[beverson]

So I have a friend starting grad school next fall in public health. He'll most likely need to be using SAS, which is some sort of statistical analysis software. They unfortunately don't seem to have put out a Mac version in a long time (big surprise there). He doesn't really know yet how this will work, if he'll be running it on Windows or if it will be running from sort of server, Telnet/X11 style. The problem is I'm trying to convince him to buy an iBook or PowerBook and not a pice of crap PC laptop.

If he would be running SAS through X11 or something, then this seems like no big deal at all. If, however, he has to run it in Windows, I'm trying to find out if Virtual PC would do the trick. I can't imagine it wouldn't, and have read about older versions of SAS being run that way, but their Personal Learning Edition support page specifically says that they don't "support" running it that way:

http://support.sas.com/rnd/le/qanda2.html

More specifically, it says:

Q. Can I run SAS Learning Edition on a Macintosh using Virtual PC ?
A. SAS does not support running SAS Learning Edition 1.0 on anything other than Microsoft Windows platforms (NT 4.0 and higher).


This to me is ambiguous and doesn't specifically rule out using it on Virtual PC since he would be technically running it on Windows 2000 or XP while in emulation.


Anyway, does anyone have experience using SAS on a Mac, either through Virtual PC or with X11? I really want to try and get him to buy a Mac, but I also don't want to screw him over if it's gonna run really slowly or if he's going to have tons of problems with it.

[G-Force]

I have installed SAS 8.2 on Virtual PC with windows 98 and it runs fine albeit quite slowly on my Powerbook G4/867 Ti. I would suggest that if your friend will be using SAS for any significant amount of time to either run version 6 through classic or buy the PC laptop. Running it on OS X through VPC for any extended amount of time is too frustruating because of the speed.

I'm not familiar with running it through telnet, so I can't provide any input there.

[beverson]

Originally posted by G-Force:
I have installed SAS 8.2 on Virtual PC with windows 98 and it runs fine albeit quite slowly on my Powerbook G4/867 Ti. I would suggest that if your friend will be using SAS for any significant amount of time to either run version 6 through classic or buy the PC laptop. Running it on OS X through VPC for any extended amount of time is too frustruating because of the speed.

I'm not familiar with running it through telnet, so I can't provide any input there.

Nuts -- that's too bad, but thanks for your input and honesty, G-Force. Was that Virtual PC 6 or 5?

Also, could you (or anyone else) give me some more info on SAS version 6 for classic Mac OS? How does it stack up feature wise to the latest Windows version -- 8.x, right? Since I don't exactly know what he'll be using it for, and frankly neither does he yet, I realize that might be a tough question to answer. But I don't want to recommend this to him as a solution if it will restrict what he is able to do with the software. He's also not very computer savvy, so I'm hesitant to recommend something two versions behind, and on a different platform from, what his classmates and professors will be using.

[G-Force]

I'm referring to performance on Virtual PC 6.

Version 6 of SAS for classic has all the basic statistical functions. I'm not sure of all the major differences, but version 8 has more of GUI than 6. Version 8 also has the enhanced program editor which I think makes it easier to code your programs. IMHO, version 8 is easier to use overall.

You say that you don't know what he'll be using SAS for and that he's not computer savvy. Is SAS required for the class he's taking? If not you may want to consider a more user-friendly (albeit less powerful) statistical package (i.e. SAS JMP) for his analyses. There is quite a learning curve for writing SAS code especially for someone that's not savvy with computers.

[beverson]

Originally posted by G-Force:
You say that you don't know what he'll be using SAS for and that he's not computer savvy. Is SAS required for the class he's taking? If not you may want to consider a more user-friendly (albeit less powerful) statistical package (i.e. SAS JMP) for his analyses. There is quite a learning curve for writing SAS code especially for someone that's not savvy with computers.

Yeah, I was wondering about that myself. I really don't know much more than what I've told you, largely because he doesn't know. He told me, "Yeah, they use this program called SAS," but he didn't know how, what, or how much. He said he couldn't even find it online, but before he finished the sentence I had Googled it and found the SAS site, if that gives you any indication of how un-savvy he is. I doubt he would even know how to quickly get any more information about this.

Anyway, my assumption has been, after reading online a little bit about this software, is that he probably will be using modules or pieces of code that the department has bought or paid to be custom developed. I don't know if this makes sense since I've never used or seen it in my life, but I can't imagine him writing any code whatsoever.