{"id":4268,"date":"2014-09-19T03:06:30","date_gmt":"2014-09-19T08:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=4268"},"modified":"2014-09-19T03:06:30","modified_gmt":"2014-09-19T08:06:30","slug":"virtual-machine-vs-sas-on-demand-for-academics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/virtual-machine-vs-sas-on-demand-for-academics\/","title":{"rendered":"Virtual Machine vs SAS On-demand for Academics"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been pretty pleased with SAS Studio (the product formerly known as SAS Web Editor), so when Jodi sent me an email with information about using a virtual machine for the multivariate statistics course, I was a bit skeptical. Every time I’ve had to use a remote desktop connection virtual machine for SAS it has been painfully slow. I’ve done it several times but it’s probably been like in 2001, 2003 and 2008 when I was at sites that tried, and generally failed, to use SAS on virtual machines.<\/p>\n

Your mileage may vary and here is the danger of testing on a development machine – I have the second-best computer in the office. I have 16GB of RAM and a 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7 processor. Everything from available space (175 GB) to download speed (27Mbps) is probably better than the average student will have.<\/p>\n

The previous occasions I was using SAS on a remote virtual machine I had pretty good computers, too, \u00a0for the time, but 6 -13 years is pretty dramatic differences in terms of technology.<\/p>\n

That being said, the virtual machine offered levels of coolness not available with SAS Studio.<\/p>\n

Firstly, size. I did a factor analysis with 206 variables and 51,000 observations because I’m weird like that. I wanted to see what would happen. It extracted 49 factors and performed a varimax rotation in 16.49 seconds. I don’t believe SAS Studio was created with this size of data set in mind.<\/p>\n

Secondly, size again. The data sets on the virtual machine added up to several times more than the allowable space for \u00a0a course directory in SAS on-demand.
\nThirdly, it looked exactly like SAS because it was.<\/p>\n

Now, I do realize that the virtual machine with SAS is probably only allowable if your university has a site wide license from SAS.<\/p>\n

SAS Studio remains as having the significant advantage of being free and easy. \u00a0It also seems to have morphed overnight. I don’t remember these tasks being on the left side, and while they look interesting and useful, they do NOT<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Encompass all of the statistics students need to compute in my classes, e.g. , population attributable risk<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  2. Explain where the heck my programs went that I wrote previously. I can still create a new program and save a program and it even shows the folders I had previously as choices to save the new program.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    #1 is easily taken care of if I can just find out where the programs are saved, for statistics not available in the task selections, they can just write a program. I’ll look into that this weekend since I have had to get up THREE days this week before 9 a.m. I am thinking I need to get some sleep.<\/p>\n

    \"tasks\"<\/p>\n

    From my initial takes of the latest versions of each, I think I will:<\/p>\n

      \n
    • Use SAS Studio for my biostatistics course because it is an easy, basic introduction AND, once I figure out where the programs are hidden, I can have students write some simple programs. (It may be in an obvious place but sleep deprivation does strange things to your brain.)<\/li>\n
    • Use the virtual machine for multivariate statistics because it allows for larger data sets and, although I did not have a similar size data set in SAS Studio, I am assuming it will run much faster.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

       <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      I’ve been pretty pleased with SAS Studio (the product formerly known as SAS Web Editor), so when Jodi sent me an email with information about using a virtual machine for the multivariate statistics course, I was a bit skeptical. Every time I’ve had to use a remote desktop connection virtual machine for SAS it has…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,11,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","category-statistics","category-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4268"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4270,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4268\/revisions\/4270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}