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GNU Octave Gets a GUI
jones_supa writes "GNU Octave — the open source numerical computation suite compatible with MATLAB — is doing very well. The new 3.8 release is a big change, as it brings a graphical user interface, a feature which has long been requested by users. It is peppered with OpenGL acceleration and uses the super fast FLTK toolkit for widgets. The CLI interface still remains available and GNUplot is used as a fallback in cases where OpenGL or FLTK support is not available. Other changes to Octave 3.8 are support for nested functions with scoping rules, limited support for named exceptions, new regular expressions, a TeX parser for the FLTK toolkit, overhauls to many of the m-files, function rewrites, and numerous other changes and bug fixes."
Most of those jobs are for "application engineers" and not developers. An application engineer is a little like tech support and a little like sales. They will work closely with existing customers to make Matlab work for their customers application and they'll also try to upsell new features.
Octave wouldn't have the same type of support structure but might have similar numbers of man power contributing to the development.
Whenever there's a comparison between an open source product and a proprietary somebody always brings up the statement that "GIMP" is inferior to Photoshop like it's the "incontestable, revealed by Jesus Christ himself, truth" without *any* kind of supporting evidence.
The Toe, I don't hold you personally accountable for repeating what's become a cultural FUD meme, but I do feel that somebody has got to set the record straight here.
I would not consider myself an expert on image manipulation software, but I would consider myself competent enough to detect the stench of bullshit when it's spoken. I would very much like to see someone provide a valid metric for comparing Photoshop vs. GIMP and then proceed to provide real, valid data that either demonstrates that GIMP really is "inferior" to Photoshop or there's no real difference or that comparing the 2 products is inappropriate because they have different uses.
Examples of bullshit metrics would be something like "has to support Photoshop plugins", or "has to have an interface like Photoshop" because that's not comparing capability, but comparing preference.
I would not consider myself an expert on image manipulation software, but I would consider myself competent enough to detect the stench of bullshit when it's spoken. I would very much like to see someone provide a valid metric for comparing Photoshop vs. GIMP..
Good luck with that quest.
Just before Christmas, I did some graphics work for a customer, and most of the 'grunt' work was dome in Gimp (and yes, I have fully licensed copies of CS4 and CS5 at my disposal).
It's just another tool, and I use it when I need it. (I know of other 'professional' graphics artists who still use PSP)
(Just for completeness, the final output design for this project was generated via Coreldraw X5).
Error: Divide by zero.
Does not compute.
In a perfect world where piracy is zero, all people who will not pay for Photoshop are forced to use GIMP and other alternatives, or just stay out of the race. The problem in our world is few people see piracy as a problem and make statements such as this as if Adobe's boxes were all marked "MSRP: $0" instead of $600 or $1000 for the non-student versions. Just skip this post if you advocate otherwise. I don't want your reasons.
If you basically have no barriers to acquiring Photoshop, then sadly there's no reason to "invest" on the less developed product, even if it is ALSO free.
Adobe and Microsoft both know that piracy tends to drive adoption out of increased eyeballs on the de-facto tools. This hurts the number of developers who would otherwise improve Gimp out of sheer need. We have Linux today because someone in the nineties wanted a free alternative. Someone like that living in today's pirate friendly world would have few reasons to bother working with others, when he can just shut up and torrent multi-thousand dollar software.
Does all that free work up on deviantart get made with paid copies of Photoshop, especially for broke amateurs contributing from humble third-world countries? nobody there buys personal software.
If you're one of us who won't pirate, you'll find the problem. Just by the power of numbers, intentional or unknowing free-loaders *dictate* practices for everyone. It's free for them to send you their work in PSD format, or ppt and docx for Windows office work, so they'll do it and assume you have the reader for free on your machine.
Not so much a problem for geeks who know of Openoffice, Gimp or the free converters online, but things get to the point where you have random computer illiterate friends expecting you to have those installed on your mother's machine to read some random forward, and think YOU are the one with the problem for not having pirated. But most of them are clueless that their PC is "fine" because someone else skirted paying hundreds of dollars for Office and other software. They just assume all PC's can read all files and that yours is broken. They're driving up the pressure for others to pay for Office and Photoshop. More realistically, it's just more pressure to pirate!
We all wish Mathworks/MatLab well. I used it at university and I use it at work. I use Octave at home (and sometimes at work). Octave is good for getting answers, not so good at graphing.
Are they competitors? Yes. Is there room for both? Yes.
Regarding Gimp vs Photoshop: I've never used photoshop (because of price) but I use Gimp all the time. The price is right and the functionality is there. I will never care about Photoshop because I'm not an artist. I think the same is true for Octave, many people have a light simulation or similar and Octave is good and available.
I'm a bit surprised to find that, 60 comments in, nobody's yet suggested R , e.g. http://cran.r-project.org/ as an alternative. There are several different GUIs available for R (Rstudio, Rcommander, Rjava,...), it's 100% opensource, and frankly most of us R users find the syntax and flexibility to be far better than MatLab. And the graphics have to be seen to be believed. You can do anything and then some.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw