Paul has a good idea... And I would be happy to have Carol Wedekind contact anyone else who may be interested regarding an evaluation copy of our software. Gary Cable -----Original Message----- From: Medica, Paul A [mailto:paul.medica@hp.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 1:00 PM To: Patrick Burns; Gary Cable Cc: r-sig-finance@stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: RE: [R-sig-finance] R vs. S-PLUS Enough with the Tennis match. Gary, why don't you send e-mire a student intro copy of S-Plus with the 1 month expiration control date imbedded and the Fin-metrics toolkit. And e-mire, why don't you download a copy of the R complier at the Ill Univ. website and run some of the shared R code. Make your own decision based on your specific needs. Paul A. Medica Product Reliability Engineering Personal Image & Printing Group Hewlett-Packard Co. o: 360-212-2766 paul.medica@hp.com -----Original Message----- From: r-sig-finance-bounces@stat.math.ethz.ch [mailto:r-sig-finance-bounces@stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Patrick Burns Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 12:31 PM To: Gary Cable Cc: r-sig-finance@stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: Re: [R-sig-finance] R vs. S-PLUS
Gary Cable wrote:
I don't want to detract from the success of the R language, but if I were going to build solutions in a highly regulated industry that expects documentation, official support and standardization -- I would be inclined toward a commercial solution rather than a freeware solution. This decision comes from twenty years of experience of application development.
The usual argument for preferring commercial software is that the commercial software will be better written, tested, documented and supported. The expectation is that the free software will have many bugs, and the commercial software will have few bugs. Perhaps my experience is unusual, but in using S-PLUS for Windows for 4 months I found 2 serious bugs, 2 very annoying bugs and a few minor bugs. In 2.5 years of intense use of R I have found 4 or 5 minor bugs (almost all of which have now been fixed). I don't think playing the "commercial" card for S-PLUS is a good strategy until the point that it has at least as good of quality control as R. Patrick Burns Burns Statistics patrick@burns-stat.com +44 (0)20 8525 0696 http://www.burns-stat.com (home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")
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