🚀 go-pugleaf

Today, S-PLUS 6 Professional for Windows has been released.  Over 2 years in
the making, this version represents one of the most significant updates to
S-PLUS ever. I won't go over all the new features here, but suffice it to
say that S-PLUS 6 is very cool (if I do say so myself!). For full details,
check out the S-PLUS 6 website at
http://www.insightful.com/products/splus/splus6win.  Instead, if I may
indulge the list, I'd just like to mention some of the many contributors to
S-PLUS.

My thanks go the Insightful development and doc teams, particularly the
project leads Rich Calaway and Stephen Kaluzny, for their hard work on the
S-PLUS engine, interfaces, and documentation. The Insightful Research
department produces statistical software components for S-PLUS, and I'd
particularly like to give credit to Jim Schimert (missing data), and Doug
Martin and Kjell Konis (robust statistics).

S-PLUS 6 went through three Beta versions and three Release Candidates, and
the feedback we got from more than 200 testers was invaluable -- thanks to
everyone who gave us comments, suggestions, and bug reports.  I'd
particularly like to thank David Brahms, Mark Bravington, Laura Chihara,
Cesare Furlanello, Steve McKinney, Albert Nigrin, Brian Ripley, Peter Shaw
and Johnathon Swinton, for their patience and effort in helping us improve
the beta versions (any remaining errors are of course ours).  I'm grateful
to Insightful's QA and Support teams and their director Kim Leader for all
their help in investigating and responding to feedback.

There have been many contributors to S-PLUS outside of Insightful.  There
are too many to list here (and I apologise for the omissions!) but I'd
particularly like to give thanks to Terry Therneau (the author of the
survival analysis code), Doug Bates and Jose Pinheiro (NLME), Bill Meeker
(reliability), Bill Venables and Brian Ripley (MASS) and Frank Harrell
(Hmisc/Design).

Especially I'd like to give thanks to the pioneers of S: Bill Cleveland,
Trevor Hastie, Rob Tibshirani, Rick Becker, Allan Wilks and colleagues and
particularly John Chambers, the "father of S", without whom S-PLUS would
never have existed.

And on a personal note, I'd like to thank Bill Venables, who as my mentor at
Adelaide Uni got me started on the whole S-PLUS thing, for being such a
great guy.

Enjoy S-PLUS 6.  I look forward to hearing your feedback -- feel free to
email me and let me know what you think.

Cheers,
# David Smith

P.S. S-PLUS 6 Professional will be shipping all this month to maintenance
customers in North America; international customers will receive theirs a
few weeks later.  The Network and Standard editions will follow later this
year.  If you're at the JSM in Atlanta, stop by our booth and see S-PLUS 6
in action!

--
David M Smith <dsmith@insightful.com>
S-PLUS Product Marketing Manager, Insightful Corp, Seattle WA
Tel: +1 (206) 283 8802 x360
Fax: +1 (206) 283 0347

Insightful Corporation provides analytical solutions leveraging
S-PLUS, StatServer, S-PLUS Analytic Server and consulting services.
See www.insightful.com for details.

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