Licensing has been the most controversial change in IDL 8. The release notes say: IDL licensing is now managed through a 3rd-party solution from Flexera software. You obtain the license through a portal hosted by Flexera, then you can choose to activate the license on a license server or on an individual node-locked machine. This seems like a more convenient solution, but there are a lot of other changes in the licensing for IDL 8. Limits have been placed on the number of instances of IDL running on a machine. Furthermore, the IDL 8. In the past, this has allowed IDL developers to release applications to users who did not need the full IDL distribution, or an IDL license, to run the application. Complaints resulted in a proposed change for the next release of IDL. IDL Project Lead, Chris Torrence wrote on Feb 1: Starting with IDL 8. If you need to use IDL on two machines, you should contact Tech Support or your sales rep for options. Leave a Reply Name required Mail will not be published required Website In comments, you can use or these HTML tags: Authenticate this comment using OpenID. Buy Modern IDL now! But I've always wanted a thorough, concise, up-to-date overview of the the IDL language and its vast capabilities. This is exactly what Mike's book provides in 464 very informative pages... I work mostly in IDL, but occasionally use C, CUDA, and Python. I currently work for the National Center for Atmospheric Research NCAR at the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory. Previously, I worked for Tech-X Corporation, where I was the main developer for , a library of IDL bindings for GPU accelerated computation routines. I am the creator and main developer for the open source projects , , and. Contact me at , , or via email at mgalloy at gmail dot com. For more details about me, see my. TaskDL TaskDL is a task-farming solution for IDL designed for problems with loosely-coupled, parallel applications where no communication between nodes of a cluster is required. Remote Data Toolkit The Remote Data Toolkit is a library of IDL routines allowing for easy access to various scientific data in formats such as OPeNDAP, HDF 5, and netCDF. This book also contains: a thorough tutorial on the core topics of IDL; a comprehensive introduction to the object graphics system; common problems and gotchas with many examples; advanced topics not normally found are discussed throughout the book: regular expressions, object graphics, advanced widget programming, performance, object-oriented programming, etc.