Re: Eric Weisstein's MathWorld packages
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg110036] Re: Eric Weisstein's MathWorld packages
- From: David Bailey <dave at removedbailey.co.uk>
- Date: Sun, 30 May 2010 06:47:42 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <htqk64$n99$1@smc.vnet.net>
On 29/05/10 09:44, Syd Geraghty wrote: > Arthur, > > This is an issue I last tried to get resolved in threads of late 2008 - Re: Re: Re: FiniteGroupData[]. > > I believe that MathWorld is a wonderful resource for Mathematica users and access to it should be completely available with the standard distribution of Mathematica. This will probably not happen without a lot of requests from users. > > To reiterate points made back in 2008: > > "MathWorld is the site maintained by Eric Weisstein at Wolfram and he has a couple of downloads of "MOST" packages and utilities needed to properly evaluate notebooks which are available for most pages on the MathWorld site. > > However the downloads are not quite complete and I asked Eric for an updated complete download so that wherever I roamed around MathWorld I could just download that pages notebook and be sure to able to evaluate it right away without hunting for additional packages. > > Our personal systems are getting so sophisticated that we have the capacity to obsolete the current Mathematica design principle which leads to the unnecessary loading of optional packages. All of WRI's packages could be available in the basic distribution and loaded on most of our systems I think. Indeed Mathematica has been moving in recent releases to having much bigger subsets loaded and available (Very noticeable in V7 vs V5)." > > I also added a request for Mathematica to fall in step with other significant complex software systems (such as XCode& iPhone SDKs) which are continuously updated for all users at reasonable fees and, I would argue, produce huge benefits to Apple& its developer base. > > There is considerable utility for WRI and all Mathematica users to have a truly common system to deal with and I believe WRI would derive great commercial benefit eliminating the current mish mash of versions being used by the Mathematica community and maintained by WRI. > > Anyway I hope Eric or some marketing folks from WRI respond. > > > Cheers .... Syd > > Syd Geraghty B.Sc, M.Sc. > > sydgeraghty at mac.com > > Mathematica 7.0.1.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64 - bit) (12th September 2009) > MacOS X V 10.6.1 Snow Leopard > MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB RAM > > > On May 28, 2010, at 4:22 AM, a wrote: > >> I am having a lot of diffculty in installing/using these packages >> (MathWorldPackages, Utilities) which are necessary to use the large >> majority of the files in the Mathworld website. >> >> I have placed both these directories in the appropriate place on the >> path but trying to load the packages<< Utiltities`Plot` i >> getGet::noopen: fail. >> >> Manually loading the packages and running them also seems unstable/ >> unworkable. >> >> I would appreciate any suggestions, I have been trying to resolve this >> issue for over a year now >> >> Regards, >> >> Arthur >> > > I certainly agree that putting Eric's packages into Mathematica would be a good idea. However, I very much hope we will not get continuous software updates! I know these could be turned off, but they would cause intense confusion because one person's 7.0.1 would not be quite the same as another's! Furthermore, if WRI were making continuous updates, it would presumably not be able to beta-test the code properly - which would probably cause the quality to drop. David Bailey http://www.dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk