{"id":3018,"date":"2010-11-16T11:48:45","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T10:48:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3018"},"modified":"2011-03-10T15:05:36","modified_gmt":"2011-03-10T14:05:36","slug":"mathematica-8-released","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3018","title":{"rendered":"Mathematica 8 released"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Version 8 of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolfram.co.uk\/\">Mathematica<\/a> was released on Monday 15th November and it&#8217;s a big one!\u00a0 With permission from Wolfram Research , I&#8217;ve been releasing little <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=2985\">preview<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=2933\">snippets<\/a> from the beta version over the last couple of months but they hardly scratch the surface.\u00a0 I&#8217;m really excited about this release and so rather than post a traditional review of the product in a couple of weeks time, I thought that I&#8217;d try something different.<\/p>\n<p>The idea is that this post will grow with new information and observations on the new version as they happen.\u00a0 One of the things I&#8217;ll be focusing on is the new Wolfram portal for site license administrators in the hope that it might help other unlimited site administrators.<\/p>\n<p>So, if you have anything to say about version 8 then post your comments, links and code here.<\/p>\n<p><strong>10th March 2011 &#8211; Wolfram Portal Problems Fixed<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I am very pleased to be able to report that almost all of the issues I had with Wolfram&#8217;s portal have been fixed and Manchester University is beginning the Mathematica 8.0.1 roll-out to its staff and students.\u00a0 A huge thank you to the Wolfram portal staff who have been working with me on this.<\/p>\n<p><strong>9th March 2011 &#8211; Wolfram Demonstrations Site Overhauled.\u00a0 CDF Player launched.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Check out Wolfram&#8217;s blog post on this at <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2011\/03\/08\/innovating-interactive-web-publishing-with-wolfram-demonstrations\/\">http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2011\/03\/08\/innovating-interactive-web-publishing-with-wolfram-demonstrations\/<\/a>.\u00a0 See one of the first interactive .cdf (computable document format) demonstrations outside of Wolfram Research at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3267\">Mathematica: Interactive mathematics in the web browser<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>7th March 2011 &#8211; Mathematica 8.0.1 has been released<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In an email to me Wolfram say &#8216;\ufeff<em>Mathematica 8.0.1 includes more than 500 improvements, including feature, stability, and performance enhancements, as well as documentation updates.&#8217; <\/em>Sadly there is no indication of what any of these changes actually are!\u00a0 That sucks!<\/p>\n<p><strong>10th December 2010 &#8211; Wolfram Portal Problems<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>When I first saw the new Wolfram Portal, I thought that it would make my life as a license administrator (and the lives of my colleagues) much easier and that I would be able to release Mathematica 8 to our University in double quick time.\u00a0 Sadly, however, it has not lived up to expectations and I now feel that it has some serious problems that need fixing before we start using it in anger.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t want to go into details just yet because I&#8217;m working with Wolfram to try to come to a resolution.<\/p>\n<p>For now, however, I am sad to report that Manchester University won&#8217;t be rolling out Mathematica 8 to the masses for a while yet.<\/p>\n<p><strong>20th November <\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Just discovered that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3036\">Image capture is not supported on Linux machines<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Some people have asked me if Mathematica 8 has improved &#8216;undo&#8217; functionality.\u00a0 The answer is no &#8211; undo is identical to v7 (as far as I can tell).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>18th November <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Some new Mathematica 8 coverage:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3030\">How many MATLAB toolboxes make a Mathematica 8?<\/a> I wrote this out of curiosity.\u00a0 The list is longer than I expected.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2010\/11\/16\/programming-with-natural-language-is-actually-going-to-work\/\">Programming with Natural Language is Actually Going to Work<\/a>. Stephen Wolfram discusses the new NLP features in Mathematica.\u00a0 I have to say that it&#8217;s a feature I find myself using more and more.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t like leaving natural language in my notebooks though &#8211; it just looks wrong to my eyes and I worry that the behaviour of my notebook may change if Wolfram were to modify the Wolfram Alpha back-end.\u00a0 It is, however, a great way of quickly looking up Mathematica syntax and that&#8217;s mostly how I use it right now.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>17th November 11:00<\/strong><br \/>\nSome issues with Wolfram&#8217;s new site license administration portal are as follows<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Downloads are much slower than people would like.\u00a0 My beta testers have already requested that we host the Mathematica 8 installers on our local university servers.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve officially requested this from Wolfram. (<strong>fixed)<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>It is not possible to use email wildcards when specifying who can request licenses or not.\u00a0 For example, if the requesters email doesn&#8217;t end with @manchester.ac.uk (and variants) then I want it to be automatically rejected with a message of our choice.\u00a0 Sadly I cannot do this which means that we&#8217;ll be doing lots of rejections from people who we can&#8217;t easily verify are are members of our university. (<strong>fixed<\/strong>)<\/li>\n<li>The site license admins get an email <strong>every single time<\/strong> someone requests a license from us.\u00a0 A once a day digest would be much more useful!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>16th November 15:50<\/strong><br \/>\nI have my own copy of Mathematica 8 up and running and I&#8217;ve started playing with it a little.\u00a0 Just tried the following two commands on my desktop machine to see if I can get the CUDA interface working<\/p>\n<pre>Needs[\"CUDALink`\"]\r\nCUDAInformation[]<\/pre>\n<p>Mathematica 8 needs to load something from Wolfram&#8217;s servers in order to complete this command and it&#8217;s taking an age.  Several minutes in and it&#8217;s only at 17%.  I guess Wolfram&#8217;s servers are being hammered right now (either that or there&#8217;s a local network problem).  Definitely a down-side of cloud-based computing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>16th November 15:00<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A colleague and I have been poking around the new Wolfram site license administrators portal and overall we are impressed.\u00a0 There are a few issues to iron out before we feel confident enough to open Mathematica 8 to all Mathematica users at Manchester but the system appears to be a vast improvement on what has gone before.\u00a0 This may be the fastest release to site I have ever performed.\u00a0 Sent Wolfram tech support about a trillion questions (sorry guys!)<\/p>\n<p><strong>16th November 12:30<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Our site license has been upgraded already!\u00a0 Now to get my head around the new portal and see what needs to be done to get the goodies out to Manchester Uni users.<\/p>\n<p><strong>16th November 10:30<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>My employer, The University of Manchester, has a full site license for Mathematica and I am one of the administrators of this license.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve already had my first request from a user who wants to upgrade to version 8 (very keen these Mathematica users) but Wolfram haven&#8217;t yet upgraded the site license from version 7.0.1.\u00a0 So, even I, as the administrator of an unlimited site license can&#8217;t get my hands on the goodies yet.\u00a0 Hopefully this will change soon because we&#8217;ve got a lot of work to do internally before we release it to our site.<\/p>\n<p><strong>16th November 09:00<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve just read Stephen Wolfram&#8217;s blog post about the new <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2010\/11\/15\/the-free-form-linguistics-revolution-in-mathematica\/\">free-form linguistics in Mathematica 8<\/a>.\u00a0 It all looks very awesome but it seems that Wolfram Alpha is used to process the free-form input.\u00a0 This leads me to wonder about the following questions<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How much of the free-form linguistic functionality will you get if you are offline?<\/li>\n<li>Will any information about the user be sent to and kept by Wolfram Research?\u00a0 If nothing else then I guess this will give Wolfram some very detailed usage information.<\/li>\n<li>Since it has to go across the Internet to do some of the processing, how much will using free-form input slow things down?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Mathematica 8 around the web<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2010\/10\/07\/why-you-should-care-about-the-obscure\/\">The Owen\u2019s T function<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2010\/10\/01\/new-algorithm-to-make-short-work-of-challenging-problems\/\">Symbolics and Numerics combine to form new integration Algorithm<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2010\/09\/20\/tapping-into-the-power-of-gpu-in-mathematica\/\">Mathematica, CUDA and GPUs<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2010\/11\/10\/how-to-make-a-webcam-intruder-alarm-with-mathematica\/\">Real time image capturing<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"..\/?p=2985\">5 new plot commands in Mathematica 8<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=2933\">Control Theory Sneak Peek<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Version 8 of Mathematica was released on Monday 15th November and it&#8217;s a big one!\u00a0 With permission from Wolfram Research , I&#8217;ve been releasing little preview snippets from the beta version over the last couple of months but they hardly scratch the surface.\u00a0 I&#8217;m really excited about this release and so rather than post a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math-software","category-mathematica"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-MG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3018"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3335,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018\/revisions\/3335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}