Re: It costs how much?!!?!

[Bill <billybobsuzanne(at)my-deja.com>]

Nick Bower <bowern@ses.curtin.edu.au> wrote:
> i received word from IDL product manager some time ago that as of 5.4,
> were giving the student version the ass.  As they should - array size
> limitation.  hoh!  Instead, an "academic" version for US$495 would be
> introduced.  Of course this is still out of reach for grad students in
> say, Australia, where this translates to AUD$950 ...

I have heard similar things about RSI dropping the 'student' version and
making a 'real' version available at a discount... It still works out to
be $1000 cdn which is 1/2 the price, but still too much money for me :(

> Bill - if you're a linux user, you may try PyDL (plug).
>
> http://nickbower.com/computer/pydl/

This looked very promising until I found that the library (DSLIN) you
built all the graphics around is propriatary and without source.  Free
for linux (yes) but the binary is built for your system (i.e. me with
solaris x86 and linuxPPC machines is out of luck) ... too bad, like I
said, it looked very promising.  There is no way you can build around a
GNU graphics library?

One final note, to those who commented about RSI not being interested in
marketing or selling to graduate students...  That is a very poor
marketing practice!  People are creatures of habit.  If you get all of
the physics graduate students using IDL, then you will have 90% of them
going out to industry and purchasing IDL.  On the contrary, why on earth
would I go out and buy IDL in my new job if I had never used it and
wasn't familiar with it?  We have a matlab licesnse available at school
and I have switched to it... the license is much more flexable and the
people at MathWorks are quite keen to have graduate students using thier
products (i.e. personal use student licenses of non-crippled software
are not $1000 CDN).

While long term contracts with government labs and other *large*
corporations will keep RSI-Kodak around for now, someone had best take
notice that only a few graduate students are learning and using IDL
these days.  We are the next genearation and our turn is coming.


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