Monday, April 04, 2005

i swoon

The release of Stata 9 has been announced.

Update: Granted, that it's $549 with the complete documentation set (and, I must have the complete documentation set) does take a little of the wobble out of my knees.

Update, 1:30pm: I just got the following message from Stata. My good Stata citizenship is going to be rewarded. As Careyoke and Dorotha would say, Awesomely awesome!
-----Original Message-----
From: [address]@stata.com
Sent: Monday, April 04, 2005 12:48 PM
To: Jeremy Freese
Subject: Stata 9
Hello,
We will be sending you a complimentary copy of Stata 9.
I was going to have a sales person prepare a "ship form" (instructions to
shipping as to what and where to ship your package), but I wanted to
confirm the address with you first.

11 comments:

Corrie said...

I am sooooooo jealous. The ed school here just put Stata 8 on the lab computers this quarter...they might be planning to skip Stata 9 entirely.

Corrie said...

Seriously, how can you not be excited about Procrustean analysis and tetrachoric correlations!!!

Anonymous said...

Of course you could just use R for free.

Tom Bozzo said...

I'm jealous, too. The commercial upgrade is nearly $1000 (as my workplace has an older Intercooled Stata release), and it seems that we're on track to spend at least that much in senior-level time just to decide whether to pull the trigger.

Tom Volscho said...

Dammit, I just paid $130 for Intercooled Version 8.

I have R but when I have huge N's I have to use STATA and sometimes the standard errors are different. STATA if you are in practice allows you to do stuff really quickly.

jeremy said...

Tom V.: If you bought Stata 8 in 2005, I think the upgrade is free.

Tom B.: Once you make the leap up from Intercooled to SE, the upgrades aren't any more expensive in subsequent releases. Or at least that is their pricing policy to date.

Anonymous said...

I say unless they throw in a Release 9 t-shirt, you don't accept it. (http://www.stata.com/giftshop/)

Neal

jeremy said...

I haven't bought one of their T-Shirts since Stata 6, so maybe I'm due for another.

Anonymous said...

what is R (besides a letter and a statistic)?

Anonymous said...

R is to Stata as Firefox is to Internet Explorer.
Actually, R is to S as Linux is to Unix is probably more accurate, but maybe less helpful.

It's an open source, incredibly powerful statistical language with a bit of a learning curve, but great flexibility and graphics. More info: www.r-project.org
Neal

Tom Bozzo said...

Jeremy, you're right, Stata pricing (at least for commercial users) allows the Intercooled to SE upgrade to be unbundled from an 8 to 9 upgrade w/o penalty.

Thanks, Brayden, Neal and Bill, for the pointers on R. It's been a while since I've done stupid Unix-like tricks with my PowerBook, and the price is right for home use.