[email protected]
> A last concern for (at least some) graduate students is
> updates and add
> ons. This is not manual related.
> I don't know what stata can do about it, but administrators
> make the
> Stata folder and the ado folder non user-writable and it looks like
> there is no way of convincing them to type -update all-
> -update swap-
> with the result that we are still using the version out of the CD.
>
> I just found out that it is possible to add ado paths. I'll
> look into
> this more, but I truly hope it is possible to download ado
> files to the
> added path.
>
> Personally, I work from home with my own copy, but it is very
> frustrating not to be able to reproduce my results at the
> department.
I too use my own copy of Stata, while locally there
are also versions under network licences. I guess it's
a universal truth that the willingness of system
administrators to update as frequently as desired
varies inversely with their distance
from you in institutional space, a Newton-type law
of attitude cooling (unless you are the BOSS, of
course, a kind of singularity outside my experience).
However, one tip is simply: charm. When I offered
to turn up at his office and show the University person _exactly_
what to do, I was told in effect that no one had
ever done that for any software he could remember.
Everyone treats such people as dogsbodies and also
assumes that updating is trivial or obvious. It is,
when you know how, but everybody responds well to a
little consideration.
More directly, here is a warning that may be
helpful to some people in some circumstances.
In another local situation, a user found that he
could update ados as frequently as desired, but
not the executable. (This arose out of a local
ruling that only the IT personnel were allowed
to install any software on anybody's machine,
even in individual offices, "software" here being
defined in some Windows sense. ) This colleague
got into a mess when his -scatter- was more up-to-date
than his executable, and most of the graphs he wanted
were no longer possible. There was a remedy, but
beware of your executable and your ados getting
out of sync in this way.
Nick
[email protected]
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