Nelson Lim <[email protected]> wrote
> Someone told me today that Stata 9.0 is coming out soon. True?
No. Stata 8 shipped January 2003 and, historically, there has been a new
Stata release every couple of years, so someone probably made a guess based
on that.
Shortly after Stata 8 shipped, however, I mentioned that we were moving away
from a 2-year schedule and that, in addition, we would release more new
features via the -update- facility during the release. You have seen that
more recently with Stata's new time-series features. If we were following the
2-year schedule, we would have held those new features to be part of Stata 9.
Instead, we made them available via -update- and there is a new time-series
manual for those who are interested.
I like this policy, mostly because it gives you new stuff for free. But
beyond that, it can take a long time to get an entire institution to update
its software. And as an individual user, it is a little easier for me to
type -update all- than it is to install from scratch. Plus, as soon as you
do the new release, you will start seeing all these ado files that say
-version 9- and everyone who hasn't updated will be out of luck. That is
not to say you never release a new version, but personally I find it really
annoying when new versions are too frequent and it takes time and money to
get modest improvements.
