping manual

    Why not try R? There's not much point and click, but the command are quite ok, and as you can see from their page it generates some VERY good-looking graphs. Its GPL'ed :-)

    --
    Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.