mafbar

joined 1 year ago
[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

This is interesting! Thanks for sharing!

[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

So it can be done, simple as that.

[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've just discovered Thonny! I'm not sure of the exact advantages over just vanilla Python though. Maybe because it's an IDE.

[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

It really depends on the course, but I think for general undergrad stuff, Python should be capable for most things.

[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the theft comes from stealing someone's labour, rather than their products. But it depends on the situation though.

[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, then other languages should be allowed as well.

[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] mafbar@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by mafbar@lemmy.world to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
 

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?

 

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.

 

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

 

I use vim btw

 

I use Windows btw

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