E1n1verse

By the end of April, I seemed to be stymied in my quest for an affordable copy of MATLAB that I could run on my local laptop. The university maintains a license pool for the base software plus toolkits. I do have access to run a copy from the license server when I’m on campus. It actually worked off of campus too, when I’d been told it shouldn’t, but that turned out to be a mistake. When I reported it, the firewall was closed to the outside world for requests for the license server. That’s where honesty gets you: no MATLAB accessibility from anywhere with an Internet connection.
I was hoping to snag one of the concurrent licenses for my permanent use and offered even to buy an additional one for that purpose as that would be cheaper. I was told that I couldn’t have one and I should investigate the student version of the software. Unfortunately, the student version is only available to students in taught courses, not Ph.D. research students, so that wasn’t any good. I mentioned to Thufir that I’d been turned down, reportedly by the head of software/hardware procurement within our department. Thufir promised to see what he could do. Then, last week, I received an e-mail last week from the lab manager, the person in charge of the procurement. He offered, if somebody would pay for it, to install an academic version of the software on my university-owned equipment for only £525 (~930 US/780 €). That was just for the base software and not also for the toolkit I need.

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