[R] Hardware for a new Workstation for best performance using R

[Dalphin, Mark]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Thomas Lumley wrote:
>> On 3/19/07, Thomas Lumley <tlumley at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 15 Mar 2007, Andrew Perrin wrote: (in part)
>>>>
>>>> 2.) Yes, by all means you should use linux instead of windows. The
>>>> graphics output is completely compatible with whatever applications you
>>>> want to paste them into on Windows.
>>>
>>> This turns out not to be the case.
>>>
>>> It is not trivial to produce good graphics off Windows for adding to
>>> Microsoft Office documents (regrettably an important case for many
>>> people).  There has been much discussion of this on the R-sig-mac
mailing
>>> list, for example, where PNG bitmaps (at sufficiently high resolution)
>>> seem to be the preferred method.
>>
>> On Windows one can produce metafile output directly from R.
>
> Yes, indeed. However, this fact is of limited help when working on another

> operating system, which was the focus of the original question.
>
> 	-thomas

One solution which has not been covered here is to use both operating
systems. For example, I need to present in Powerpoint, yet my work is
done under Linux where I have substantially more RAM and CPU
power. Typically, I'll run my analysis under Linux and then take
advantage of the binary compatibility of the .RData file and move my
final values from Linux to Windows via Samba; I may delete large
intermediate results before the transfer to compendate for my lack of
RAM under Windows.  Some small scripts which may have been developed
under Linux are used to create the plots which are placed in my
Powerpoint presentations. By an large, the plots developed under Linux
drop right into the Windows presentations, although there are
occasional font size difficulties that require adjustments.

Mark Dalphin

----------------------
Mark Dalphin
Dept Comp Biol, M/S AW2/D3262
Amgen, Inc.
1201 Amgen Court W
Seattle, WA 98119