Average Rating: 
Rating: - Mathematica - Lite, I suppose
I don't own, and have never used Mathematica, the big (expensive) product from Wolfram Research. I put this particular product on my Wish List cause it looked kind of interesting. Turns out, that I guess this is really a scaled down version of Mathematica. Easy to imagine they wanted to be able to get a lower-end product out of the door to lure folks up to the big one.So, it's pretty cool. Calculated Pi up to 1000 decimal points or so, printed out a google so my kids could see it, etc. The only really irksome thing about this product, is they have this section called "Demos", which seems to a set of links to notebooks that you can run only with "real" Mathematica. They have a little parenthetical note at the beginning of every notebook in the Demo section that says something to the effect "You may not be able to run the calculations in this Notebook with the custom version of Mathematica that you have". Um ... duh! Why do I want to see this? It's really teasing, since there is no way I can afford the big product. To be positive, I'll call it advertising. But for $[amount] or whatever, I'd prefer the advertising to be the slick flyers inserted in my product box only, not something in my face all the time. Of course, I think I can probably figure out how to get rid of it also; Mathematica seems to be fairly extensible. Also on the negative, the usability is lacking. The odd syntax I can deal with; the weird keystroking, and the lack of things I just expect to work (like scrolling a text area with a mouse wheel) are the kind of things that bug me to no end. But, in the end, for me, a math- and computer-geek, this is a cool toy.
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