Thread: Unix Popularity
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Old 5th July 2008
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Oko Oko is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DrJ View Post
*sigh*



For me, that is making 2D and 3D CAD drawings, solving rather large sets of PDEs (say, a few hundred) using the CAD drawings as the geometry input, optimizing the device through this, submitting the drawing to a clean room and to a laser fabricator to make the gizmos, obtaining real-time laboratory data (including photomicrographs and videos) to get the device performance, abstracting items from and rearranging PDF documents, writing the grants, and submitting grant applications through grants.gov. There's lots of other tasks involved, but this is the core of what I and my people do.

The software available for Linux can *almost* do the entire chain, but not quite -- there is nothing that I am aware of that is really comparable to SolidWorks or AutoCAD, its integration into PDE packages and acceptance by various fabrication shops. Solaris on SPARC is in the same boat, but not on Intel architectures. BSD has nothing that is native (well, the OSS stuff works, but that is not enough), and Linux emulation does prove to be a challenge (see the lists for constant references to getting Mathematica to run, for example).
First of all I mean no offense by my previous post. I was strongly disagree with your ideas but I would not attack anybody personally. You obviously talk from your professional experience I talk from mine.

Yes there is NO AutoCAD for Unix and if I had my own shop I would run Windows for CAD. AutoCAD is arguably one of the best applications written for Windows OS. Guess what. When the NASA needs CAD, 2D, and 3D animations do you think that they use Windows. NO, they use Silicon Graphics (Irix in the past now Linux) but I guess price tag of couple hundred thousand dollars for complete systems is little bit to much for an average Joe
We have quite a few of those at U of Arizona but you have to deserve the access to them.

I also happen to work at the math Department (U of A) which is world known for its applied mathematics and although my field of expertise is Dynamical Systems based on ODEs I happen to know people who work on PDEs, Fluids,
Turbolence, and similar things. For small numerical computations of the type couple hundred PDEs they use Linux clusters (DeLL PCs). For big one they use Cray 3 and Los Alamos PPC based machines (we have joint program with them). I guess you are well aware that Cray 3 doesn't run Windows.


I have to repeat something that somebody already said. People needs to get the job done and they will run whatever it is necessary, cost effective, and do the work. They do not care about BSD vs GPL (unless there are afraid of legal problems) , they do not care if it is Windows, Unix, or VMS. They do not care if it is MIPS, Sparc64, Motorola, or i386. All they care is to do the work.


P. S. By the way my friend who is one of the principal coders of GAP (he is German mathematician but lives here in Arizona) uses OpenSUSE for the past ten years. He used NetBSD in 90s but it was not user friendly for him. I also never said that BSD is very popular as a Desktop, Workstation platform. See one of my first posts. I still have to see anybody at my department running OpenBSD like me on his desktop. It is mostly Ubuntu and Debian around me.

Last edited by Oko; 5th July 2008 at 08:11 PM.
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