On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 11:26 -0500, Marc Schwartz wrote: > On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 17:56 +0200, Bi-Info > (http://members.home.nl/bi-info) wrote: > > I certainly have that idea too. SPSS functions in a way the same, > > although it specialises in PC applications. Memory addition to a PC is > > not a very expensive thing these days. On my first AT some extra memory > > cost 300 dollars or more. These days you get extra memory with a package > > of marshmellows or chocolate bars if you need it. > > All computations on a computer are discrete steps in a way, but I've > > heard that SAS computations are split up in strictly divided steps. That > > also makes procedures "attachable" I've been told, and interchangable. > > Different procedures can use the same code which alternatively is > > cheaper in memory usages or disk usage (the old days...). That makes SAS > > by the way a complicated machine to build because procedures who are > > split up into numerous fragments which make complicated bookkeeping. If > > you do it that way, I've been told, you can do a lot of computations > > with very little memory. One guy actually computed quite complicated > > models with "only 32MB or less", which wasn't very much for "his type of > > calculations". Which means that SAS is efficient in memory handling I > > think. It's not very efficient in dollar handling... I estimate. > > > > Wilfred > > <snip> > > Oh....SAS is quite efficient in dollar handling, at least when it comes > to the annual commercial licenses...along the same lines as the > purported efficiency of the U.S. income tax system: > > "How much money do you have? Send it in..." > > There is a reason why SAS is the largest privately held software company > in the world and it is not due to the academic licensing structure, > which constitutes only about 12% of their revenue, based upon their > public figures.
Hmmm......here is a classic example of the problems of reading pie charts. The figure I quoted above, which is from reading the 2005 SAS Annual Report on their web site (such as it is for a private company) comes from a 3D exploded pie chart (ick...). The pie chart uses 3 shades of grey and 5 shades of blue to differentiate 8 market segments and their percentages of total worldwide revenue. I mis-read the 'shade of grey' allocated to Education as being 12% (actually 11.7%). A re-read of the chart, zooming in close on the pie in a PDF reader, appears to actually show that Education is but 1.8% of their annual worldwide revenue. Government based installations, which are presumably the other notable market segment in which substantially discounted licenses are provided, is 14.6%. The report is available here for anyone else curious: http://www.sas.com/corporate/report05/annualreport05.pdf Somebody needs to send SAS a copy of Tufte or Cleveland. I have to go and rest my eyes now... ;-) Regards, Marc ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.