Quoting "Robert G. Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on Wed 21 Nov 2007
05:56:51 AM PST:
On Tue, 20 Nov 2007, Jim Lux wrote:
Octave is nice, but.... the graphics are MUCH better in Matlab, and
there's all those toolboxes full of cool stuff (signal processing,
control systems, maps, etc.)
And, an academic license for Matlab is only $100. That's less than
the textbook likely costs. Granted Matlab isn't quite as cool as
the symbolic
"Only $100" is IMO highway robbery, especially for students.
For a copy that they get to have on their very own personal computer
(as opposed to a shared class license, which is cheaper, on a per seat
basis)?
I don't know that it's highway robbery.. It's comparable to the cost
of a textbook these days. It's less than the cost of a couple concert
tickets or a live theater presentation like "Wicked". (No starving
students buying tickets to see the Stones or the Eagles these days...)
And
toolboxes are typically separately licensed at similarly high cost.
Yes, indeed, that could accumulate pretty darn quick...
Duke has a site license of sorts for students, but for a long time
faculty had to buy their own copies (or departments had to buy a copy
for them) even if they were using it to teach part of a course. If you
have a department with order of 100 desktops, that "only $100" adds up
to $10,000, which is a truly absurd chunk of our department's entire
annual computing budget (outside of the much larger human costs). We
literally would have to let the server/desktop replacement cycle stretch
out to have a hope of covering it.
I think their pricing model is quiet different. If the department buys
the copies and lets the students share licenses, it's less on a per
seat basis.
The individual purchase model is more like a textbook. Your
department doesn't supply textbooks to your students, do they?
And, granted, the academic world IS different in terms of computing
cost models, but for most medium to large businesses, a computer
sitting on someone's desktop costs about $300/month for equipment
lease/replacement, maintenance and help desk support, and a basic load
of software. (about half the cost is equipment, half is support).
In the world of $200 Walmart computers and free-for-the-downloading
Ubuntu, yes, $100 is significant.
With all that said, for engineering types (matlab use is taught and
required in the Engineering school) and for various research groups or
student uses matlab is OK. But if you don't need a toolbox, octave
really is just as good and almost identical in terms of its command set,
and free is a lot better than $100, even for students.
I agree, and use both...
I just get spoiled with the substantially better graphing capabilities
of Matlab, and some of the toolbox things that one gets used to.
Sure, one could probably find equivalents (or write them) for Octave,
but it's nice when it's just right there.
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