Comments on: The next Mathematica

By: thm

thm — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 03:27:10 +0000

@Michael– I’m even more a GIS hobbyist than a Mathematica hobbyist; in particular, I don’t have Arc(View|Editor|Info|GIS) so I have no basis for telling what might be easier in Mathematica than with a standard, professional GIS product. And Wolfram’s SHP import documentation is pretty sparse, so I can’t say how easy my ideas would be to realize. But with the DC GIS data, I’d like to do things like map walking distances to Metro stations or parks or grocery stores, using actual sidewalk routes, and compute proximity-based “scores” along the lines of walkscore.

@Jon–Thanks for the clarification; I’ve updated the post.

By: Jon McLoone

Jon McLoone — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:36:12 +0000

To clarify our upgrade policies: We have had a long standing policy of offering upgrades paths from at least the previous two feature releases (major or minor) and any number of maintenance releases. In that respect there is no advantage in naming it Mathematica 7 rather than 6.1. The naming is purely to reflect the large amount of new functionality.

Currently we are briefly providing upgrade paths back as far as 3.0 (released 1996).

If you transfer your license from a single machine license to a network license, you will be able to use Mathematica from any machine on your local network without the need to take Premier Service. I would however recommend Premier Service anyway.

By: Michael Croucher

Michael Croucher — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:29:00 +0000

I’m the beta tester who’s notes you found. I should be getting my full copy of mathematica soon so if you have any questions or anything you’d like me to try out for you then feel free to ask.

I know we have some GIS users at my University and I’d like to put together a couple of quick Mma demos for them eventually but I have no idea what would get their attention since I know nothing about the subject. Any ideas would be gratefully received.

Cheers,
Mike