How bad is it if I can't update Stata?

[ben earnhart]

New job, new computer. New installation of Stata, no admin rights -- so I can't update it. How bad is it if I don't update it? I went looking for a list of what updates have occurred since the installation files were downloaded (I think it's about a year and a half out of date). Is there a list I can refer to in order to see what has been patched? If it's stuff I'd be using that would impact my work, I can probably convince the IT people to run updates for me, but if there's nothing critical that I'm missing, I'll just live and let live. General advice appreciated, but a specific list would be even better. I apologize if my google skills are too weak to find such a list... 13.1 SE, Windows 7.

Thanks!

[Richard Williams]

http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?whatsnew

[Richard Williams]

There are a huge number of bug fixes. A lot of them are esoteric and may never affect you, but it is hard to say. For somebody with admin rights, the update takes the better part of 5 minutes maybe. Harass them to do it.

I assume you do have the ability to get stuff from SSC? If that too is a hassle, you may be able to adapt this advice. I use it on classroom computers that I don't have R/W privileges too.

http://www3.nd.edu/~rwilliam/statsin...a/ndstata.html

EDIT: Congrats on the new job and the new computer!

[Clyde Schechter]

FWIW, I do most of my Stata work on my own computer. But there is one organization I work with that requires me to use their computer which I access over their network. Originally, I faced the same problem as you do: no administrative rights and couldn't update their Stata. Every time there were new updates (discovered on my own computer) I would remind them to update Stata for me. As Richard points out, it takes only a couple of minutes. But eventually they got tired of doing it and they reconfigured the Stata installation in such a way that I could do the updating myself, without actually giving me administrative privileges. I'm not enough of a systems guy to know just how that worked: maybe they just had to change the access bits on a directory or two. But once they trust you, and get tired of being harassed by you, you can probably talk them into this arrangement.

[Richard Williams]

Maybe once Ben has worn them down links like this might be useful:

http://community.spiceworks.com/topi...rtain-programs

http://superuser.com/questions/51292...an-application

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Richard, this is incredibly unsafe!
If you allow the regular user to run Stata under admin account (however encrypted the admin credentials are), you effectively give her FULL CONTROL over the computer because any process initiated by Stata will also be under admin account. So type shell in Stata and you have the admin command prompt.

Ben, the answer to your question depends on the kind of research that you are doing. If the description of your project includes something medical, nuclear, or military, the penalty is close to infinity. If you are doing a class homework, the penalty is trivial. For everything else it is going to be somewhere in between. Windows 95 Eula explicitly stated that it is not designed for "OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, DIRECT LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES, OR WEAPONS SYSTEMS, IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF JAVA TECHNOLOGY COULD LEAD DIRECTLY TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE". There is no such statement in Stata's EULA, but since it effectively uses the same Java it probably is subject to the same warning.

I am seeing users of Stata 9 and 10 periodically, so going for the "last Friday's" update is in overkill. But before reporting a problem, check if you are using the most recent version, and if not, check what was fixed in between yours and most recent. Unfortunately there is no list of known-and-reported-but- not-fixed-yet issues (no doubt it exists internally in StataCorp). So many users can effectively report the same issue multiple times. The only way is to try to search Statalist for it, and +1 if you are lucky to find it.

Best, Sergiy Radyakin

[ben earnhart]

Thanks everybody... Looking over what got fixed recently, 13.1 was pretty darn stable as-is. The odds of encountering a situation where I get errors due to lack of updates is slim. For now, need to pressure the IT people to get SAS mainframe access (the boss is a SAS user) and SPSS installed (our web-survey software exports SPSS with labels and everything, and the Sr Research Scientist is exclusively an SPSS user). So I'll look at Stata updates down the road, once I've fought the other IT battles.

Then I show them the Power of Stata! SPSS is severely limited unless you pay through the nose for all the add-ons, and I find SAS rather clunky and annoying. If I can do in five minutes what takes five hours to program in SAS (and can't do at all in SPSS without an add-on), maybe I can get them to switch. I figure the SEM features with diagrams clients will eat up will be a major selling point.

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Ben,

-usespss- should be able to import the file your web-survey software exports to Stata directly without the use of SPSS.
Especially if your web-survey software is Qualtrics. Let me know if you encounter any incompatibility.

Best, Sergiy Radyakin

[ben earnhart]

Sergiy --

Awesome! I somehow missed that you'd updated it for 64 bit Stata! Now even less reason for using SPSS, though working with one/some of my colleagues it may still be useful.