I had a long comment about "where and when," but I think this table is a better idea: Mouse,trackball
multi-avatar navigation
Tablet
Graphics Design/spatial data entry
Keyboard
All other forms of data entry
Gamepad,joystick
navigating when you have only one avatar(as in games) I'd say that a mouse is seldom the right tool for the right job. You can't even really do all the browsing stuff with a mouse, as it often involves some other form of data entry. Further, since clicking is so very primitive in a web environment, the rudimentary clicking that a tablet is capable of makes it just about as good for exactly what mice are used for most (browsing). It's a hybrid that'll get you by.
Yeah, and what's great about the universe are: 1. Time 2. Space
Your #2 and #3 are broad, far-reaching categories that actually contain numerous reasons why Google is a better company. #1 is actually part of that, #3, by the way.
I would change #2 to be "providing services their customers want."
There are doubtless many manure companies that consider recycled crap to have lots of value.
Re:$42.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda
on
Photoshop for DNA
·
· Score: 1
I don't know...a lot of the super-super rich are very generous.
It's been that way since the first super-super rich.
Ever heard of Carnagie Melon university? Or Carnagie hall? Vanderbilt? And yet these men were called robber barons.
The list of generous donations goes on and on for the super-rich.
It's still not as big a sacrifice as me donating $5 to a local charity.
Also, does the good they do outweigh the harm they do to society? Doubtful. It's equally doubtful for most super-rich men. I think it's a way to ease their conscience about all the horrible things they've done.
Well, I'm glad you sorted that out for yourself. That red herring about recursive enumerability/decidability was a nice touch. Feel better now?
I stand by my statement. I was "dumbing it down." A problem is normally called NP-hard because it hasn't been proven that it is NP-complete or NP.
There's a heck of a lot of these, and the implications you get from this class of problems are those implications that I gave you. Further, in the real world, decidability isn't a black-and-white sort of thing. A lot of times it's hard to tell if you've actually got the answer. I bet you can guess the only area that you can't know most of the time.
What has been proven is that there are problems for which it is impossible to automatically write a program to solve. Further, this is an NP-hard problem, meaning that you can't even know for sure if you're ever going to get a solution, or how long it will take.
However you can usually make a good estimate with approximate solutions of how close you are to the real solution, and how much longer it will take. Obviously this only works with programs that have some form of error evaluation criteria. This is what the field of AI is all about. There are also some programs that you would immediately be able to identify as solvable with a clear, direct solution, or unsolvable.
Using the wheel as a metaphor is pretty close to perfect when you're talking about reinvention.
There's virtually no past experience on which the wheel was based.
Improving someone else's design, as is often done in programming languages, isn't reinventing the wheel. It's improving it. You're creating the product from scratch, but the idea of the product is taken from the old stuff. Same with the eight bit adder.
How many students create an eight bit adder with absolutely no previous experience in math or science? Even given a knowledge of what a transistor is, I don't think any students are asked to make an 8 bit adder without first learning what a half-adder looks like.
I'm not just arguing semantics here. My point is that there is something that has traditionally been called wheel reinvention (and this, I believe is what the grandparent post was talking about) that is, in fact, useless. You can't just assume that because you haven't learned what to do that you will probably come up with something new and better. This is very, very rare, and generally only occurs in areas that haven't been explored much anyway. It's usually the other way around.
You have to immerse yourself in the current knowledge before you can figure out how to reject it.
Um...we're pretty sure that the galaxy is finite, even if the universe isn't, which was my claim. Going outside the galaxy is going a mind-bogglingly long way. As I said, the guess is wildly innaccurate since so much is extrapolated.
However, we have no good way of knowing that the Universe is finite, but current best guess says that it is.
The big three theories of creation - superstring, big bang, and God all specify a finite age and finite size (that there is a finite amount of space that contains matter even if space itself is boundless). Actually, this is an implication you usually get from any finite-age theory, since space and time are so related, -and finite age comes from observation of entropy. I'm inclined to believe there's some truth to finite universe size because of this.
Under the current assumption of how life came to exist (random chance at the current level of randomness), the chance that we are alone in the galaxy is very high.
We can't really be sure how much farther beyond our galaxy the Universe actually reaches, or how big the galaxy actually is. The amount of extrapolation necessary to reach the probability of other life is staggering.
Either our theories about how likely life is, and how big the galaxy is are wrong, or there aren't any neighbors nearby.
If your job puts you on an airplane once a week, then you're going to be at risk. This makes traveling on an airplane unsafe, since it can give you cancer.
These are all well known and exploited properties, since they're obviously a function of being alive. You also pretty much learn this stuff in the first high school chemistry class, if you're paying attention.
The generation of electricity using ocean temperature differentials, however, is a new thing, and thus shows how water is more awesome.
However, this isn't even the first new thing in the last two decades. Heavy water (deterium (sp?)) is extracted from seawater for nuclear fusion. Hydrogen fuel cells use ionization of water followed by oxidation reactions as a mechanism for storing and retrieving power with a much higher concentration of energy than more conventional batteries.
There are lots of compounds that we use every day that aren't looking more and more awesome, but which are pretty awesome to begin with. Silicon strikes me as one of those: we're pretty much using it's awesome semiconductor properties the same way over and over - which is awesome - but it's not getting more awesome . With all the new and exciting ways that we don't live off of it, water is surely moving closer to the top of "People Magazine's 100 most awesome compounds" list.
1) If it's a concern, fill the space the reactor takes up with ammo, and only shoot as fast as often as the reactor is capable of delivering enough power (which wouldn't be constant). Your ammo will hold out longer than the reactor would before you have to go back and refit.
2) Maybe. I'm not sure that would be faster.
3) True, but only marginally important. Remember that "it takes up less space" argument is wrong - or at least has been wrong so far.
4) This is definitely not in favor of the laser, and probably the biggest reason why we're not using them now. You basically have to haul a power station with the laser whereever you go. A power station is much more difficult to keep up and running than a BFG, and the maintenence is a nightmare by comparison. Also, lasers have to be kept really, really clean. Dust is a problem. If you've already got a power station handy, it might be useful as an auxillary weapon.
next to no evidence EMF/EMI causes anything in people Actually there's a massive amount of evidence. There are whole products dedicated to the protection and absorbtion of harmful EMFs.
Perhaps you've heard of some of them - to name a few: sunscreen, sunglasses, umbrellas, microwave doors, UV filters, X-ray vests...
It is so well known as to be considered fact that EMF in the ultraviolet and higher radiation can cause all kinds of dangerous mutations; that a lot of matter will absorb EMF energy in the microwave all the way through UV and convert it to (possibly) dangerous heat; and that specific frequencies of microwave radiation will cause excitation of water molecules, which can cause burns even more efficiently than simple absorption! So what do we have left? Well, I still haven't talked about the visible spectrum much, which in large doses can blind someone.
What there is little evidence of is that frequency in radio range causes damage. If it does, it's certainly very subtle and not well known. Personally, I'm not willing to entirely dismiss the idea that any kind of radiation is harmful, as we already know that most of the rest of the RF spectrum can be, and there's no good way to prove a negative.
On the other hand, I'm not going to be coating my house with aluminum on the off chance that it has an effect - which is likely miniscule since it has not yet been noticed.
Actually, the military doesn't need a laser that powerful for combat at all.
The kind of laser you find in Real Genius is actually impossible, short of using cold fusion as the energy source. What you actually get from a laser of that size is a massive assembly and huge power source to work. All the portable ones take up a LOT of space, which is completely impractical (and they're not terribly useful, either). Tanks are much more effective.
For close combat, bullets are as hard to dodge as lasers, take up a lot less space, and have good enough stopping power. From further away you can get a lot more stopping power from bombs and RPGs, or as you said, rail guns.
However, to modify a quote from a movie: "All you'd need is a large spinning mirror and a tracking system, and you could vaporize a space target from earth." The only real advantage you don't get from non-lasers is the unlimited range and instantaneous hits (it should be noted that "instantaneous" is only an issue for things that are already moving quickly and erratically - such as missles. You have to be really lucky to dodge a bullet.)
To me this seems like a fundamental property of the universe: you can almost always do more damage with a little matter than you can with a lot of energy. After all, matter is essentially condensed energy.
I went to school in Florida, which is rated second to last in quality of education. I was in the gifted program, and the top 10 of my graduating class.
I knew one person who went to Harvard, and she was most likely the stupidest person in any class that I took. Admittedly, she was in the gifted program, too, but...still. She was far from the top of our class despite her great efforts to the contrary. I think she got in from triple minority scholarship - an actual minority, a woman, and having done well on an IQ test when she was really, really young....and so she went to Harvard. I'm sure she was quickly in the bottom of the class. Could there be more like her?
BTW, a 'y' chromo results in a male because, well, it takes less information to make a man.
Interesting concept, but no. I imagine you probably have heard the actual truth of the matter, but got it a little mixed up. Would you be interested in buying a magazine from me? How about 30 issues of the same one? 30 times as much information, right?
Two X chromosomes means lots of redundancy. More traits end up recessive for women than for men because of this.
But that doesn't mean that more information is needed, only that it's there, and sometimes even that is duplicate info.
However, I have a sister in High School and one in college.
Yes, you missed the memo.
Star Wars is not cool - and it hasn't been for about a decade.
Anyone with strong feelings about Star Wars is a geek, like the rest of us - which isn't cool.
It has also, however, fallen out of favor with the uncool and now resides in the land of the truly emotionally handicapped whose identity is defined by their worship of it.
"Most Matlab functions" are in other languages if you're only talking about the basic stuff.
But you really have to do a lot of work to find a lot of those algorithms for the other languages.
For example, what if you want to feed the output of a 3 level feedforward, backpropagating neural network into an optical flow algorithm with pyramids for better convergence - all this in order to test out quality of a new backpropagation function?
You can get these things for Java or Fortran? They're just "around" on standard numerical kits?
Googling for it I had a hard time substantiating your claim. Matlab is more than a glorified calculator.
As far as having a free runtime, it's not needed. There's a compile kit for Matlab. If you really want to make portable code for Matlab, then you can use it to generate ANSI compliant C.
About half the time (cases 1 and 5, and in the fact that Matlab may be falling behind Octave in the use of a symbolic engined) that I said Octave I meant Matlab.
A lot of these items are FUD. 1) You can choose any editor you want to write your matlab code. You just need to run it in octave. Since octave has a command line interpreter, you can show the result with any editor that can display the results of a run command (emacs will do this, too) 2) Yeah...it has readline, but that's about it. 3) Poster asked, besides being free...this is part of the price. 4) Not true. Any code not written in C, which is a good many of the numerical algorithms Matlab includes, have available source so that you can integrate the algorithms into any finished products (Matlab is for prototyping).
Other than that, you're asking for more than is really needed to extend the functionality. 5) Octave has a code repository. If they like what you write they use it. In other words, you can contribute to Octave.
6) Your fault/FUD. It took me about ten minutes.
7) I didn't have to. More FUD? Obviously this isn't a universal procedure.
8) I've never looked at my License file. I never track what it's doing. This has never been an issue.
9) See issue #3
10) Is this even a reason?
11) See issue #4
12) Obviously you don't have very good reasons. I will present some good reasons after we get through this.
13) This is true of Matlab as well. Try typing "ls" in Matlab and see what happens.
14) See issue #3
Having said all that, let me tell you why you should be using Octave.
The biggest reason is the free as beer thing. Matlab+ all packages needed is astronomically expensive. It's a big deal. We're not talking Microsoft-who-sells-to-consumers expensive - we're talking big-contractors-who-work-for-Engineering-firms expensive. It's kind of like the difference in price between Oracle and Postgres.
However, SOMETIMES it's worth it. As an Engineering student, I've tried and used regularly Matlab's image toolbox, Matlab's neural net toolbox, and their symbolic toolbox, and compared it to the normal canned algorithms.
Matlab is very, very good. They put an extra polish on every algorithm they write. In general, they're better written, and produce more clever results than anything else. Keep in mind that I was dealing with underconstrained problems, so the issues where matters of estimation. Matlab got more accuracy or faster convergence out of it's canned algorithms than you'd get if you wrote them straight from the descriptions supplied by the algorithm's authors.
Having said that, it's quite likely that there are certain areas that Octave will probably eventually fall behind. Symbolic work is one, I think, since their symbolic toolbox is actually an interface to Maple's symbolic engine, which they rent.
Maple doesn't have the manpower to compete with the OSS people writing computer algebra systems. IMHO, right now it's about tied. Three years ago Maple was ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you still get the odd mistake even with when using preview. But you probably won't get things as obvious as having bbcode in your post.
s/lean/learn/
I feel the same way with web development. Let them lean html and then teach them about bbcode.
If you just give them bbcode right from the beginning, they'll think they can just always use that, and not preview their posts.
I had a long comment about "where and when," but I think this table is a better idea:
Mouse,trackball multi-avatar navigation Tablet Graphics Design/spatial data entry Keyboard All other forms of data entry Gamepad,joystick navigating when you have only one avatar(as in games)
I'd say that a mouse is seldom the right tool for the right job. You can't even really do all the browsing stuff with a mouse, as it often involves some other form of data entry. Further, since clicking is so very primitive in a web environment, the rudimentary clicking that a tablet is capable of makes it just about as good for exactly what mice are used for most (browsing).
It's a hybrid that'll get you by.
Yeah, and what's great about the universe are:
1. Time
2. Space
Your #2 and #3 are broad, far-reaching categories that actually contain numerous reasons why Google is a better company. #1 is actually part of that, #3, by the way.
I would change #2 to be "providing services their customers want."
There are doubtless many manure companies that consider recycled crap to have lots of value.
So does postscript. You think that's a good idea?
I don't think it's going to happen. There are far too many renderers that treat SVG like postscript without any embedding or text.
Making them more is a big hack.
Yeah...SVG is for rendering graphics. Not media.
The stuff doesn't move.
I don't know...a lot of the super-super rich are very generous.
It's been that way since the first super-super rich.
Ever heard of Carnagie Melon university? Or Carnagie hall? Vanderbilt? And yet these men were called robber barons.
The list of generous donations goes on and on for the super-rich.
It's still not as big a sacrifice as me donating $5 to a local charity.
Also, does the good they do outweigh the harm they do to society? Doubtful. It's equally doubtful for most super-rich men. I think it's a way to ease their conscience about all the horrible things they've done.
Well, I'm glad you sorted that out for yourself. That red herring about recursive enumerability/decidability was a nice touch.
Feel better now?
I stand by my statement. I was "dumbing it down." A problem is normally called NP-hard because it hasn't been proven that it is NP-complete or NP.
There's a heck of a lot of these, and the implications you get from this class of problems are those implications that I gave you. Further, in the real world, decidability isn't a black-and-white sort of thing. A lot of times it's hard to tell if you've actually got the answer. I bet you can guess the only area that you can't know most of the time.
What has been proven is that there are problems for which it is impossible to automatically write a program to solve. Further, this is an NP-hard problem, meaning that you can't even know for sure if you're ever going to get a solution, or how long it will take.
However you can usually make a good estimate with approximate solutions of how close you are to the real solution, and how much longer it will take. Obviously this only works with programs that have some form of error evaluation criteria. This is what the field of AI is all about.
There are also some programs that you would immediately be able to identify as solvable with a clear, direct solution, or unsolvable.
Using the wheel as a metaphor is pretty close to perfect when you're talking about reinvention.
There's virtually no past experience on which the wheel was based.
Improving someone else's design, as is often done in programming languages, isn't reinventing the wheel. It's improving it. You're creating the product from scratch, but the idea of the product is taken from the old stuff. Same with the eight bit adder.
How many students create an eight bit adder with absolutely no previous experience in math or science? Even given a knowledge of what a transistor is, I don't think any students are asked to make an 8 bit adder without first learning what a half-adder looks like.
I'm not just arguing semantics here. My point is that there is something that has traditionally been called wheel reinvention (and this, I believe is what the grandparent post was talking about) that is, in fact, useless. You can't just assume that because you haven't learned what to do that you will probably come up with something new and better. This is very, very rare, and generally only occurs in areas that haven't been explored much anyway. It's usually the other way around.
You have to immerse yourself in the current knowledge before you can figure out how to reject it.
Um...we're pretty sure that the galaxy is finite, even if the universe isn't, which was my claim. Going outside the galaxy is going a mind-bogglingly long way. As I said, the guess is wildly innaccurate since so much is extrapolated.
However, we have no good way of knowing that the Universe is finite, but current best guess says that it is.
The big three theories of creation - superstring, big bang, and God all specify a finite age and finite size (that there is a finite amount of space that contains matter even if space itself is boundless). Actually, this is an implication you usually get from any finite-age theory, since space and time are so related, -and finite age comes from observation of entropy. I'm inclined to believe there's some truth to finite universe size because of this.
Under the current assumption of how life came to exist (random chance at the current level of randomness), the chance that we are alone in the galaxy is very high.
We can't really be sure how much farther beyond our galaxy the Universe actually reaches, or how big the galaxy actually is. The amount of extrapolation necessary to reach the probability of other life is staggering.
Either our theories about how likely life is, and how big the galaxy is are wrong, or there aren't any neighbors nearby.
How about cancer? X-Rays are carcenogenic!
If your job puts you on an airplane once a week, then you're going to be at risk. This makes traveling on an airplane unsafe, since it can give you cancer.
This is not acceptable.
These are all well known and exploited properties, since they're obviously a function of being alive. You also pretty much learn this stuff in the first high school chemistry class, if you're paying attention.
The generation of electricity using ocean temperature differentials, however, is a new thing, and thus shows how water is more awesome.
However, this isn't even the first new thing in the last two decades. Heavy water (deterium (sp?)) is extracted from seawater for nuclear fusion. Hydrogen fuel cells use ionization of water followed by oxidation reactions as a mechanism for storing and retrieving power with a much higher concentration of energy than more conventional batteries.
There are lots of compounds that we use every day that aren't looking more and more awesome, but which are pretty awesome to begin with. Silicon strikes me as one of those: we're pretty much using it's awesome semiconductor properties the same way over and over - which is awesome - but it's not getting more awesome
.
With all the new and exciting ways that we don't live off of it, water is surely moving closer to the top of "People Magazine's 100 most awesome compounds" list.
1) If it's a concern, fill the space the reactor takes up with ammo, and only shoot as fast as often as the reactor is capable of delivering enough power (which wouldn't be constant). Your ammo will hold out longer than the reactor would before you have to go back and refit.
2) Maybe. I'm not sure that would be faster.
3) True, but only marginally important. Remember that "it takes up less space" argument is wrong - or at least has been wrong so far.
4) This is definitely not in favor of the laser, and probably the biggest reason why we're not using them now. You basically have to haul a power station with the laser whereever you go. A power station is much more difficult to keep up and running than a BFG, and the maintenence is a nightmare by comparison. Also, lasers have to be kept really, really clean. Dust is a problem.
If you've already got a power station handy, it might be useful as an auxillary weapon.
next to no evidence EMF/EMI causes anything in people
Actually there's a massive amount of evidence. There are whole products dedicated to the protection and absorbtion of harmful EMFs.
Perhaps you've heard of some of them - to name a few: sunscreen, sunglasses, umbrellas, microwave doors, UV filters, X-ray vests...
It is so well known as to be considered fact that EMF in the ultraviolet and higher radiation can cause all kinds of dangerous mutations; that a lot of matter will absorb EMF energy in the microwave all the way through UV and convert it to (possibly) dangerous heat; and that specific frequencies of microwave radiation will cause excitation of water molecules, which can cause burns even more efficiently than simple absorption! So what do we have left? Well, I still haven't talked about the visible spectrum much, which in large doses can blind someone.
What there is little evidence of is that frequency in radio range causes damage. If it does, it's certainly very subtle and not well known. Personally, I'm not willing to entirely dismiss the idea that any kind of radiation is harmful, as we already know that most of the rest of the RF spectrum can be, and there's no good way to prove a negative.
On the other hand, I'm not going to be coating my house with aluminum on the off chance that it has an effect - which is likely miniscule since it has not yet been noticed.
Don't you mean aluminumy?
Actually, the military doesn't need a laser that powerful for combat at all.
The kind of laser you find in Real Genius is actually impossible, short of using cold fusion as the energy source. What you actually get from a laser of that size is a massive assembly and huge power source to work. All the portable ones take up a LOT of space, which is completely impractical (and they're not terribly useful, either). Tanks are much more effective.
For close combat, bullets are as hard to dodge as lasers, take up a lot less space, and have good enough stopping power. From further away you can get a lot more stopping power from bombs and RPGs, or as you said, rail guns.
However, to modify a quote from a movie:
"All you'd need is a large spinning mirror and a tracking system, and you could vaporize a space target from earth." The only real advantage you don't get from non-lasers is the unlimited range and instantaneous hits (it should be noted that "instantaneous" is only an issue for things that are already moving quickly and erratically - such as missles. You have to be really lucky to dodge a bullet.)
To me this seems like a fundamental property of the universe: you can almost always do more damage with a little matter than you can with a lot of energy. After all, matter is essentially condensed energy.
Is that really true of Harvard?
...and so she went to Harvard. I'm sure she was quickly in the bottom of the class. Could there be more like her?
I went to school in Florida, which is rated second to last in quality of education. I was in the gifted program, and the top 10 of my graduating class.
I knew one person who went to Harvard, and she was most likely the stupidest person in any class that I took. Admittedly, she was in the gifted program, too, but...still. She was far from the top of our class despite her great efforts to the contrary.
I think she got in from triple minority scholarship - an actual minority, a woman, and having done well on an IQ test when she was really, really young.
BTW, a 'y' chromo results in a male because, well, it takes less information to make a man.
Interesting concept, but no. I imagine you probably have heard the actual truth of the matter, but got it a little mixed up. Would you be interested in buying a magazine from me? How about 30 issues of the same one? 30 times as much information, right?
Two X chromosomes means lots of redundancy. More traits end up recessive for women than for men because of this.
But that doesn't mean that more information is needed, only that it's there, and sometimes even that is duplicate info.
Cool never mattered to me.
However, I have a sister in High School and one in college.
Yes, you missed the memo.
Star Wars is not cool -
and it hasn't been for about a decade.
Anyone with strong feelings about Star Wars is a geek, like the rest of us - which isn't cool.
It has also, however, fallen out of favor with the uncool and now resides in the land of the truly emotionally handicapped whose identity is defined by their worship of it.
"Most Matlab functions" are in other languages if you're only talking about the basic stuff.
But you really have to do a lot of work to find a lot of those algorithms for the other languages.
For example, what if you want to feed the output of a 3 level feedforward, backpropagating neural network into an optical flow algorithm with pyramids for better convergence - all this in order to test out quality of a new backpropagation function?
You can get these things for Java or Fortran? They're just "around" on standard numerical kits?
Googling for it I had a hard time substantiating your claim. Matlab is more than a glorified calculator.
As far as having a free runtime, it's not needed. There's a compile kit for Matlab. If you really want to make portable code for Matlab, then you can use it to generate ANSI compliant C.
Man, I posted really tired here.
About half the time (cases 1 and 5, and in the fact that Matlab may be falling behind Octave in the use of a symbolic engined) that I said Octave I meant Matlab.
Obviously in my mind they're very interchangable.
A lot of these items are FUD.
1) You can choose any editor you want to write your matlab code. You just need to run it in octave. Since octave has a command line interpreter, you can show the result with any editor that can display the results of a run command (emacs will do this, too)
2) Yeah...it has readline, but that's about it.
3) Poster asked, besides being free...this is part of the price.
4) Not true. Any code not written in C, which is a good many of the numerical algorithms Matlab includes, have available source so that you can integrate the algorithms into any finished products (Matlab is for prototyping).
Other than that, you're asking for more than is really needed to extend the functionality.
5) Octave has a code repository. If they like what you write they use it. In other words, you can contribute to Octave.
6) Your fault/FUD. It took me about ten minutes.
7) I didn't have to. More FUD? Obviously this isn't a universal procedure.
8) I've never looked at my License file. I never track what it's doing. This has never been an issue.
9) See issue #3
10) Is this even a reason?
11) See issue #4
12) Obviously you don't have very good reasons. I will present some good reasons after we get through this.
13) This is true of Matlab as well. Try typing "ls" in Matlab and see what happens.
14) See issue #3
Having said all that, let me tell you why you should be using Octave.
The biggest reason is the free as beer thing. Matlab+ all packages needed is astronomically expensive. It's a big deal. We're not talking Microsoft-who-sells-to-consumers expensive - we're talking big-contractors-who-work-for-Engineering-firms expensive. It's kind of like the difference in price between Oracle and Postgres.
However, SOMETIMES it's worth it. As an Engineering student, I've tried and used regularly Matlab's image toolbox, Matlab's neural net toolbox, and their symbolic toolbox, and compared it to the normal canned algorithms.
Matlab is very, very good. They put an extra polish on every algorithm they write. In general, they're better written, and produce more clever results than anything else. Keep in mind that I was dealing with underconstrained problems, so the issues where matters of estimation. Matlab got more accuracy or faster convergence out of it's canned algorithms than you'd get if you wrote them straight from the descriptions supplied by the algorithm's authors.
Having said that, it's quite likely that there are certain areas that Octave will probably eventually fall behind. Symbolic work is one, I think, since their symbolic toolbox is actually an interface to Maple's symbolic engine, which they rent.
Maple doesn't have the manpower to compete with the OSS people writing computer algebra systems. IMHO, right now it's about tied. Three years ago Maple was ahead.
Vanilla Octave is quite limited, but have you tried using it along with Octave-Forge?
In my experience, this tips the balance of available uses in favor of Octave.