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A story of MATLAB piracy
  • Well, one context that I left out was that the course was pretty simple. We learned some basic loops, graphing, matrix operations, and writing some basic scripts to solve some problems. If you need a higher level functionality, then you'd probably struggle with GNU Octave, I don't know.

  • A story of MATLAB piracy
  • I'm actually from Asia. I don't understand requiring students to purchase a certain resource, if they're already available elsewhere, or if similar resources already exist. I mean I understand it, I just don't like the whole system.

  • A story of MATLAB piracy
  • As another commentor said, it kinda depends on what is the purpose of the course. If the purpose was to actually teach you the MATLAB ecosystem, then yea, sure, teach it all you want, but the institution has to provide the software.

    But for an intro course? The students should probably be able to just use what they want.

  • A story of MATLAB piracy
  • I agree with that. It's similar to Photoshop or Premier Pro. Sure, you could maybe, perhaps use open-source alternatives. But you'll have to get used to a different set of (usually separate) software, dissimilar to what people all over the world uses.

  • A story of MATLAB piracy
  • Even though I'm generally for open-source software, I know that in heavy duty use, highly niche specialisations, and in industries in general it's difficult to find equally competent software. That's why I put emphasize on my specific situation, where it's an introductory course. Heck, we ended up doing what could be done in Python anyway.

  • A story of MATLAB piracy
  • I'm not sure what would have happened had I insisted. I imagine that they'd probably ask us to obtain it on our own though, based on my memory that they were insistent that everybody must have it.

  • A story of MATLAB piracy
  • That's an interesting perspective actually, since it gets into all sorts of weirdness and trickiness of the intellectual property concept. Perhaps because of two factors: (i) we treat digital data as fundamentally different from physical objects, and (ii) theft intuitively implies that the original object is no longer with the owner, but with piracy, you're simply making a copy-and-paste, rather than a cut-and-paste.

  • A story of MATLAB piracy
  • I'm not sure how it works in the US but where I'm from, the way lessons are conducted are typically like this:

    1. Professors hand out lecture notes, typically in the PDF format. So, students will either print or just use their phones/laptops to follow along the lectures. It's either this way, OR
    2. Professors will list out recommended readings for this course, and it's up to you how you obtain the source material. Most people will probably just download the PDFs and take down notes during lectures.
    3. We were never required to buy any books.

    So I'm personally unfamiliar with the "shilling" of textbooks which cost up to hundreds of dollars for practically the same content, which, from what I've heard, is quite common in US colleges. This seems to be a very strange concept to me.

  • A story of MATLAB piracy
  • Yea of course but we're talking about piracy, so when we pirate proprietary software, they'll of object with "nothing is free, you gotta pay". It's either we pay for that, or fundamentally uphold piracy as some means or some ends, or use and support open-source software. Not a lot of choices, really.

  • A story of MATLAB piracy
  • I think I get that as well. I used to talk quite a bit about open-source to my friends, but looking back, it seemed quite preachy (maybe because I was quite young at the time), and it never really changed anything. This is especially the case since open-source (or free software) is a philosophical approach to technology that many people might be unfamiliar with or simply don't care about. I just simply use open-source software, supports devs/foundations, and only will talk the necessary bits if someone asks me about it.

  • A story of MATLAB piracy
  • I mentioned it to a couple of friends, but I think I didn't get it across well to them that GNU Octave is supposed to be syntactically compatible with MATLAB. Also, they're more comfortable using established software since everybody else is using them anyway.

    Speaking about numerical analysis courses, I feel like one should be able to choose what programming languages they wish; the course should just aim to teach the fundamentals/principles of numerical methods, not what language to use. I get that it is much more convenient to streamline software choice, but still, why not use Python over MATLAB for undergraduate introductory courses?

  • A story of MATLAB piracy
  • I'm not sure about that since I'm not in any field that requires MATLAB at the moment. However, my specific case is for undergraduate introductory courses, and perhaps even at schools. To go even beyond this conversation a bit, any numerical / computational / algorithmic principles should probably be taught using Python. I had another numerical methods course where students can use any language they want, either C or C++ or Python. So I know it's possible.

  • A story of MATLAB piracy

    I would just like to share a story, and probably an opinion as well. When I was doing my STEM undergraduate degree a couple of years ago, I took a course in which I had to use MATLAB. I won't disclose too much information, but it was a course involving computation.

    Well, we (the students) weren't given a student/institutional license of any sort, but the course coordinator still insisted on using MATLAB. We took it as an implicit instruction to "somehow" obtain MATLAB. In the end, one guy in our class pirated it and distributed it the whole class.

    Before that though, I did approach my course coordinator, asking them if it's possible to use other software like GNU Octave, which is a clone of MATLAB. Personally I think it should also possible to use any other programming language like Python for example, since the important part is the computation part, in my opinion. They refused any discussion and did not even consider alternatives, instead basically forcing us to "obtain" MATLAB. How else? Well.

    As I have said, we all pirated it in the end.

    I did something quite interesting though, which is that for every quiz, assignment, and projects that we had, I'll run the same exact MATLAB code on GNU Octave, to see if it's compatible. And it is. It works flawlessly. There's only one function that GNU Octave didn't support back the (this was a couple of years ago), and even then, it wasn't an essential feature, you could use other software for that function as well.

    By the end of that semester, I had compiled almost all input/output of the MATLAB code alongside its GNU Octave's counterpart, to demonstrate that we didn't need to pirate MATLAB to get through this undergraduate course.

    Regrettably though, I didn't follow through. So sad!

    Do you think piracy is justified in this case?

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    Will operating systems still be relevant?

    With lots of things being developed through web technologies, and many things being web-based so that it is cross-platform, will operating systems still be relevant?

    We can differ philosophically by using Debian or Arch or Windows or Mac, but if nowadays applications are web-based or developed through something like Electron such that it can run on practically all modern operating systems. what is the relevance of operating systems galore?

    Don't get me wrong I love FOSS and Linux and stuff, but it seems that the paradigm right now is creating web applications, with many things being web-based.

    Am I off, or is this something you also think about?

    P.S. I'm a total noob when it comes to IT, so the question might be weirdly phrased.

    6
    Are there any Malaysians using Lemmy here?

    Just curious if there's any Malaysians using Lemmy here! I looked at Malaysia communities in Lemmy but they seem to be deserted.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MA
    mafbar @lemmy.world
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