I would say that none of them are intellectuals either. In particular, the "liberal arts" (classics, literature, philosophy, history, social sciences) lost touch with intellectual life long ago and have turned into political parties and social clubs.
As an intellectual, I'm anti-intellectual, in the sense that I take nobody's word for granted, even if they are supposed to be a "recognized expert". Either explain your reasoning or go away.
Why do you think it would be madness? When its "firmware" gets damaged, you can take it to the Apple Store to be "repaired". Also, they might have some way of letting you reinstall over the Internet. I doubt it makes a big difference in the market. When they need to reinstall, most people already seem to take their machines to the store or buy a new one.
If you are willing to give a company that much control, you might as well just switch to Google's and other cloud services: they do what Apple is trying to do for much less money and with much less hassle.
Local police who are locally funded and controlled by local officials can only go so far before the other local citizens take their power and wealth away and replace them with better police with better, less-abusive policies.
And this astounding theory is based on... what? Local police can become locally corrupt and start doing the bidding of local politicians and local wealthy people. And they have done that.
When law enforcement gets a large amount of funding, receive orders, and follow policies and directives from a large central government, then local law enforcement loses accountability to their local populations.
Historically, it's the federal government that has curbed corruption and excesses in local and state police.
In this case, you don't seriously believe that anybody would lift a finger locally to get these people their camera phone back.
The fact that Apple can do basic tests to make sure your post-to-twitter app doesn't use 100% CPU all the time is a good thing in my book.
Apps that use 100% CPU all the time quickly get downrated and disappear in the market; "app X makes my phone slow" doesn't require a degree in computer science to grasp.
A much bigger concern should be whether your app posts your personal information to some phishing site, and iOS is a total failure in that regard: the OS can't protect you, Apple's review doesn't catch even gross violations, and end users won't notice and won't be able to report it. Android, in contrast, enforces permissions against applications, so you can be sure that only apps you trust actually access sensitive information.
Google got it right with Android. Apple got it wrong: they are reducing a nuisance (the occasional misbehaving app) but restricting functionality greatly and not guaranteeing security.
So you are a highly experienced IT geek and you find iPhone easy to use. Well, that's not surprising.
iPhone: install iTunes, sign up for Apple account, connect iPhone, sync, deal with firmware upgrades in iPhone, then regularly sync and backup, remembering not to disconnect prematurely
Android: enter Google account (new or existing)
Which one is easier to use? Most people don't even know how to install software on their computers, let alone understand syncing. Don't even get me started on Apple's idiotic notification system that makes you click through dozens of alerts and notifications and just won't stop.
Do some apps make Android slow? Sure; it's a fully multitasking OS. But that's a concept people grasp easily: "application X makes my phone slow, I'm just going to uninstall it".
but they may not do as well as they envisioned until they get some coherency in their OS and application development.
It's quite coherent. More importantly, it's better designed, easier to program, easier to use, more secure, and more functional than iOS.
Any more such brilliant insights, Mr. Woz? And who do you suggest Apple should try to rip-off this time to get the technology?
Of course, if Apple's foray into handwriting is any indication, Apple will "solve" this problem by having us speak in Morse code, just like they didn't manage to get a decent handwriting system together.
No, more likely the UK would itself charge and convict you, since UK laws are at least as draconian; no need to extradite you. Theses kinds of laws are massive cases of policy laundering. Britain (and Europe) are at least as much at fault here as the US.
Take responsibility for your own country instead of believing the propaganda that this is all America's fault.
The problem with Windows is that instead of getting rid of old stuff, Microsoft just piles up on top of it. So, next to the simple sleek interface, there is an old Windows 7 screen, and inside that are even older layers of Windows.
Can you imagine the mess it's going to be to talk someone through getting to the old Windows 95-style network configuration dialog box, which you doubtlessly will still need?
You find similar crap in the file system: there is the directory tree, then there is its localized variant of it, and then there is the rearranged tree that you get to see in the file manager.
No, Apple and Google have it right: create specialized versions of their operating systems for different form factors and clean out the crap. And Linux, of course, just got most of this right the first time around: the file system layout doesn't change haphazardly and window management is factored such that regular apps work fine in a tiling window manager as well as many other kinds of window management styles.
This doesn't change the actual point, that the universities are not Israel, of course.
Referring to the Israeli universities and institutions involved in this as "Israel" is an instance of metonymy; it is appropriate and correct. It obviously does not refer to the state of Israel (since that wouldn't make any sense in this context). I chose it both because the actual thing being referred to is a cumbersome phrase, and to emphasize the connection with Israel, since that is the relevant attribute of these institutions in this context.
Shipud's misinterpretation and self-righteous indignation is just another indication of the inability of Israelis and Palestinians even to engage in normal conversation about their situation anymore.
I am pretty sure it is quite uncommon that organizers require you to go back to country of origin after the engagement is over
Organizers frequently only pay for a simple round-trip ticket, and some have "no side trip rules".
He should have negotiated fee for giving talks like 1k/hour and pay for his trip himself and not be restricted in his movements.
How does that solve anything? The Palestinians could have uninvited him all the same.
Besides, you're missing the bigger picture here. This is not a symmetric situation. The Palestinians are incredibly poor compared to the Israelis. It's an embarrassment for any Israeli institution to attempt to piggy-back a free side-trip onto a trip paid for by the Palestinians. It's not a question of "rights" or "obligations", it's a question of basic decency and common sense, in particular for a group of professionals that purport to be part of an international community that supposedly transcends political boundaries.
It would also be outrageous is Israel is doing it, which it isn't. I would ask you to find citations for that ever happening.
Citations? Are you kidding? What rock are you living under? The Palestinians have no control over international travel; Israel controls who goes in and who comes out.
And what is this about "Israel paying"? When a scientist is invited to speak at an academic institution the institution is paying. There is zero government involvement.
Yes, that's what "Israel paying" means in this context: Israeli academic institutions should pay for it.
At most I ask my paying hosts for accurate dates, telling them I will be travelling more. I have never encountered any kind of objection to that, nor a request to share the primary travel venue. Of course, I do not ask for extra travel or Room & Board for the "side" travels.
Many companies and universities that reimburse trips require a simple round trip ticket.
Again what is "Israel" the university of Tel Aviv?
Whatever Israeli universities or academic institutions are involved in this, obviously.
What is wrong with you people? Are you so blinded by your hatred for the Palestinians that even simple English sentences become too difficult to parse and understand for you? Has demagoguery become such a way of life for you that you deliberately misinterpret whatever statement anybody makes?
Short term, this kind of patent trolling is a nuisance. Long term, it spells doom for Microsoft.
$5/handset isn't going to make Microsoft wealthy, and as Microsoft products keep failing in the market and the stock stagnates, fewer and fewer people will want to work there, drying up the patent pipeline.
Stallman expects the rest of us to live some live of software purity, never compromising on closed software,
Free software is about receiving source code along with software and being able to modify and redistribute the software. There is nothing inconsistent about Stallman's behavior: you can get paid for software, you can create proprietary software, etc. if you like. Some of your business models may not work with free software, but that's not Stallman's intent, that's just a consequence.
Yet here is he, quite prepared to give into bullying terms when it suits him.
The Palestinians are paying for the trip and they get to set the conditions they pay for; that's the way all invited talks work. "No side trips" is a common condition for invited talks.
What's actually going on is that Israel is forcing foreign scientists wanting to visit the Palestinian territories to travel through Israel, and then saying "oh, we made you come here, why don't you also give some lectures for free". Imagine the US used military force to keep international planes from landing in Canada and then asked foreign scientists diverted through the US to also give free talks in the US; it would be quite outrageous.
The situation is made even worse because the Palestinians are so poor compared to Israel. For Israeli universities to piggy-back on a trip paid for by the Palestinians ought to be a huge embarrassment for Israel.
The obvious thing would be for Israel to pay for the entire trip, including the trip to the Palestinian territories. That would be the obvious, right and peaceful thing to do. Apparently, Israel isn't interested in that.
I hope Israel will turn around and do the right thing.
It's interesting that you find that Jacket's CONV2 doesn't detect separability, because the guy who runs the company claimed that it did; he was talking about all the "advanced algorithms" that CONV2 contains.
Of course, GPU computing speeds up convolutions; that's what GPUs were designed to do. The questions we have been discussing are the following.
First, is GPU cost-effective for most applications right now and are people going to see the speedups they hope for? In my experience, the answer is "no", because most applications need to do a lot more than convolutions and speedup on other operations is much less. GPU computing is tricky enough that there is a lot more to worry about than whether one inner loop runs faster on the GPU.
Second, should you be using MATLAB for this? The answer there is "no" as well: MATLAB does some things well, but overall it's a badly designed language and environment. There are much better choices available, and many of them open source and with good support for GPU computing.
Third, we were talking about who was taking the lead and who was following, with the Jacket CEO trying to portray his company as leading the way and unpaid open source developers eventually copying their stuff. That is totally wrong. This style of computing was developed in academia long ago. There have been tons of implementations, both commercial and open source, over the years. Jacket is filling one particular market niche for one particular platform.
Having said all that, it sounds to me that Jacket is probably the best GPU computing solution for MATLAB and probably better than anything MATLAB provides. I just don't think that means all that much: most people likely won't see much of a real-world speedup from it, and most people would be far better off kicking the MATLAB habit altogether and moving on to better platforms, open source or otherwise.
So? For you to present benchmarks of a CONV2 that detects separability against the built-in CONV2 that explicitly does not use separability is dishonest, because much of the speedup you measure has nothing to do with GPU computing.
CONV2 (i.e. convolutions) are very useful in many applications
Your error is with the "i.e." part. Convolutions are very useful, but CONV2 is almost never the right function to call. Most convolutions are separable. Those that aren't can usually be made separable. If you're really stuck with a non-separable large 2D convolution, you can use 2D FFT in some cases. And if you have a non-separable small 2D convolution, there's usually some other known trick you can use to speed it up. Anybody who has any business working with image processing should know these things; it doesn't take an "expert".
Expert convolutions on the GPU (that work well for both separable/non-separable cases, arbitrary input matrix sizes, and arbitrary kernel sizes) are extremely difficult
CONV2 in Matlab is defined to use "straightforward convolution", with no optimization.
If you are benchmarking CONV2 against a GPU implementation that checks for separability and does other optimizations, your benchmarks are a fraud.
You might say at least your customer are getting a good 2D convolution function for their money and they don't need to know the details. But your customers already get optimized 2D convolutions in Matlab (e.g. FILTER2), so they don't need to pay for your code to realize that speedup, they just need to call a different function.
(And please stop referring to 2D signals as "matrices"; 2D signals and matrices are totally different mathematical objects; the name for the common supertype is "array".)
Hand optimization is really tough. Try for instance to beat Jacket's CONV2 (yes, I'm talking about straightup convolutions) by hand.
CONV2 is one of the most trivial cases for GPU programming; if you didn't screw up badly, I can't beat your code, but you couldn't beat mine either.
Jacket is meant to be a luxury as was mentioned elsewhere... providing a faster, better approach to what you could try to reinvent by hand if you had infinite energy.
Most people shouldn't be using GPU programming at all because it isn't going to speed up their programs significantly overall.
Most success stories with GPU programming involve incompetence. For example, someone using CONV2 in their code is going to see a big speedup moving to a GPU, but they shouldn't be using CONV2 to begin with!
Talking about speedups is always a bit slippery because of the sensitivity of the CPU baseline, but very significant speedups (at least an order of magnitude) are definitely possible.
Yes, you can speed up individual algorithms sometimes by an order of magnitude. But that often doesn't help you much with overall program performance, because once you eliminate one bottleneck, another one takes its place. Buying more cores gives you less speedup for each algorithm, but makes it much more likely that you speed up your entire program, and with less programming effort too.
The reality is that it is too stinking hard to build good stuff open source (i.e. where the developers aren't paid)
Most open source developers I know are paid and the stuff they produce has wiped away pretty much anything commercial and proprietary in any area where they have developed it.
The reality is that GPU computing barely makes sense today, and it certainly didn't make sense in 2007. And it may just be another fad, taken over again by general purpose CPUs, just like the last few times.
While GPU computing in MATLAB is too small a niche, M-programming in general is ripe for the open sourcing.
Your idea that things start out as commercial code and then move into open source is backwards. Many Matlab toolboxes started out as open source, and then were gold-plated for the typical Matlab customer.
I would say that open source has a way to go before reaching Matlab's level
The first thing you should do is stop thinking of it as "levels". Matlab has a few packages that you can't easily get for Python, and it has Simulink. There are many other areas where Matlab isn't even remotely close to Python's level. The two are, as the technical term goes, "incomparable".
One of the usual problems with open source which is true here is fragmentation
Well, closed source is even more fragmented! There's Matlab, Mathematica, S, SPSS, PV-Wave, J, and tons of other closed source software, all incompatible! It's a wonder anybody gets anything done with closed source software at all with all that fragmentation!
The second usual problem of open source software is polish. Matlab is more polished and in my opinion has a much better UI than the open alternatives I've used.
You mean its buttons-and-windows disaster that's stuck some time in the 1990's? Come on, what about a decent modern IDE?
Open source programs like many Python libraries may be comprehensively documented, but the documentation is rarely as well organized. Of course the fragmentation comes up here again: some libraries may have excellent documentation, others very poor.
There are tons of shitty, poorly documented Matlab libraries around as well.
So in summary, I like Matlab, and I like open source. But I think Matlab is simpler and easier to get the job done, and that is what professional users care about more than a couple $k in license costs.
Being a "professional" just means you do it for money, it doesn't mean you're competent or good at it. Matlab and its vendor support is a safety blanket for engineers who can't program and developers who don't know anything about computational methods. They don't actually need it, but they are too intellectually lazy to change or learn a different way of doing things; Matlab is their crack.
For a professional user the license costs are not terribly significant, for academic, personal, or consultants, the open alternatives might make more sense.
Oh, academics and consultants are not "professionals"? Wow, so what exalted group of professionals do you fancy yourself to be a part of? Can't be corporate users, because if you were one of those, you'd know that while a few thousand dollars for software licenses for each user isn't going to affect the bottom line, the paperwork would kill you.
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I would say that none of them are intellectuals either. In particular, the "liberal arts" (classics, literature, philosophy, history, social sciences) lost touch with intellectual life long ago and have turned into political parties and social clubs.
As an intellectual, I'm anti-intellectual, in the sense that I take nobody's word for granted, even if they are supposed to be a "recognized expert". Either explain your reasoning or go away.
Nullius in verba.
Why do you think it would be madness? When its "firmware" gets damaged, you can take it to the Apple Store to be "repaired". Also, they might have some way of letting you reinstall over the Internet. I doubt it makes a big difference in the market. When they need to reinstall, most people already seem to take their machines to the store or buy a new one.
If you are willing to give a company that much control, you might as well just switch to Google's and other cloud services: they do what Apple is trying to do for much less money and with much less hassle.
Wow, Apple is seriously behind the curve, as usual. Google and others have been offering "it just works" cloud-syncing for years now.
And we'll have to see whether their iCould service is even usable MobileMe really sucked (I used to subscribe to it and canceled after a few years).
Oh, knowing some people from behind the Iron Curtain, believe me, the US was a lot better, even with Hoover and McCarthy and all that.
And this astounding theory is based on ... what? Local police can become locally corrupt and start doing the bidding of local politicians and local wealthy people. And they have done that.
Historically, it's the federal government that has curbed corruption and excesses in local and state police.
In this case, you don't seriously believe that anybody would lift a finger locally to get these people their camera phone back.
Apps that use 100% CPU all the time quickly get downrated and disappear in the market; "app X makes my phone slow" doesn't require a degree in computer science to grasp.
A much bigger concern should be whether your app posts your personal information to some phishing site, and iOS is a total failure in that regard: the OS can't protect you, Apple's review doesn't catch even gross violations, and end users won't notice and won't be able to report it. Android, in contrast, enforces permissions against applications, so you can be sure that only apps you trust actually access sensitive information.
Google got it right with Android. Apple got it wrong: they are reducing a nuisance (the occasional misbehaving app) but restricting functionality greatly and not guaranteeing security.
So you are a highly experienced IT geek and you find iPhone easy to use. Well, that's not surprising.
iPhone: install iTunes, sign up for Apple account, connect iPhone, sync, deal with firmware upgrades in iPhone, then regularly sync and backup, remembering not to disconnect prematurely
Android: enter Google account (new or existing)
Which one is easier to use? Most people don't even know how to install software on their computers, let alone understand syncing. Don't even get me started on Apple's idiotic notification system that makes you click through dozens of alerts and notifications and just won't stop.
Do some apps make Android slow? Sure; it's a fully multitasking OS. But that's a concept people grasp easily: "application X makes my phone slow, I'm just going to uninstall it".
It's quite coherent. More importantly, it's better designed, easier to program, easier to use, more secure, and more functional than iOS.
Any more such brilliant insights, Mr. Woz? And who do you suggest Apple should try to rip-off this time to get the technology?
Of course, if Apple's foray into handwriting is any indication, Apple will "solve" this problem by having us speak in Morse code, just like they didn't manage to get a decent handwriting system together.
No, more likely the UK would itself charge and convict you, since UK laws are at least as draconian; no need to extradite you. Theses kinds of laws are massive cases of policy laundering. Britain (and Europe) are at least as much at fault here as the US.
Take responsibility for your own country instead of believing the propaganda that this is all America's fault.
Well, since you're from Europe, you're obviously speaking from experience.
The problem with Windows is that instead of getting rid of old stuff, Microsoft just piles up on top of it. So, next to the simple sleek interface, there is an old Windows 7 screen, and inside that are even older layers of Windows.
Can you imagine the mess it's going to be to talk someone through getting to the old Windows 95-style network configuration dialog box, which you doubtlessly will still need?
You find similar crap in the file system: there is the directory tree, then there is its localized variant of it, and then there is the rearranged tree that you get to see in the file manager.
No, Apple and Google have it right: create specialized versions of their operating systems for different form factors and clean out the crap. And Linux, of course, just got most of this right the first time around: the file system layout doesn't change haphazardly and window management is factored such that regular apps work fine in a tiling window manager as well as many other kinds of window management styles.
Referring to the Israeli universities and institutions involved in this as "Israel" is an instance of metonymy; it is appropriate and correct. It obviously does not refer to the state of Israel (since that wouldn't make any sense in this context). I chose it both because the actual thing being referred to is a cumbersome phrase, and to emphasize the connection with Israel, since that is the relevant attribute of these institutions in this context.
Shipud's misinterpretation and self-righteous indignation is just another indication of the inability of Israelis and Palestinians even to engage in normal conversation about their situation anymore.
Organizers frequently only pay for a simple round-trip ticket, and some have "no side trip rules".
How does that solve anything? The Palestinians could have uninvited him all the same.
Besides, you're missing the bigger picture here. This is not a symmetric situation. The Palestinians are incredibly poor compared to the Israelis. It's an embarrassment for any Israeli institution to attempt to piggy-back a free side-trip onto a trip paid for by the Palestinians. It's not a question of "rights" or "obligations", it's a question of basic decency and common sense, in particular for a group of professionals that purport to be part of an international community that supposedly transcends political boundaries.
Citations? Are you kidding? What rock are you living under? The Palestinians have no control over international travel; Israel controls who goes in and who comes out.
Yes, that's what "Israel paying" means in this context: Israeli academic institutions should pay for it.
Many companies and universities that reimburse trips require a simple round trip ticket.
Whatever Israeli universities or academic institutions are involved in this, obviously.
What is wrong with you people? Are you so blinded by your hatred for the Palestinians that even simple English sentences become too difficult to parse and understand for you? Has demagoguery become such a way of life for you that you deliberately misinterpret whatever statement anybody makes?
Short term, this kind of patent trolling is a nuisance. Long term, it spells doom for Microsoft.
$5/handset isn't going to make Microsoft wealthy, and as Microsoft products keep failing in the market and the stock stagnates, fewer and fewer people will want to work there, drying up the patent pipeline.
Free software is about receiving source code along with software and being able to modify and redistribute the software. There is nothing inconsistent about Stallman's behavior: you can get paid for software, you can create proprietary software, etc. if you like. Some of your business models may not work with free software, but that's not Stallman's intent, that's just a consequence.
The Palestinians are paying for the trip and they get to set the conditions they pay for; that's the way all invited talks work. "No side trips" is a common condition for invited talks.
What's actually going on is that Israel is forcing foreign scientists wanting to visit the Palestinian territories to travel through Israel, and then saying "oh, we made you come here, why don't you also give some lectures for free". Imagine the US used military force to keep international planes from landing in Canada and then asked foreign scientists diverted through the US to also give free talks in the US; it would be quite outrageous.
The situation is made even worse because the Palestinians are so poor compared to Israel. For Israeli universities to piggy-back on a trip paid for by the Palestinians ought to be a huge embarrassment for Israel.
The obvious thing would be for Israel to pay for the entire trip, including the trip to the Palestinian territories. That would be the obvious, right and peaceful thing to do. Apparently, Israel isn't interested in that.
I hope Israel will turn around and do the right thing.
It's interesting that you find that Jacket's CONV2 doesn't detect separability, because the guy who runs the company claimed that it did; he was talking about all the "advanced algorithms" that CONV2 contains.
Of course, GPU computing speeds up convolutions; that's what GPUs were designed to do. The questions we have been discussing are the following.
First, is GPU cost-effective for most applications right now and are people going to see the speedups they hope for? In my experience, the answer is "no", because most applications need to do a lot more than convolutions and speedup on other operations is much less. GPU computing is tricky enough that there is a lot more to worry about than whether one inner loop runs faster on the GPU.
Second, should you be using MATLAB for this? The answer there is "no" as well: MATLAB does some things well, but overall it's a badly designed language and environment. There are much better choices available, and many of them open source and with good support for GPU computing.
Third, we were talking about who was taking the lead and who was following, with the Jacket CEO trying to portray his company as leading the way and unpaid open source developers eventually copying their stuff. That is totally wrong. This style of computing was developed in academia long ago. There have been tons of implementations, both commercial and open source, over the years. Jacket is filling one particular market niche for one particular platform.
Having said all that, it sounds to me that Jacket is probably the best GPU computing solution for MATLAB and probably better than anything MATLAB provides. I just don't think that means all that much: most people likely won't see much of a real-world speedup from it, and most people would be far better off kicking the MATLAB habit altogether and moving on to better platforms, open source or otherwise.
So? For you to present benchmarks of a CONV2 that detects separability against the built-in CONV2 that explicitly does not use separability is dishonest, because much of the speedup you measure has nothing to do with GPU computing.
Ah, the typical argument by putting words in people's mouths and misrepresenting their positions. Good luck with that.
Your error is with the "i.e." part. Convolutions are very useful, but CONV2 is almost never the right function to call. Most convolutions are separable. Those that aren't can usually be made separable. If you're really stuck with a non-separable large 2D convolution, you can use 2D FFT in some cases. And if you have a non-separable small 2D convolution, there's usually some other known trick you can use to speed it up. Anybody who has any business working with image processing should know these things; it doesn't take an "expert".
CONV2 in Matlab is defined to use "straightforward convolution", with no optimization.
http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/conv2.html
If you are benchmarking CONV2 against a GPU implementation that checks for separability and does other optimizations, your benchmarks are a fraud.
You might say at least your customer are getting a good 2D convolution function for their money and they don't need to know the details. But your customers already get optimized 2D convolutions in Matlab (e.g. FILTER2), so they don't need to pay for your code to realize that speedup, they just need to call a different function.
(And please stop referring to 2D signals as "matrices"; 2D signals and matrices are totally different mathematical objects; the name for the common supertype is "array".)
CONV2 is one of the most trivial cases for GPU programming; if you didn't screw up badly, I can't beat your code, but you couldn't beat mine either.
Most people shouldn't be using GPU programming at all because it isn't going to speed up their programs significantly overall.
Most success stories with GPU programming involve incompetence. For example, someone using CONV2 in their code is going to see a big speedup moving to a GPU, but they shouldn't be using CONV2 to begin with!
Yes, you can speed up individual algorithms sometimes by an order of magnitude. But that often doesn't help you much with overall program performance, because once you eliminate one bottleneck, another one takes its place. Buying more cores gives you less speedup for each algorithm, but makes it much more likely that you speed up your entire program, and with less programming effort too.
Most open source developers I know are paid and the stuff they produce has wiped away pretty much anything commercial and proprietary in any area where they have developed it.
The reality is that GPU computing barely makes sense today, and it certainly didn't make sense in 2007. And it may just be another fad, taken over again by general purpose CPUs, just like the last few times.
Your idea that things start out as commercial code and then move into open source is backwards. Many Matlab toolboxes started out as open source, and then were gold-plated for the typical Matlab customer.
The first thing you should do is stop thinking of it as "levels". Matlab has a few packages that you can't easily get for Python, and it has Simulink. There are many other areas where Matlab isn't even remotely close to Python's level. The two are, as the technical term goes, "incomparable".
Well, closed source is even more fragmented! There's Matlab, Mathematica, S, SPSS, PV-Wave, J, and tons of other closed source software, all incompatible! It's a wonder anybody gets anything done with closed source software at all with all that fragmentation!
You mean its buttons-and-windows disaster that's stuck some time in the 1990's? Come on, what about a decent modern IDE?
There are tons of shitty, poorly documented Matlab libraries around as well.
Being a "professional" just means you do it for money, it doesn't mean you're competent or good at it. Matlab and its vendor support is a safety blanket for engineers who can't program and developers who don't know anything about computational methods. They don't actually need it, but they are too intellectually lazy to change or learn a different way of doing things; Matlab is their crack.
Oh, academics and consultants are not "professionals"? Wow, so what exalted group of professionals do you fancy yourself to be a part of? Can't be corporate users, because if you were one of those, you'd know that while a few thousand dollars for software licenses for each user isn't going to affect the bottom line, the paperwork would kill you.