Harassing the power of mathematics
Alec Mihailovs
Maple 10 came from (replacing "brilliance of 1000 mathematicians"). Finally
I found the answer - it was stolen from Mathematica!
See http://forums.wolfram.com/mathgroup/archive/1998/Jun/msg00169.html ,
http://www.wolfram.com/news/brazilmtc.html , and other links from the Google
search for harnessing in Mathematica.
Alec
Cliff
The front page of maplesoft.com has a claim to be "Mathematics software
product" (singular) " of the year, Scientific Computing". Implying that
it was THE best product.
The actual award from the magazine is "Mathematics 2005 products"
(plural) "of the year"
If you look at the website
http://www.scimag.com/ProductNews.aspx?Cat=14&SubCat=17&ProdCode=00001991&ATLC=1001302&ATLK=475155
You see that Mathematica and Mathcad were both winners too. And
Mathematica won their "Readers choice" (singular) " award" earlier in
the year, with Mathcad as a finalist.
Vladimir Bondarenko
writes Mon, 16 Jan 2006 13:10:40 GMT
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.symbolic/msg/3adf45cf732f6460?hl=en&
AM> where "harnessing the power of mathematics" in Maple 10
AM> came from...
AM> it was stolen from Mathematica!
AM> http://forums.wolfram.com/mathgroup/archive/1998/Jun/msg00169.html
AM> http://www.wolfram.com/news/brazilmtc.html
Gee, capital!
I do take my hat off to your insight.
For years I know you are endowed with fruitful intuition. But your
terrific pun really creased me... ;)
"Harassing the power of mathematics"
Given the Maple bugs I am preparing for publication, you hit the spot.
Vladimir
Alec Mihailovs
at Maplesoft. I am a loyal Maple customer.
By the way, I noticed some interesting differences comparing relationships
between people providing Maple help here and Maplesoft, and relationships
between people providing Mathematica help here and Wolfram Research.
First, a lot of Wolfram Research employees answer to questions, while
Maplesoft employees post their comments extremely rarely.
Second, Mathematica posters are usually very polite to Wolfram Research, and
Wolfram Research seems to keep very good relationships with customers.
In particular, I was very pleased to receive a Christmas card (and a very
nice gift) from Wolfram Research this year. Especially keeping in mind that
I've never received a Christmas card from Maplesoft.
Looking at my recent postings, I noticed that I mentioned in one of them
that if I would get paid by Wolfram Research, I would never have any
complains about Mathematica. Now that happened and I am trying to keep my
word (hoping to get a Christmas card next year as well.)
Alec
Felix Rawlings
> In particular, I was very pleased to receive a Christmas card (and a very
> nice gift) from Wolfram Research this year. Especially keeping in mind
> that I've never received a Christmas card from Maplesoft.
Are you really saying that the fact that a company is sending you a
Christmas card makes it preferable over another that doesn't?
How shallow can you be?
Peter Pein
relationships ...". I didn't see any declaration of intention to buy software
exclusively at senders of Christmas cards.
How attentive can /you/ be?
Greetings,
Peter
Peter Pein
...
> to buy software exclusively *from* senders of Christmas cards.
>
I love prepositions.... :-\
Alec Mihailovs
news:pan.2006.01.18....@yahoo.com...
Well, I didn't think about that, but now, after you mentioned that, I
refreshed my memory (and people reading some of my earlier postings will
understand me), and came to the decision that Yes, in this situation it
does.
Alec
Felix Rawlings
> Well, I didn't think about that, but now, after you mentioned that, I
> refreshed my memory (and people reading some of my earlier postings will
> understand me), and came to the decision that Yes, in this situation it
> does.
Let me get this right: You would recommend Mathematica, rather than
Maple, on the grounds that Wolfram Research sends you Christmas cards, but
Maplesoft doesn't? Is this what you mean?
Vladimir Bondarenko
on Wed, 18 Jan 2006 23:46:52 GMT
FR> Christmas card makes it preferable over another that doesn't?
Well, I am in Quality Assurance over a decade;
http://www.cas-testing.org/index.php?list=3
testing, assessment & classification is not just an integral part
of my life but the very heart of it; I'd like to present a comment
here.
First, personally, for almost a decade I enjoy the deep, affluent
river of Alec's helps and comments alive with elite salmon ;)
In my obvious opinion, Alec's mind of formidable power or his sunny
analytic skills or his top-notch level of expertise in Maple need
any comments whatsoever. Taste, for example, his sites
http://webpages.shepherd.edu/amihailo/
http://mihailovs.com/
420 Alec's links are here...
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=alec%40mihailovs.com&start=0&num=100&hl=en&lr=&
yet another his 685 links here... well... let me please stop at
this point ;) oh no, I nearly forgot about the Maple assist
group; pls count here Alec's messages by yourself...
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/maple-assist/messagesearch?query=mihailovs&submit=Go
I especially enjoy these two his pictures:
"I never bored with this company"
http://webpages.shepherd.edu/amihailo/Alec.jpg
"For those Amazing, Enigmatic Integers... Cheers!"
http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/100K/Alec.jpg
An intellectual and physical athlete, Alec fears nobody and nothing
(just like me; I also fear nobody... save my Mom!)
As for those greeting cards, I agree with you that it much depends
what a company sends you a greeting card, how nice is it etc etc.
But generally, as a Quality Assurance Engineer dealing with many
dozens companies over the globe I have gradually gained a definite
feeling that there could be a positive correlation between sending
a customer a greeting card, average response time in case you alas
have a problem, level of interest in the customer's success, and
quality of the product by this company. Anyway, my QA intuition
definitely votes for this.
This is about corporative culture. About genuine focusing on the
customer's feelings and needs.
Run 5 copies of Standard Maple 10 interface; give them the tasks.
Then reboot (yes, reboot after Maple 10), and run 10 copies of
Mathematica 5, solving with Mathematica, too, like with Maple,
various tasks, especially relatively time consuming ones, in
each window.
Feeling the difference?
Best wishes,
Vladimir Bondarenko
http://www.cybertester.com/
http://maple.bug-list.org/
http://www.CAS-testing.org/
Alec Mihailovs
I reread again what I wrote and couldn't find any recommendations for one or
another one.
What I wrote is that it seems as if while Maplesoft is good at making
enemies (Vladimir Bondarenko is one example), Wolfram Research is good at
making friends.
You, Felix, obviously, a guy that likes making enemies (I mean your note
about my shallowness), so you have something in common with Maplesoft.
That makes more probable that you use Maple rather than Mathematica.
Now, after insulting me, you have to insult Robert Israel, Carl Love, Thomas
Richard, and Joe Riel as well to make absolutely sure that you won't get
help with Maple problems if you will have some.
Alec
.
Felix Rawlings
> First, a lot of Wolfram Research employees answer to questions, while
> Maplesoft employees post their comments extremely rarely.
That's fair enough; getting better support from one than from the other
is an important consideration.
> Second, Mathematica posters are usually very polite to Wolfram Research,
OK. I don't see how that can have any bearing on one's decision to
choose Maple or Mathematica though.
> and Wolfram Research seems to keep very good relationships with
> customers.
So WR is good at marketing. That does not imply technical excellence, as,
say, Microsoft amply illustrates.
> In particular, I was very pleased to receive a Christmas card (and a
> very nice gift) from Wolfram Research this year. Especially keeping in
> mind that I've never received a Christmas card from Maplesoft.
This is the one I can't understand. Or is it the case that you believe WR
sentimentally cares about you? I find it amazing that anyone can fall for
such a transparent marketing ploy.
Finally, I have not insulted you, or anybody else: I still think that if
this Christmas card stuff has an influence in you, as far as your CAS of
choice is concerned, then you are on the shallow side.
By the way, I use Maxima and Axiom; I don't think that Mathematica and
Maple are worth what they cost.
Alec Mihailovs
news:pan.2006.01.19....@yahoo.com...
> OK. I don't see how that can have any bearing on one's decision to
> choose Maple or Mathematica though.
As I said few times, and Peter Pein said before me, it is not about choosing
Maple or Mathematica. Either you can't read, or have difficulties with
understanding.
> Finally, I have not insulted you, or anybody else: I still think that if
> this Christmas card stuff has an influence in you, as far as your CAS of
> choice is concerned, then you are on the shallow side.
Well, good that you didn't insult me. I'll insult you then.
If a Christmas card means nothing to you, then you are an idiot.
Alec
Felix Rawlings
>> Finally, I have not insulted you, or anybody else: I still think that if
>> this Christmas card stuff has an influence in you, as far as your CAS of
>> choice is concerned, then you are on the shallow side.
>
> Well, good that you didn't insult me. I'll insult you then. If a Christmas
> card means nothing to you, then you are an idiot.
Hmm... Interesting. Stooping to insulting when rationality fails. Notice
that there are millions of people worldwide for whom Christmas cards are
meaningless.
For your own good, I hope that you are just an immature youngster.
car...@colorado.edu
Dilbert (talking to the PHB): I am ready to follow in your
footsteps [to get into management]. But I wonder if a
lobotomy is actually necessary.
PHB: No, we just put you through "quality training".
Walter Roberson
Alec Mihailovs <al...@mihailovs.com> wrote:
>Well, good that you didn't insult me. I'll insult you then.
Alec, when I look on mapleprimes, I see many postings from you,
and several bits of contributed code. The volume of the work you
have done there suggests that you enjoy assisting other people.
I know that in comp.soft-sys.math.maple you have contributed a
number of useful answers.
Having that impression of you, that you try hard to help others,
I have been having trouble understanding why you sometimes appear
to go out of your way to put people down when they have -disagreed-
with you, even though they have not attacked you.
For example, in an earlier thread, you wrote in response to me that,
"It was a mistake that I tried to help you - I didn't realize at that
moment that you are a sysadmin - i.e. belong to the category of
people that can't be helped."
That was in the context of a discussion where at no time did I mention
your character or heritage or religion or association with any group,
or otherwise address anything other than what you had actually
written.
My experience, over the last 20 years of contributing technical
assistance via Usenet, is that the most -respected- contributers are
those who are polite, who refrain from insulting others, and who
respect that other people have different viewpoints and different
needs. Such contributors are -listened to-, and their opinions sought
after -- whereas other posters who might have a deeper technical
knowledge but accompany it with an "acid tongue" often get ignored or
shunned.
When someone offers someone else a personal insult, the result is often
that the recipient stops really listening to the offerer -- and the
recipient might start looking for ways to show that whatever the
offerer says is wrong (you know what they say about choosing one's
enemies ;-) ). When the insult is withheld, there is much more of a
possibility that the other person may say, "Ah, I did not know that",
or "You have convinced me", or "Your interpretation seems reasonable,
but I don't quite see how this particular bit fits in; let's work
together to resolve this."
Thus I would suggest to you that you would likely find that you
would be able to help people even more effectively if you were to
more often pause and ask yourself, "Is it really helping anything
by saying this about the -person-? Is it not sufficient to make
my point by discussing the -ideas-?"
Regards
Vladimir Bondarenko
Alec Mihailovs
news:0yaAf.186087$tl.45800@pd7tw3no...
>
> For example, in an earlier thread, you wrote in response to me that,
> "It was a mistake that I tried to help you - I didn't realize at that
> moment that you are a sysadmin - i.e. belong to the category of
> people that can't be helped."
> That was in the context of a discussion where at no time did I mention
> your character or heritage or religion or association with any group,
> or otherwise address anything other than what you had actually
> written.
That's not exactly true, Walter. You mentioned something that I found
unappropriate, otherwise I wouldn't respond that way. By the way, I used to
be a sysadmin myself for quite some time, so I don't find belonging to that
group a bad thing. The truth is though that, contacting with many users
problems, many of us (I mean sysadmins) accuire some amount of arrogance,
independtly of our wishes. This (rather small, I should say) amount of
arrogance in your previous replies to me in that thread, was, probably, the
thing that triggered such a response from me.
> Thus I would suggest to you that you would likely find that you
> would be able to help people even more effectively if you were to
> more often pause and ask yourself, "Is it really helping anything
> by saying this about the -person-? Is it not sufficient to make
> my point by discussing the -ideas-?"
Well, Walter, in this case (that is significantly different from your case)
that person was not discussing the ideas, he didn't even understand what
they were. He told me what he thinks about me - that I am a shallow person,
so I told him what I think about him - that he is an idiot. I didn't try to
help him (and that is different than in a thread with you - originally I
tried to help you). When I am trying to help people, I don't call them
idiots.
Alec
Alec Mihailovs
>
> For your own good, I hope that you are just an immature youngster.
Well, if you are not an immature youngster, that makes your postings even
worth.
In general, I wonder why my postings in this group get so many responces
from people with IQ measured in milligrams.
I don't want to say that lower intellectual classes should keep silent.
However, if your inner child forces you to get involved in a discussion
about things that you don't understand, please to make sure to get a Ph.D.
first and preferably from a good school (as I did).
Alec
Roman Pearce
It's disappointing to see you pursue such a low level of discussion
here. Maybe you should take a break from this newsgroup (and the
internet generally) for a couple of days. I find that helps,
especially when Bondarenko is posting a lot :)
Roman
Alec Mihailovs
news:1137781301.7...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> This exchange reminds me of one Dilbert strip:
That's absolutely true - at least from my part. As usual, anything that I
write has some joke in it (even Maple code). Some people just don't have
sense of humor and nothing can be done with that. One guy wrote to me that
he didn't have a sense of humor originally, but he developed it by studying
for 3 years all research on humor that he could find. And still, as he
wrote, he couldn't find anything funny in what I wrote to him. (I wrote to
him that our exchange is a competition in stupidity - every next letter is
more stupid that previous and that he won that contest.) He tried to find
out if he really won, or not.
Alec
Alec Mihailovs
news:1137803626....@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Roman,
Thank you.
It is always nice to get an advise from a guy who would rather buy
Mathematica than went on 3 Bahama's cruises.
Alec
Vladimir Bondarenko
writes Date: 20 Jan 2006 16:33:46
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.symbolic/msg/6a5af0befdf9392a
RP> Bondarenko is posting a lot :)
Why don't forget about all these personal matters, and
focus on a really bad, deep problem?
I do not know, if you have Maple for free, but I am one
of millions of Maplesoft's customers who paid it out of
his own pocket.
The data we keep calculating and part of which you will
see soon shows that under leadership of the Maplesoft's
owners and top officers, the Maplesoft's engineers keep
crippling Maple on a large scale.
Ask NASA, Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Raytheon, Intel,
Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, Hewlett Packard, Ford,
Philips, Siemens, Baxter, Fujitsu, Glaxo why they keep
visiting our sites?
Felix Rawlings
> "Felix Rawlings" <fr...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:pan.2006.01.20....@yahoo.com...
>>
>> For your own good, I hope that you are just an immature youngster.
>
> Well, if you are not an immature youngster, that makes your postings even
> worth.
>
> In general, I wonder why my postings in this group get so many responces
> from people with IQ measured in milligrams.
>
> I don't want to say that lower intellectual classes should keep silent.
:-) :-) You are really hilarious in your childishness :-) :-)
Alec Mihailovs
> Ask NASA, Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Raytheon, Intel,
> Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, Hewlett Packard, Ford,
> Philips, Siemens, Baxter, Fujitsu, Glaxo why they keep
> visiting our sites?
>
> http://maple.bug-list.org/maple-crisis.php
I just looked there for the first time. Excellent work!
I noticed my name once or twice mentioned and some photos from my Maple
page.
I don't know if that will be useful for you, or not, but I want to post here
my message deleted by moderator (Laurent Bernardin) from one of the Maple
forums,
Here it is:
"Seeing the direction in which Maple is developing and caring about my
student's future, I decided to switch from Maple to Mathematica in all my
courses, starting today. Fortunately, it is the beginning of the term and it
is not too late to do that."
Also, I want to say that one of my (ignored) recommendations to Maplesoft
was to hire you as a tester.
I didn't realize that they refused your proposal for submitting a tremendous
amount of bugs for just about $2,300 per month. That's just ridiculous.
Alec Mihailovs
http://math.tntech.edu/alec/
PS Originally I thought that Felix Rawlings is just a name that Laurent
Bernardin was using for posting on Internet - but after his words about
using Axiom and Maxima (that, by the way, made a great commercial for them -
even idiots can use them), I started doubt that - Alec
Felix Rawlings
> PS Originally I thought that Felix Rawlings is just a name that Laurent
> Bernardin was using for posting on Internet - but after his words about
> using Axiom and Maxima (that, by the way, made a great commercial for them
> - even idiots can use them)
You seem SO happy with your Christmas card, that maybe next year, if you
are a good boy, Santa might leave a present for you (gasp!)
Alec Mihailovs
I think, I know who Felix Rawlings is - it is the guy posting in
sci.math.symbolic in 2002 under the name of Peter Kosta (thinking about
himself that he is Tesla and Wolfram is Edison). He was fired by Wolfram
just before that.
Alec
-
Felix Rawlings
> I think, I know who Felix Rawlings is - it is the guy posting in
> sci.math.symbolic in 2002 under the name of Peter Kosta (thinking about
> himself that he is Tesla and Wolfram is Edison). He was fired by Wolfram
> just before that.
Nope, I have never posted as Peter Kosta (whoever he may be) and,
no, I have never been an employee at Wolfram. Don't be sad though - I'll
be sending you a Christmas card, to help you overcome your disappointment.