David,
I was excited about the pipeline architecture when I first heard about
it, but then I realized that I wouldn't be getting it in my edition of
the software. Whereas I used to have the same S-Plus that everyone
else had, with version 7 I found out that I now had a second-class
version of S-Plus and I would have to pay more to get the full power
of S-Plus, even though I was already paying for the maintainance plan.
It so infuriated me that I didn't even inquire about how much the
upgrade would cost.
Roger
On 7/15/05, David Smith <dsmith@insightful.com> wrote:
> And regarding point 1 below, I'll raise Andy's $0.02 by a penny or so :)
>
> While servers with large amounts of RAM are now becoming available, the
> pipeline architecture and big data library of S-PLUS 7 Enterprise are already
> helping many people analyse multi-GB data sets that would swamp the servers
> Andy describes. (I'll point you to an example at the end of this message.)
> Remember: in versions before S-PLUS 7 Enterprise, you'd often need multiple
> copies of a data set in RAM to actually pass the data through an analysis
> routine. Even if your data was smaller than the amount of RAM available, it
> could still cause the machine to start swapping during the analysis. With the
> big data library, the data is not brought into RAM all at once, so this is no
> longer an issue. If you're getting out of memory errors with S-PLUS 6 today
> (or it's running slowly because the machine is using a lot of virtual memory
> and page-swapping frequently), S-PLUS 7 Enterprise will help.
>
> In addition, one of the goals of S-PLUS 7 was to deliver the benefits of
> statistical analysis across organizations, especially to those that are not
> statisticians themselves. (For more information about what I mean by this,
> see: http://www.insightful.com/insightful_doclib/document.asp?id=168.) This
> includes statistical analysis of large data sets. And while a single
> multi-GB server might be affordable, it's unlikely to be affordable to
> purchase one for each of dozens or hundreds of users. One of the great
> benefits of S-PLUS 7 Enterprise is that it allows the analysis of large data
> sets with hardware already in place, even on modest desktop systems that do
> not have large amounts of RAM.
>
> And finally, while the big data library of S-PLUS 7 enables analysis of large
> data sets, it also adds new capabilities to the S language that apply to both
> small and large data sets, like data preparation tools, SQL data processing,
> and new graphical techniques like Trellised hexbin plots.
>
> If you'd like to see an example of the value these capabilities of S-PLUS 7
> Enterprise provide, Greg Gupton of Moody's will be giving a webinar on April
> 2, showing how he uses the big data library to analyze large data sets and
> create some incredible graphics of the results using the new techniques I
> mentioned. Details are available at:
>
> http://www.insightful.com/news_events/webcasts/2005/08gupton/default.asp
>
> # David Smith
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Liaw, Andy [mailto:andy_liaw@merck.com]
> Sent: Tue 7/12/2005 9:08 PM
> To: 'Thomas Jagger'; s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu
> Cc:
> Subject: Re: [S] Concerns about SPLUS version 7
>
> I'll chip in my $0.02:
>
> 1. I find Insightful's marketing blurb for the big data library
> in the Enterprise Developer version a bit puzzling: I just
> check the price of a dual Opteron 275 server with 8GB of RAM
> at one vendor, and it is under $6500 (with 16GB that jumps
> to over $12000). Anyone care to disclose the price tag of
> the enterprise developer edition?
>
>
>
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