Derive Software no longer available!?
tomcee...@yahoo.com
it will no longer be selling it after June 2007.]
I wonder if/hope another supplier picks up and supports this product!
TomCee
David W. Cantrell
Look at
<http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.symbolic/msg/9cb205803370173c>.
If you contact Soft Warehouse Europe and get some information, perhaps you
might post it here. I'm guessing that there might be an agreement with TI
which forbids Soft Warehouse Europe from selling Derive to anyone in North
America or Australia, but I sincerely hope my guess is wrong.
David
D Herring
The Derive user group may know something.
http://www.austromath.at/dug/
Though I didn't see any mention of this change in issues 65 or 66 of
their newsletter.
Vladimir Bondarenko
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.symbolic/msg/ba732b3f0e412993?hl=en&
T> I wonder if/hope another supplier picks up and supports
T> this product! [Derive -- VB]
Hello,
Derive 6.1 is the world's #1 computer algebra system in terms
of the math correctness/price ratio. It is unique in many
respects, including its size, speed and scope. I had been a
Derive beta tester during 1992-2005, to its very most recent
release by Texas Instruments.
An independent review of Derive by Ray Girvan, with a title
I fully agree with, Derive 6: Far too good just for students
http://www.scientific-computing.com/scwmarapr04derive6.html
"Maths education is the main market for Derive, but Ray Girvan
thinks this software should have a much wider appeal..."
Derive 6.1 is available via Chartwell-Yorke Ltd
"Derive 6 Explore symbolic and numeric maths solutions from
school to professional level. Particularly useful at KS4 and
above. New version 6 shows calculus steps, exchanges data
with TI calcs, has sliders to change values, and more."
For someone willing to download a 30 days fully functional
demo (about 6 Mb only), here you are
http://www.chartwellyorke.com/D6setup.exe
I can add that the VM machine shows that Derive 6.1 is the
only commercial computer algebra system with a surprisingly
low amount of defects. In contrast to Maple, Mathematica and
MuPAD, regression bugs are practically absent in Derive
during all its development history.
By the way, imho there is much interesting stuff in Derive
newsletters here
http://www.derive-europe.com/support.asp?dug
There is a number of tips and tricks here (in German, but
you can still understand easily the mathematical formulae)
http://www.austromath.at/dug/faq/f_faq.htm
A group for the users of Derive, Derive XM, Derive for
Windows, and the Texas Instruments TI-92/89 is here
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/eDUG/
I have no commercial interest in Derive meaning I earn not
a single cent for its advertisement but I adore this system.
If you have any question about Derive please feel absolutely
comfortable free to contact me at
v b @ c y b e r t e s t e r . c o m
Cheers,
Vladimir Bondarenko
VM and GEMM architect
Co-founder, CEO, Mathematical Director
http://www.cybertester.com/ Cyber Tester, LLC
http://maple.bug-list.org/ Maple Bugs Encyclopaedia
http://www.CAS-testing.org/ CAS Testing
JB
seems to have any idea why TI would buy it, fail to market it
successfully, and now kill it. There was a rumor for a while that
they were going to put Derive features on their new nspire calculator
that that didn't happen. Does anyone understand what TI's strategy
was with Derive?
DP
This is a major problem with commercial software. You never know
if TI did some deal with a CAS competitor which includes
scratching Derive. This resembles what happened to Macsyma, where
an unknown investor bought Macsyma and stopped to sell it further.
The result is a huge waste of intellectual effort.
In contrast open source software can not be stopped, and in the case of
CAS this is very important because a lot of efforts is invested on the
long term by users in their own software.
Dan
JB
> This is a major problem with commercial software. You never know
> if TI did some deal with a CAS competitor which includes
> scratching Derive. > Dan
I wonder if TI bought and killed Derive because they considered it
competition for their cas calculators?
Vladimir Bondarenko
JB> I wonder if TI bought and killed Derive because
JB> they considered it competition for their cas
JB> calculators?
1) TI-89/92+ etc has a built-in CAS ala Derive but
far much weaker in computational sense than Derive.
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.symbolic/msg/afdf2d9b45df7359?hl=en&
2) "It was a capital mistake by Dave Stoutemyer to sell
Derive to TI... I always knew ADR was against this, in his
soul, badly... they would have more fame and money if would
have continued by their own."
amzoti
> On Jul 10, 3:13 pm, tomcees_m...@yahoo.com writes:
>
>
> On Jul 10, 3:13 pm, tomcees_m...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>
>
> > It appears that TI will no longer be producing Derive. [TI page says
> > it will no longer be selling it after June 2007.]
>
> > I wonder if/hope another supplier picks up and supports this product!
>
>
> - Show quoted text -
I wonder if they could be convinced to place Derive into the open
source community in order to further progress this wonderful
scientific tool (and I mean that in general for all CAS efforts)?
It seems odd to me that they would ever think that a package like this
was competition for a calculator - and maybe they were thinking of
merging the symbolic engine or a subset in the calc - but that doesn't
appear like it will work in this decade and the next (not enough
horsepower yet).
I wish that more of these would combine the benefits of all the others
and create a mega-CAS project which includes all the wonderful
packages that include such topics as number theory, abstract algbra,
algebraic geometry as well as all of the standard topics we all know
and love.
Jaap Spies
>
> I wish that more of these would combine the benefits of all the others
> and create a mega-CAS project which includes all the wonderful
> packages that include such topics as number theory, abstract algbra,
> algebraic geometry as well as all of the standard topics we all know
> and love.
>
>
Look at:
Jaap
rjf
"
is what the website says.
http://www.derive-europe.com/main.asp
As far as motives for killing Derive, I would assume that it was
losing money, or that TI thought it could make more money by selling
TI-Nspire with (parts of?) Derive in it.
If one assumes that TI was losing money on Derive, it seems like it
would not be a good business for someone to acquire Derive and sell
it. If one assumes that TI-Nspire is similar to Derive, it would not
make sense for TI to give away Derive.
I would be quite surprised if TI "did a deal" with a CAS vendor to
suppress Derive. .
dp says "This resembles what happened to Macsyma, where
an unknown investor bought Macsyma and stopped to sell it further."
(unknown? His name was Andrew Topping.)
vb, quoting from himself, does not validate his statement about ADR.
(presumably Albert Rich, one of the authors).
I have not used Derive myself for many years, but my colleague W.
Kahan has praised Derive for making the right choices (when one or
more of the M's made the wrong choices) in various situations. Kahan
has always been generous with his advice; I think Stoutemyer and Rich
were more prone to making the suggested modifications that some
others.
dp's view that open software cannot be stopped strikes me as odd. In
fact, MOST open software is stopped. Look at how many inactive
projects there are on sourceforge. If you really want Derive, come up
with a business plan, get some investors, and buy it from TI. Asking
TI to give it away, um, I guess that's a plan, too. If I owned TI
stock, I would not be keen on that plan.
(newsgroups trimmed to sci.math.symbolic)
Vladimir Bondarenko
http://www.sagemath.org/SAGEbin/microsoft_windows/sage-vmware-2.6.zip
ended in an incomplete/broken zip file of about 95 MB.
JB
" I wonder if they could be convinced to place Derive into the open
source community in order to further progress this wonderful
scientific tool (and I mean that in general for all CAS efforts)?"
Not likely. That would be giving away an asset and TI doesn't give
away anything. They don't even give away information unless it suits
their purpose. For example, from time to time people ask questions on
their nspire site, such as does their download software called TI-
connect work with the new calculator called nspire. Such questions
simply get ignored. If and when they want you to know something you
will be told. It's a strange culture.
Vladimir Bondarenko
(TI, HP, Casio, ...)
Although now rare in college and professional settings,
graphing calculators are still common in high-school math
education. But as full-scale computers become cheaper,
smaller and ever more ubiquitous, the future of standalone
calculators is increasingly unclear.
As the world's broadest and deepest mathematical system,
Mathematica's computational capabilities vastly exceed
anything that can be achieved with a calculator - and
provide a completely different level of educational
possibilities.
While calculators are easy to use for simple operations,
they rapidly become unwieldy when many steps are required.
Mathematica, on the other hand, is immediately able to offer
a fully scalable interface with dramatically more compelling
graphics and interactivity, as well as greater systematic
learnability.
With its unique document-centered interface and full support
for symbolic mathematical notation, Mathematica provides a
complete environment for educational computing, seamlessly
combining math, visualization, interactivity, programming
and text.
With support for the latest interface and presentation
systems, together with immediate access to thousands of
student-modifiable interactive educational demonstrations,
Mathematica redefines the role of calculation in the classroom.
Jaap Spies
> Two attempts to download SAGE here
>
> http://www.sagemath.org/SAGEbin/microsoft_windows/sage-vmware-2.6.zip
>
> ended in an incomplete/broken zip file of about 95 MB.
>
I'm sorry. I don't no why, but you can try a mirror site.
Jaap
D Herring
I thought they bought it to learn how to design a more effective CAS for
their calculators. It doesn't hurt that this simultaneously killed a
potential classroom competitor. Symbolic manipulation was the only
thing TI calcs ever had better than HP.
Vladimir Bondarenko
DH> It doesn't hurt that this simultaneously killed
DH> a potential classroom competitor.
Albert D. Rich's letter at the moment of selling Derive to Texas
Instruments floored me with its hidden intense pain. It was like
a cry from the depths. I will try to find it and quote.
DH> It doesn't hurt that this simultaneously killed
DH> a potential classroom competitor.
A person of deep intuition, Albert D. Rich felt this and feared
this. David Stoutemyer's chase for sausage and other petty home
thing was the main trouble.
Do not sell your uniqueness,
Vladimir Bondarenko
VM and GEMM architect
Co-founder, CEO, Mathematical Director
http://www.cybertester.com/ Cyber Tester, LLC
http://maple.bug-list.org/ Maple Bugs Encyclopaedia
http://www.CAS-testing.org/ CAS Testing
Vladimir Bondarenko
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 1999 11:43:57 -1000
Reply-To: "Soft Warehouse, Inc. (Albert Rich)" <[log in to
unmask]>
Sender: derive-news
From: "Soft Warehouse, Inc. (Albert Rich)" <[log in to
unmask]>
Subject: DERIVE Comes of Age
Content-type: multipart/alternative;
To all DERIVE Users:
On 6 August 1999 Soft Warehouse, Inc. and all its assets,
including DERIVE, were acquired by Texas Instruments
Incorporated. There has been much concern expressed on
this NewsGroup and elsewhere about the impact this will
have on the future of DERIVE. As one of the principal
authors of the system, I would like to respond to these
concerns. The views expressed are my own, not TI's.
However, note that I am working with TI as an independent
consultant.
At the risk of over anthropomorphizing DERIVE, I make the
following metaphor:
More than one person has told me that DERIVE has many of
the traits of a woman (intuitive, persistent, eager to help,
etc.). I have been working on DERIVE and her predecessor
muMATH for 20+ years now. And like any 20 year old, she is
ready to go out into the world on her own. Like any father
would be, I am proud and elated that she has come of age,
but also deeply concerned about her future.
The following facts have convinced me that passing the DERIVE
torch to TI is the right thing to do:
Soft Warehouse, mostly through the efforts of my partner
David Stoutemyer, has had a close working relationship with
the Educational and Productivity Solutions (E&PS) division
(formerly the Calculator division) of TI for more than seven
years.
During that time E&PS has successfully developed and marketed
products (the TI-92 and TI-89 calculators) based in large part
on computer algebra (CA) software developed in cooperation
with Soft Warehouse.
The investment TI made to acquire Soft Warehouse provides clear
evidence that TI appreciates the value and potential of CA in
general and DERIVE in particular.
TI faces strong competition in the graphing calculator market.
To remain competitive in this market, TI will need to provide
math and science educators with an integrated set of math tools
(both hardware and software) available on a broad range of
platforms.
Writing and debugging completely new software for each product
would be prohibitively expensive, difficult to support, and not
provide the required integration between products. Instead, it
makes much more sense to write an interface specially designed
for each product, but to base all the products on a single math
engine. TI appears to want to base its products on the math
engine that powers DERIVE.
Theresa Shelby designed (in collaboration with me) and
implemented the DERIVE for Windows interface (both version
4 and the forthcoming version 5). Theresa and David Stoutemyer
are now employees of TI. I am a consultant working with TI.
Presumably we were hired by TI for our expertise in developing
compact, efficient CA systems, as well as for our experience
in marketing mathematical software over the last 20+ years.
Therefore, we have a unique opportunity to significantly
influence the direction E&PS takes in the future.
Our agreement with TI makes it clear that the top priority for
Theresa and me is to complete, thoroughly test, and release
version 5 of DERIVE for Windows as soon as possible. Thereafter
I will continue to work on the math engine that powers DERIVE.
Freed from the responsibilities of running a company, I can
devote more of my professional time and creative efforts to
extending the mathematical and programming powers of DERIVE.
TI has the resources, personnel, and know-how required to
effectively promote DERIVE in the current highly competitive
global software market in a way that Soft Warehouse could
never hope to do.
In addition to its own considerable programming talent,
TI has the stature to attract first-rate programmers and
mathematicians to enhance DERIVE's performance and
reliability, and to extend the range of its capabilities.
Also authors will be more likely to write and publishers
more likely to publish math and science books based on
DERIVE if TI's name is on the product.
Several users have expressed concern that DERIVE will be
transformed from an efficient and compact CA system into
a behemoth much like our competitors'. E&PS pioneered
development of the graphing calculator, and more recently
(in cooperation with Soft Warehouse) has produced calculators
having symbolic math capabilities. The relatively modest
computing power and memory size of such portable platforms
gives E&PS a vested interest in preserving DERIVE's compact
size and high performance. Also, the calculator paradigm
that DERIVE uses fits in well with that used on products
designed for math and science education.
muLISP (the LISP system in which DERIVE is written) and
DERIVE (and its predecessor muMATH) have steadily evolved
over the past 20+ years. The mistakes and successes I made
in the process have taught me a great deal about how to
implement a computer algebra system. I am not going to
live forever. I am determined to pass this knowledge on
to others more capable than me so that DERIVE and/or her
successors will continue to be used and improved. Thus,
as soon as version 5 is released, one of my primary
consulting duties will be to transfer this knowledge to
software engineers at E&PS. I and the other authors greatly
appreciate your loyalty and enthusiasm for DERIVE, and your
concern about her future. But, now it's time to get back
to work on version 5!
Aloha,
Albert D. Rich
Co-author of DERIVE
P.S. We recently received the following email from my
friend and colleague, Julio Valella of Texas Instruments:
================================================================
Al, David, and Theresa:
I am delighted to be assigned as the Texas Instruments
DERIVE Product Manager.
In my new role I have a monumental challenge, to continue
your long established excellence in development and support
of the Derive family of products. And to help you complete
Derive 5.0 and ship, promote, and support it worldwide with
our renown TI-Cares(TM) Educator Support services.
We are a mere few days into this challenge! We are learning,
organizing, training our staff, and marshalling resources
required to maintain uninterrupted delivery and support of
DfW 4.11 while we prepare to launch and support DfW5.0
worldwide. Some of the forthcoming TI-Cares(TM) services
Derive enthusiasts should enjoy in the near future include:
+ Workshop Loan Program - Texas Instruments free loan service
to educators and professionals who wish to conduct training,
academic presentations, teacher workshops, and on site
institutional demonstrations.
+ Conference Exhibits - Texas Instruments exhibits at most
math and science conferences worldwide. Beginning this November
Derive will be displayed with opportunity for hands on
demonstrations, literature, applications and support services
information.
+ World Wide Web information dedicated about Derive will
continue at
http://www.derive.com/
Soon global exposure and support for Derive expands at
http://www.ti.com/calc/docs/software.htm
As the Team Leader of TI-92 development my emotional connections
with Derive and its development team run deep. Now I am eager to
get to know and work with Derive customers and enthusiasts
worldwide.
With a little help from all our friends I'm confident we will
meet our challenge and measure up to the high expectations you
have conditioned in Derive users!
Cheers,
Julio Valella
Derive Product Manager
Texas Instruments Educational & Productivity Solutions
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ti.com/calc/
JB
After that optimistic outlook by Julio Valella, now Derive is dead.
Why would TI buy a product that had a very good reputation and kill
it? I've never understood that. If it wasn't intentional, it had to
be through incredible miss-management.
DP
rjf wrote:
...
> I would be quite surprised if TI "did a deal" with a CAS vendor to
> suppress Derive. .
Are you that much ingenuous about business practices? The only motive
of companies like TI and their shareholders is profit, irrespective
of possible damages on the society, culture, knowledge, or the
environment.
> dp says "This resembles what happened to Macsyma, where
> an unknown investor bought Macsyma and stopped to sell it further."
> (unknown? His name was Andrew Topping.)
Obviously known by a fews but unknown in the CAS world (the first
reference to Andrew Topping by Google is a man arrested for
plotting to kill Nixon).
...
> dp's view that open software cannot be stopped strikes me as odd. In
> fact, MOST open software is stopped. Look at how many inactive
> projects there are on sourceforge. If you really want Derive, come up
> with a business plan, get some investors, and buy it from TI. Asking
> TI to give it away, um, I guess that's a plan, too. If I owned TI
> stock, I would not be keen on that plan.
I am astonished that you don't see, as a scientist, the parallel between
the building of software like CAS and scientific progress. Only public
science can spread efficiently because each interesting results is
immediately available to all. Closed science and technology
(as developed in companies and in the military) is inefficient despite
huge investments because it leaks slowly to the open world (by reverse
engineering, spying, etc.), in fact most of it is forever lost.
Your sourceforge argument is particularly weak, sourceforge is actually
incredibly active. You are impressed by the long tail of inactive projects,
but the minority of active projects are those that count for the future.
With such an argument you could as well take the scientific publications
to show that most of them are forgotten, therefore public science would
be a failure. Ridiculous.
Finally to come back to Macsyma, instead of being completely dead, the
open source project Maxima (http://maxima.sourceforge.net/) indeed
has resurrected part of the knowledge lost in the Macsyma buyout.
Similar efforts like Axiom are now put together at the Sage site
(http://www.sagemath.org/). My point is that such efforts can not
suddenly be stopped like several closed source CAS projects have
been in the past. The only thing that kills open source projects
are better open source projects.
Dan
Frank J. Lhota
news:1184226590.8...@n60g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
Frankly, I'm amazed at how many products that Borland had purchased that
were sent to the scrap heap soon after.
Chip Eastham
I'm interested in seeing an example or two
of what you are thinking of, re: Borland.
regards, chip
Frank J. Lhota
news:1184275246.7...@m3g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
They bought a CM package called Sorcerer's Apprentice. Soon it was
abandoned. Then they bought a popular programmer's editor called Brief from
Solutions Software. After buying Brief, Borland did no updates, and
eventually dropped the product. Then they bought the newer program editor
CodeWrite from Premia. That they actually did maintain for a while, but that
product was also allowed to lapse.
> regards, chip
>
Chip Eastham
> "Chip Eastham" <hardm...@gmail.com> wrote in message
Thanks, I now have an appreciation for
the sorts of products at issue. Loss
of support for version control software
would be painful!
regards, chip