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Cleaning a Vista PC

Posted on 13 Sep 2007 at 12:45

Windows Vista was supposed to be the nemesis of bugs and viruses. Jon Honeyball discovers otherwise.

This is a development platform of quite staggering ability. There's no reason why all scientific, mathematical and physics coursework couldn't be represented in .NB format, and the free Player makes it viewable by anyone. Indeed, WebMathematica is an engine that renders the entire thing into a web page. I strongly suggest you take a look at this stuff: think of it as a next-generation PDF format with interactivity and a level of smarts that will blow your head off.

And then it struck me: Mathematica is 21 years old next year, which makes it about the same age as Excel. Both started out as maths engines, one based around a grid, whereas the other is more freeform. One locks you into a cell-orientated formula-based approach, whereas the other permits freeform equations. Now look at what they've both achieved over the past 20 years. The sad reality is that most people use Excel as a sort of list manager: some do equations, and a few do large-scale models. For each group, the functionality is critical to them at their usage level, although the lightweight users should probably have gone for an easier tool.

Instead, Microsoft has spent the last 20 years sugar-coating the tool. Wizard after wizard has been bolted on in an attempt to make things easier. Wolfram has taken a different approach with Mathematica, adding more world-class numerics and functionality into the core engine. Comparing Mathematica and Excel today is like comparing Concorde to a Cessna, and you're left with the inescapable reality that Excel is a tool for dumb users to do dumb tasks in a dumb way. Take a look outside the box, you might be shocked at what you find. I was.

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