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.
So it can be done, simple as that.
I’ve just discovered Thonny! I’m not sure of the exact advantages over just vanilla Python though. Maybe because it’s an IDE.
It really depends on the course, but I think for general undergrad stuff, Python should be capable for most things.
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.
Yeah, the theft comes from stealing someone’s labour, rather than their products. But it depends on the situation though.
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.
Yeah, then other languages should be allowed as well.
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.
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.
I see. That’s a bit rough that we require proprietary software to graduate.
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.
I’m not sure how it works in the US but where I’m from, the way lessons are conducted are typically like this:
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.
What do you say to people that maintains the POV that it’s theft?
What do you say to people whose position is “you are stealing their work; nothing is free”?
Of course, without an operating system, all you have is hardware and other devices. But I meant for the casual desktop user, this does not really matter for them I don’t think. I’m sorry, I forgot to put it in the question. Obviously operating systems must exist, I get that, but I mean that for a desktop user, who treats their computers as bootloaders to the browser, so to speak, will different operating systems be relevant for them, i.e. the majority of users?
Time to go to Linux Mint
Man, why do people hate apt so much? Maybe because I’m a filthy casual but I never really had any big problems with apt.
Yikes, I forgot about the All-Snap Ubuntu Desktop!
This is interesting! Thanks for sharing!