> I'm currently crunching large databases. I use Win software (Stata,
> RATS, Matlab, Gauss, and occassionaly R and Mathematica). There are
> Linux and Mac versions of all this, but there's an awful amount of
> sunk capital (human and cash) in the Win versions that I'd hate to
> give up. That's why, if I buy the Mac, I envision my launching them
> from Win, not OS X. OS X I'd use for basic text processing, browsing,
> e-mailing, photos, etc.
I've been very impressed with Parallels, and the price is quite reasonable--$80, the last time I looked, and $40 for the upgrade last summer. The first release of 3.0 was not very buggy and the update arrived quickly and fixed all my problems. It also gives you the ability to run other OSes for special purposes. (Keep in mind I've got a lot of memory in my MacBook.)
> One other thing -- the data input from one key provider is through an
> Excel ad-in that sucks the data off the web. I cannot but use Excel,
> which I've always liked, by the way. No other spreadsheet matches it.
Excel is the product from Microsoft that earns my grudging admiration. I know that simply thinking of the spreadsheet was the breakthrough there, but Excel is an awfully fine implementation thereof--a little too good, really, as I've had to turn "spreadsheets" into "databases" way too often (which then leads to Access, and then to hell.)
John A