At only £195+VAT, the Mathematica 7 Home Edition is just too tempting as an executive toy but it still seems to be far too buggy to be taken seriously. After just a few hours of playing around, a variety of bugs have become apparent. Every Mathematica user fears the dreaded error box that marks the loss of all unsaved data: Fortunately, a really serious bug in the FFT routines of Mathematica 7.0.0 was fixed for the 7.0.1 release. This was a showstopper for customers of our time-frequency analysis add-on . The severity and ubiquity of this bug really highlights just how little quality assurance goes into Wolfram's software which, in turn, goes to show how a unimportant correctness is in the creation of commercially-successful software products, even if they are used in aerospace engineering ! The first bug is in the new support for parallelism in Mathematica. Although it is only supposed to handle 4 cores, it produces pages of errors when run on a machine with more cores such as...
