SAS maintains backward compatibility across releases so a certain amount of oddness in the syntax must remain, unless they want to write a whole new language on top of the same stats engine, which is most likely a waste of developer resources. Plus, programming SAS on non-mainframe platforms really isn't so bad. It is quite a flexible language for data analysis, actually. Ok, so it's not python, but it is totally useable once you've gotten used to it, which takes very little time if you use it with any frequency.

Furthermore, I'm not sure what you consider "large scale" but nothing comes close to SAS in that arena. R, while a very nice tool would choke on the sort of data SAS handles with ease.

unless i am completely misunderstanding you, this seems like a pretty easy hack on any wiki engine. just query the page's title at other wikis and append the content to the bottom. for example: you have a page called Server Farm -- detailing your companies server farm. whenever that page is loaded in a browser, the dynamic content generator in the website downloads the page with the same name from wikipedia, strips out their formatting, and sticks it at the bottom of your page. your users can only edit your local content. this should probably take only a couple hours to fully implement and test.

if you wanted, you could also parse the "see also" section, and fetch those links and add them. or if you want to be a little more clever, you can allow people to embed keywords for relevant wikipedia articles (or other URLs) in your internal wiki's articles and then fetch those, too. in the previous example, say your server farm consisted entirely of apple xserves. you could fetch that wikipedia article and maybe the spec sheet from apple, etc.

yawn.

the site is overloaded. i was using it for about an hour or so. periodically, it would say that the site was too busy (it gave a picture of HAL and an "i'm sorry, dave" error message).

now it seems that the test is over or almost over. it will still let me search for some stuff occasionally, but usually i just get the behavior you described.

from the few dozen queries i executed, i'd say the site is cool, but not amazing. it definitely has a lot of potential.

yawn...microsoft is so last century.

i'm pretty sure griffiths's quantum mechanics has a good chapter on it. that's what we used in (undergrad) QM class.

wolfgang pauli's book wave mechanics looks pretty good. there is a preview on google books. hydrogen atom starts on page 88.

linus pauling's book introduction to quantum mechanics also looks good. preview on google books. hydrogen atom is chapter 5, starting on page 112.

disclaimer: i have not read the last two in full, just skimmed them online. they look quite good, although of course they require a decent understanding of techniques for solving PDEs. as dover editions, they are about $10 each, which seems well worth it to me.

it sounds like you have already decided not to sell, but here is my advice:

sell, you moron. pretty much all new businesses fail. most existing business consider being bought out by a larger company a huge success.

if you are worried that the money you are getting is not enough, sell 51% of the company to them and retain 49% for yourselves, so you basically split the money down the middle, but they have the control that they want.

if you are worried about the autonomy, then sell, make sure there is an employment contract with satisfactory conditions attached, and try that for a while. then quit at the end of your tenure if you are unhappy. ride the gravy train to the top if you still enjoy it.

a big business with "excellent" employment conditions is probably too good to be true, but anything close to that makes this a no-brainer.

make sure the offer is cash, not stock!!!! if it's stock, make sure you can sell it right away. the last thing you want is to be holding all of your wealth in the stock of one company. once you have $50 bn, it's ok if $49 bn is in MSFT shares, b/c you still have $1bn left even if it completely evaporates. (and believe me, gates has lots of other investments). but for the type of money we are talking about, you want cash.

get a good lawyer to straighten this out for you. the $750/hr now will be a pittance compared to the millions it can save you down the road.

actually, it has been widely shown that the correlation between wealth and happiness is very low and if anything, it is negative.

i suppose most people who are "rich" got that way by working 80+ hrs per week, ignoring their kids, families, and friends. either that or your parents were like that and you haven't had to work a day in your life and instead have bounced around the offices of various psychiatrists and rehab centers.

defining success by earnings and what it can buy you is and endless game of self-inflicted misery. you will not be the next bill gates or warren buffett, so there will always be someone with more money than you, nicer toys than you, etc. so you bought the 60" plasma, but now you want a whole movie theater room in your house. your ferrari is pretty nice, but the new lamborghini just came out. a 70' yacht is nice, but wouldn't 110' be so much nicer... and so on.

mo money, mo problems, so to speak.

still, he should sell. most new businesses fail miserably and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

um, AOL bought time warner, not the other way around.

euler - introductio in analysisin infinitorum -- brilliant work of euler from 1748 containing many striking results. english translation available.

bernhard riemann - on the number of primes less than a given magnitude -- riemann's one paper (~15 pages) on number theory, which introduced his famous zeta function (english version available in riemann's zeta function by edwards, a book dedicated to the very rich subtext of this terse paper)

shannon - a mathematical theory of communication -- seminal paper founding information theory

schrodinger -- find yourself a decent exposition of the analysis of the hydrogen atom using schrodinger wave mechanics. learn where all that junk they taught you in high school chemistry actually comes from!

Feynman Lectures on Physics -- comprehensive account from the man who knew physics as well as anyone.

ahlfors - complex analysis -- best text i know of on this subject in mathematics that shows up in the most surprising places in the sciences.

landau & lifschitz - course on theoretical physics -- 10 volumes on modern physics from classical mechanics to electrodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, fluids, etc. from nobel prize winner lev landau.

Fourier Analysis - t w korner -- intro to fourier analysis with many applications (after all, applications are the whole point of fourier analysis) from your basic heat equation stuff to calculating the age of the earth and other interesting things.

i think that in compiling this list, you will find two things to be true:
1. increasingly (in the last century, for example), important work is not (initially) published in books, but in papers.
2. trying to read the original works is fun for about 5 minutes. if you really want to learn, modern expositions in textbooks tend to be far better than the originals.

thank goodness the atomic bomb was invented, so that we could accurately tell the age of whiskey.

exactly. in fairness, the buyout price is in the neighborhood of 1/2 of it's post-crash valuation. and pretty much all of that loss in valuation came in 2008, hardly a banner year for equities. as for the business missteps, well who can say how long those have been festering. Sun probably was drinking the kool-aid and believing itself to be the $200bn infallible titan of industry that it was reported to be in 2000. pride commeth before the fall.

this is one of my favorite games of all time. i had the version for (original) xbox, which may or may not be based on the same code base. i was extremely disappointed--the graphics are just terrible. the soundtrack is one crappy song.

a friend who had a modded xbox ripped it and the whole game was like 250MB. not a whole lot of media files there. hopefully this version will be more polished. at $15 and with online play, who is really going to complain?

ok, nice to get the press coverage but an iPhone could probably handle "thousands" of daily transactions. compared to exchanges processing millions per second, this is not so impressive. a lot of them are using linux (NYSE at least uses it for some stuff, although they use AIX or z/OS for lots of stuff, too). it should come as no surprise to anyone that almost all financial markets operate on some type of unix or linux platform. really, what else would you use?

the top google result for "vim regex" is a geocities page, and a useful one at that.