Re: It costs how much?!!?!

[Randall Skelton <rhskelto(at)atm.ox.ac.uk>]

Both Paul and Nigel have some good points :)

> > In the past, whenever I asked FPS (the previous supplier of IDL in the
> > UK)
> > for a temporary license to use IDL away from our license manager there
> > was
> > never a problem. All they ever asked was how long I required it for.
> > I haven't tried again since they became RSI (UK) but I would hope the
> > situation hasn't changed.
> 
> I have done similar here. All it took was a call to RSI (after
> suitable verification of who and where I was), you run genver (or
> something similarly named), tell them the number it generates, they
> give you another number, you type it in and voila, you have 180 days
> of network free IDL usage.
> 
> Actually, my desktop machine is running in that mode right now to
> allow me to run more than one incarnation of IDL 5.4. The RSI Tech
> Support bods were right on it and got me going in no time.

These are good points... I suppose that I should directly ask RSI if they
are willing to give me a temporary license.  I did send a rather detailed
message to RSI a few weeks back explaining my predicament and nobody
*offered* to release a temporary license to me.  One problem is that I am
not the sysadmin here and have no idea how IDL is licensed in our
department.  I'll look into that though!

> ... For the same functionality, IDL and Matlab are similarly priced
> (academic and site license deals notwithstanding).

Agreed.  I took another look at the pricing, and if you need all the
modules and functions in MATLAB then the price climbs.  The academic
pricing of MATLAB still remains lower than that of IDL for a single
license.

After 3 months of programming with IDL I am getting quite comfortable with
it and I will no doubt continue using it!  Now if only they made a copy of
IDL for LinuxPPC... then I'd buy a license for sure :)

Cheers,
Randall