chrstnsn@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Christensen) (06/23/89)
[In response to message from alfred@mcc.com:] While I too do not like such a price for a piece of software considering that the prices of workstations are dropping rapidly, I think that your gouging remarks are a bit inaccurate. I have been running Mathematica for about two years, first as an alpha and beta tester and now as a developer of a Mathematica package. While it is true that the Mac price is much lower than the Sun (or other workstation versions), the perfomance on a Mac does not even come close to that on a Sun. Most of the calculations I and my collegues do will not run on even an 8 megabyte Mac II - the programs bomb as the machine runs out of memory. Further, every benchmark I have runs from 4 to 20 times slower on a Mac relative to a similarly priced SPARCstation 1. So for similarly priced hardware, you get many times the performance on a Sun over a Mac. So I suggest that you divide your price numbers (hardware plus Mathematica software) by the improved performance for the higher priced version of Mathematica. In my case, since my programs will not run on a Mac II, the benefit I get from a lower priced package is zero. The front end feature will ultimately be solved for UNIX machine once there is some sort of standard (probably X windows) for the buttons and sliders. I have found the notebooks to be fun and useful for many people but are not of much use to me since I want to use my own windowing interface more suited to my packages's needs. New workstations software is almost always more expensive than similar PC software. As the SPARC chip machines start rolling out of Toshiba, Solbourne, the Taiwan cloners and Sun itself, I suspect you will see software prices go down. While I dislike spending 1000's of dollars for workstations software, I understand why many businesses must charge more currently. Once we all start buying more workstations and fewer underperforming personal computers, we will help the situation. Steve Christensen NCSA, University of Illinois steve@ncsa.uiuc.edu [These are my opinions and not necessarily those of anyone else at NCSA.]
grunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu (Dirk Grunwald) (06/27/89)
steve, you miss the point. The core of mathematica is no more difficult to implement on the Apple than on a Sun. Admittedly, the Apple doesn't have an MMU & it may not perform as well, but realisticly, that's what the compiler is for. More man-months went into the Apple interface than the Sun interface. The X-11 interface still sucks, even in the latest revision [sorry,greg]. The Gnuemacs interface is getting along, but none the less, we're left with the question of why it costs more on the sun. The basic reason is ``because they think they can get it.'' The same reason it costs even more on a Titan or other high-end stations. This doesn't mean that I don't think Mathematica is a good tool, but personally, I was excited when Wolfram originaly stated that the prince would be such that ``everyone who wanted it could afford it,'' and have more disappointed *by the price alone [and a little by performance]* since then. Kind of like the ``All you can eat for $1'' places where they give you dry bread & tell you that's all you can eat for $1. [ I too have been an alpha & beta site for Mathematica, and have used it quite a bit, having written some packages to display 3-d data & convert 2-d plots to PiCTeX. ] -- Dirk Grunwald -- Univ. of Illinois (grunwald@flute.cs.uiuc.edu)
chip@husc6.harvard.edu (Chip Morris) (07/11/89)
aks@hub.ucsb.edu (Alan Stebbens) writes: >Although Wolfram, Inc. is not all that different from most vendors, as >Steve pointed out, I don't believe that reduces their moral culpability >for opportunistic price gouging. Just because everyone does it, does not >make it right. I get very tired of folks insisting that they have a right to the fruits of someone else's labor on "moral" grounds. If Wolfram and his company hadn't produced Mathematica in the first place, we wouldn't have much to argue about, would we? I may dislike his prices for the Sun, in which case my *worst* option is to do without, which is just where I would have been had Mathematica never existed. What gives you the idea that Wolfram owes you software (or money, or his time, ....)? What makes his pricing policy right is that it's his product, not yours. There is *no* moral culpability here at all. -- Chip Morris, Senior Engineer US Mail: Software Options, Inc., 22 Hilliard St., Cambridge MA 02138 Internet: chip%soi@harvard.harvard.edu UUCP: ...!harvard!soi!chip Phone: (617) 497-5054
casey@gauss.llnl.gov (Casey Leedom) (07/12/89)
However much I hate to say ``me too'', I must agree whole heartedly with Alan Stebbens (aks@hub.ucsb.edu) when he says: | However much [extra performance one can expect on a Sun over a Macintosh] | is true, Mathematica had very little to do with the performance of the | Sun relative to the Mac -- ostensibly you are already paying Sun for the | performance increase. It makes no sense to me to pay a software vendor | more money for a product just because it runs on faster hardware. Sun should reconsider their bogus pricing. I will certainly recommend that we do *NOT* purchase Mathematica for our 1600+ Suns at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I don't mind paying for good software, and I don't mind paying maintenance fees as long as they're reasonable. Sun, Please unbundle basic price from, problem/bug response and upgrade service, from twit response (twit response == any time you are forced to respond RTFM). Casey