Talk:Fivenum: Difference between revisions

Hailholyghost gave his example above, here is another one: most of my work is done on a business PC with 8GB RAM and SAS/Stata/R/Python (and I suspect most professional statisticians work on a daily basis on that kind of machine, with that kind of software). Some of my work is done on a SAS VA server with 256 GB RAM. Still another part of my job is done on SAS EG in a Citrix environment connecting to large Oracle servers (health data for the entire french population). Different machines, different tasks, obviously. Work on server will usually be useful to build summary data that will then be transferred to a PC for modelling or any further computations. That could mean computing boxplot data on server to be used on PC. As an aside, I would not compute this to save space, but because it's statistically useful for some task. Also, there is an extra reason to download summary data, apart from network bandwidth limitation: it's simply forbidden to extract raw data from these servers, to protect privacy (although even on the server it'sthe datasets are anonymized).

While both tasks described above are acceptable, I personally would be reluctant to ask something on Rosetta Code that requires more than a PC, as it's by far the most widespread kind of machine, especially among students, who will likelly benefit most from such a site. But we could also have a category of "heavy" tasks, requiring specialized hardware and/or software, if there are enough users willing to contribute to such tasks (I won't, as my access to such machines does not allow any form of "entertainment" - though to be honest I did once run the Fortran 77 N-Queens program on an IBM z9).