Funny you should mention SPSS as I'm using it right now. It's a fag and I hate it, but it's probably better than doing the same by hand.

Umm... a strange example. Virtually all the biology data in the public domain can be accessed without real difficulty from sites such as NCBI and EMBL. Want the human genome? It's here:

ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/H_sapiens/

"While a tenured professor may see a minor productivity increase by using Amazon Web Services, she can see an order of magnitude productivity increase by enslaving a graduate student to do the same work."

You've made a mistake there, it should be "he can see" not "she can see". Indeterminate gender is represented by he. It is acceptable these days to say "they can see" but "she" is just plain wrong. It's not an easy mistake to make so I presume it's some kind of misguided sexism. The pages of el Reg are hardly the place for misogyny .

Take it from a graduate student as described, the free R statistics language is the way to go!

I am sorry to say that this is a realy annoying merkin habit... I have seen it alot in books where, so as to make it clear to all they are NOT AT ALL SEXIST. They will switch gender, somethimes mid sentence. I have often thought about complaining as it is very confusing for a Dyslexic like me, but then im also lazy.

R is the way to go?

If you want to spend half your time in grad school figuring out how to USE it, then sure! Otherwise, go with something more user friendly.