This is a top-page to a few long-running pages of mainly complaints or user-support to do with a popular proprietary piece of numerical software, `matlab'.
The seeds were sown in 2002, when I started using an early version 6 (6.1?) under Linux. My first experience of matlab had been matlab and simulink in some version 5, under ms-win98 with a mere 64 MB of RAM: it had run fine, unlike almost any other program under that system, but as soon as version 6 came along it was much more slow and memory hungry. This, I suspect, was the change from using a native, compiled user-interface, to using a Java-based interface to make the company's job easier at the expense of user experience. Similar or even greater slowness was seen in the Unix versions of 6 and later.
The unix versions have, I fancy (having not much recent experience of the ms-windows ones), more deviances from expected UI behaviour, and more unsolved compatibility problems (e.g. language, keyboard, symlinks); nowadays the unix version represents presumably a minority group of users.
I became so annoyed by so many troubles cropping up, that should have been identified and solved quickly (preferably before any customer came near the program) that I've spent quite a while trying to persuade some changes to happen. The main positive thing I see now is that there does seem to be more attention to getting things working, now, in 2008, that there was then in 2002.
Here is the old, original page of complaints, that has made this area of my webpages be top of Google for several typical `despairing user' search terms.
Here are two letters (well, emails) I've written, the first was unsolicited, then the second was in response to a request for more detail about the problems (which I justified by citing some of my bug report correspondences).
Apart from a few popular links in the above pages, that
people have apparently used to help solve their matlab
problems, here is a stagnant tips
page.
Page started: 2008-03-20
Last change: 2010-09-27