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From: Walter Roberson <roberson@hushmail.com>
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Subject: Re: The major problem with nojvm deprecation in R2008B and beyond
 (OS X only?)
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Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:46:18 -0600
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Brian Arnold wrote:
> We will always continue to support the command line interface (CLI) on 
> the Mac platform for remote connections, but in a future release, this 
> will no longer include Figure window forwarding through X11.

That's quite disappointing, to me at least. The effect is to force me to choose
between the reliability of a Mac and the usability of the application.
I don't have room on my desk for yet another monitor to be able to buy
a Mac to display "locally" (and I already have multiple feeds into my
monitor.)

When I buy a computer, reliability is a quite strong consideration: I have
wasted quite enough of my life already getting #$@$ PC hardware to work,
or rescuing MS Windows from its own follies.

It's like when I go to buy my glasses: when the optician says "You have to go
High Index lens at $750" (plus the frame) I say "Urk! Ulp, Okay then", because
I *need* my glasses to work well in order to get through life. Working with
low-reliability software and hardware is bad for my blood pressure and bad
for my mental state. My unix machine gets rebooted about 3 times a year
(pesky cosmic rays!); for my MS Windows PC it isn't uncommon to need to reboot
3 times just to install a single program :(

Thus when I next upgrade systems (and I'm overdue for an upgrade), if
Matlab isn't going to handle X11 off of Mac OS-X, then my question is
going to be, "Well, how about Octave or MathCAD ? Do they do enough of what
I need?" And if the answer is "Yes, they do", then Mathworks loses a sale
and I go for the Mac; if, on the other hand, Matlab did handle X11 off
of Mac OS-X smoothly, then the question of switching to another package
would not occur.


> We need to make MATLAB a better citizen on the Mac for the majority of 
> Mac customers, and continuing to support X11 is contrary to that goal. 

It is difficult for me to find an interpretation of that sentence under which
I would not consider the sentence to be incorrect. The closest I have managed
so far is that it might not be economically -feasible- to maintain dual support,
or that it might be a bunch of trouble to provide two different binaries, one
for X11 work and one for "native" work. But "contrary" to the goal? No, that
I am having a fair bit of difficulty with.