From experience, when doing my thesis:

For my thesis, I had to implement something (DSP) which was part of my advisor's doctorate. This entailed computing a whole lot of constants for a FIR filter. My advisor had implemented this using symbolic computation, which apparently worked up to MATLAB 2007, but not any more on more recent versions. When I tried his code on the school computers, I got no answers, or the code kept on running, so I could not obtain implementation constants for this filter.

Well, symbolic computation did not work either on Octave, but I could install it on all my computers, so I did not need to either buy a version, run with an illegal version or only do my computations in school.

I solved the problem, by the way, using convolution, which was much faster, and always worked.

I suppose that the main reason for people using MATLAB professionally, is in the more advanced tools which are built on top of the basic layer, like Simulink and model-based design, which are missing in Octave. Anyone know how SciLab stacks up in this region against MATLAB?

Indeed, that is why I posted the Groucho Marx quote above.

Allright, you got me on that one. But would the people who are members of the group that likes Groucho Marx quotes accept membership of that group?

How he got in your pyjamas, you'll never know...

I sent the tribe an e-mail stating, "Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any tribe that will accept people like me as a member".

Yes, with B. Gates at the centre of Hell, with Steve Ballmer head first beig chewed upon. Nominations for two other persons?

And reticulating splines is plagiarism from SimCity 2000.

I think Mark Shuttleworth is a Furby (r). The one my daughter has does this also: bla, bla, bla, bla, and then something unintelligible.

They are theorems. They have been proven mathematically.

There is a nice book about composing complex systems from more primitive ones: Structure and interpretation of Computer Programs

Yes, with the whole thing unraveling I too had the thought that Dave Mustaine is, in addition to a good musician, a visionary about such things.

Isn't reactionary by definition not "paleo"?

Clobbering time?

I am a fan of the people who build their own computers from MSI components.

I discovered microprocessors around 1980, when I was 14 years old, but here in little Belgium I was never able to do something with that knowledge at that time, but my interest got me a bachelors degree in electronics, and a good (better) understanding on how software works. I was always interested in FPGA, but it is only since 2010-2012 that I got finally a possibility to do more than programming. I got my master degree in electronics, and on the way I learned VHDL (one of the reasons that I wanted to go for my master degree), and got an interesting school assignment about on the fly reconfigurable hardware and a thesis involving the Spartan-6 Atlys board.

Also, since 2004 I have been working on and off studying Common Lisp, and processor emulators.

Well, since September 2012 I have been designing a simple microprocessor, for which I first did the implementation of an assembler in Common Lisp, and a simulator, and start of this September I finally got around implementing the simple computer system in VHDL. I was surprised how easy it was, given that I only have about 1 to 2 hours a day in the evening to work on things. It is currently a 16-bit thing which uses 64kB of FPGA block RAM.

Thus, with software knowledge and VHDL, it should become even easier to build custom microprocessors.

And I am not even crossing this line. It has always interested me to go for both hard- and software, but due to circumstances I ended up more on the side of software.

Having the room for doing electronics properly is not that easy. One needs a place committed to it, which can not be used by other people in the family. For that reason, I like the concept of FPGA development boards. It lets me do what I want to, without needing to invest in dedicated space.

The Atlys board gives me all I need for growing in the future. The first part should be to make the system run using the on-board serial controller, so that I can control it through a terminal program, having access to a keyboard and a character terminal.

And I am not done with software, because one of my goals is to write a Lisp system for running on the system, and then start to optimize the ISA for better performance. Other things: go to a 32-bit implementation and start using the on-board 128 MB RAM memory.