Hi Stephen, Thanks for the link. It was an interesting discussion and brought back memories of my extremely idiosyncratic approach to computers over my 40 years as an experimental physicist. Before retiring (2 years ago), I used NeXTstations (<$100 from University surplus) for my DAQ and they were faster and better in many ways than modern machines with 100x more CPU power, memory size and disk size. The built-in DSP and very well-written and efficient OS helped. My last grad student didn't like it since it was a one-off and didn't help him learn about NI products (which I hated).
While I am sure I could find an open source data analysis tool suite to replace Igor, the business of doing accurate and convenient drafting is not as easy. All of the inexpensive drawing apps lack the precise and extremely easy to use "snap" features of the Ashlar products. I find that using other products are very tiring - getting lines to connect with some precision and frequently tiny annoying gaps are revealed when printing. Claris CAD copied the Ashlar approach (badly, in my opinion) and dropped the product when Ashlar brought out the lawyers. Many drawing products have similar features, but none are very convenient, in my experience. Cheers, Warren Nagourney On Jan 31, 2009, at 7:01 PM, Stephen Harker wrote: > Hi Derick and Warren, > > On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 05:29:55PM -0800, Warren Nagourney wrote: >> Thanks, Derick. I will look into R. > > I have been very satisfied with R for many purposes. On the question > of other, useful, packages there was a recent article in > http://slashdot.org/ on a similar issue. This was titled: Open Source > Software For Experimental Physics? and is given at this url. > > http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/30/1443203 > > You may be aware of the thread resulting from this article and/or the > programs that were recommended by different people. If not, it could > be worth looking into to see if there is something useful to you > listed. I would expect that several would run under OSX as well as > Linux. > > -- > Stephen Harker s.har...@adfa.edu.au > PEMS > u...@adfa > _______________________________________________ > yellowdog-general mailing list > yellowdog-general@lists.fixstars.com > http://lists.fixstars.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general > HINT: to Google archives, try '<keywords> > site:terrasoftsolutions.com' _______________________________________________ yellowdog-general mailing list yellowdog-general@lists.fixstars.com http://lists.fixstars.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general HINT: to Google archives, try '<keywords> site:terrasoftsolutions.com'