Release Notes for Insightful Miner 7.0 (December 2005)

These release notes are current as of December, 2005. This file contains the following information:

About this Release

What’s New in Insightful Miner 7.0

Known Issues

Supported Platforms and System Requirements

Installing Insightful Miner

Running Insightful Miner

Getting Help in Insightful Miner

Contact Information for Feedback

About This Release

To familiarize yourself with this release, see the manual Insightful Miner 7 Getting Started Guide.  This manual is provided as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file that you can access by selecting Getting Started from the main Help menu in Insightful Miner. The guide references data sets and documents in the examples folder under your Insightful Miner installation directory; you can use these files to familiarize yourself with the functionality in Insightful Miner.

What's New in Insightful Miner 7.0

Note: This release of Insightful Miner was renamed to Insightful Miner 7 to sync the product’s release number with that of S-PLUS 7. Its previous release was version 3.

Insightful Miner 7.0 includes a variety of new features that extend its capabilities. Major additions include:

New FLEXnet license manager

Embedded S-PLUS Engine

Support for 4GT RAM Tuning

Changes to Nodes

Other Enhancements

Fixed bugs

This section briefly describes these new features and other enhancements.

New FLEXnet License Manager

Starting with Insightful Miner 7.0, the FLEXnet license manager replaces the Insightful License Manager for all editions. A license authorization code (LAC) is e-mailed to you when you order your product, and this LAC is required to generate and install a license key. All editions require a license key in order to run. Further information about the license management system can be found in the Insightful Miner 7 Installation & Administration Guide, located in IMHOME/doc/install_and_admin.pdf, where IMHOME is the installation directory.


Embedded S-PLUS Engine

Previously, users had to have a licensed copy of S-PLUS to use the S-PLUS features in Insightful Miner. With Insightful Miner version 7.0, the S language engine is part of the basic Insightful Miner system and does not need to be explicitly installed. The S-PLUS page appears in the explorer pane.

Support for 4GT RAM Tuning

By using Microsoft 4GT RAM Tuning, Insightful Miner for Windows supports the ability to address larger amounts of RAM than the earlier versions were capable of.

Operating systems based on Microsoft® Windows NT® provide applications with a 4 GB virtual address space. The virtual address space is divided such that 2 GB is available to the application, and the remaining 2 GB is available only to the system. The 4GT RAM Tuning feature increases the memory available to the application to 3 GB, and reduces the amount available to the system to 1 GB. While this feature benefits applications that run on computers with more than 2 GB of physical memory, it also increases the RAM available to applications when less RAM is present.

This feature enables applications to use the first 3 GB of the address space on the following systems:

Windows Server 2003 family

Windows 2000 Advanced Server

Windows 2000 Datacenter Server

The following is required to take advantage of 4GT RAM Tuning:

The machine must have at least 4GB of RAM.

The /3GB switch must be specified in the operating system’s boot.ini file. (The installer does not change the boot.ini file. You must add the switch.)

Changes to Nodes

S-PLUS Script Node Supports Big Data

S-PLUS 7 introduced the Big Data library. Historically, S-PLUS was limited in the amount of RAM in determining the size of data it could handle, because all computations were done in memory. The Big Data library provided the ability to work on data out-of-memory using block updating techniques.

You can now indicate in the S-PLUS Script node whether you want to execute the script using the Big Data library. When you use this option, the inputs are passed to the script as bdFrame objects, and the outputs are also bdFrame objects. You can use any Big Data functions to manipulate these objects. Setting the Big Data option also changes how the script treats row handling. For more information, see the Help topic for the S-PLUS Script node.

Support for Detecting Duplicate Entries

Insightful Miner now detects duplicate row entries in data sets. See the Help for the Duplicate Detection node for more information.

Support for Column Reordering

Insightful Miner now supports reordering columns. See the Help for the Reorder Columns node for more information.

Support for Multiple Input Appending and Joining

Insightful Miner now supports appending or joining more than two data sets. See the Help for the Join node or the Append node for more information.

Export HTML has changed to Export Report

Because it now supports more than one format, the Export HTML node has been renamed the Export Report node. It supports exporting reports in the following formats:

HTML

PDF

RTF

PostScript

Graph Node Enhancements

Insightful Miner 7.0 introduces the following changes to the graph nodes:

New Hexbin Plot node: Creates a hexbin plot for a specified set of x and y values, potentially with conditioning columns. See the Help for Hexbin Plot for more information.

New Hexbin Matrix node: Equivalent to the Scatterplot Matrix node, but using hexbin plots, rather than scatterplots.

The Hexagonal Binning node has been renamed Multiple 2-D Plots: Insightful Miner 3.0 included a Hexagonal Binning node for creating hexbin plots, but the node did not provide conditioning and other options common in the S-PLUS Graph dialogs. This node has been renamed Multiple 2-D Plots, because its primary benefit is to get simple two-variable hexbin or scatterplots for multiple different combinations of x and y columns.

Plotting using all rows for most graph nodes: The following graph nodes provide the option either to use sampling through a specified number (Max Rows), or to use all of the rows in the data set (All Rows):

Bar Chart

Box Plot

Contour Plot

Density Plot

Dot Plot

Hexbin Matrix

Hexbin Plot

Histogram

Level Plot

Pie Chart

QQ Math Plot

QQ Plot

Strip Plot

Surface Plot

This option is not available for nodes that add a single point or line to the plot for each row (Scatter Plot, Cloud Plot, Scatterplot Matrix, Parallel Plot, and the three Time Series plots).

Insightful Miner 7.0 also provides the added ability to save plots as Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG) format. You can save files either from the File tab in the node dialog box, or from the File menu option to specify the file type in the graph dialog.

Other Enhancements

The following additional enhancements have been made to Insightful Miner 7.0:

Backwards compatibilty

Changes to Expression Language

Support for reading and writing longer strings

SAS file import enhancements

Dramatically improved Sort, and Shuffle speed

Easier image color specification

Data Viewer improvements

Change to default user directory location (Microsoft® Windows®)

Running available nodes

Support for accessing min/max values for date columns in the S-PLUS Script

Improvements to running and stopping an S-PLUS command in the UI

S-PLUS Script node handles more output data types

Updated JRE

Backwards compatability

Insightful Miner 3.0 worksheets can be opened in Insightful Miner 7.0.

You can have both Insightful Miner 7.0 and Insightful Miner 3.0 installed simultaneously on the same computer. When you install Insightful Miner 7.0, the file extension, .imw, is associated with this version of the application. (That is, double-clicking a file with an .imw extension launches the later version of Insightful Miner, as expected.)

If you want to open an existing worksheet with Insightful Miner 3.0, first start the application, and then click File > Open and browse to the file to open it.

Changes to Expression Language

The function translate(str, fromchars, tochars) has been changed so that the fromchars and tochars arguments can be strings of different lengths. If fromchars is longer than tochars, the "unmatched" characters are deleted.

The following new functions have been added:

startsWith, endsWith, contains, getNew, asJulianMsec, asDateFromJulian, is.na, Inf, ifequal, oneof, prev, diff, tempvar

The expression language also includes additional multiple-argument versions of asDate and ifelse.

Conversion type checking relaxed

While logical values can be created and used within the expression language, they cannot be represented in a Big Data object. The expression language type checking has been relaxed so that continuous columns can be read as logical values, and logical expression values can be output as continuous values, without doing explicit conversions.

When a continuous column value is converted to a logical value, the conversion is:

NA ==> NA

0 ==> false

<anything else>==> true

When a logical expression is output to a continuous column, the conversion is:

NA ==> NA

true ==> 1

false ==> 0

The conversion occurs only when reading column values and outputting the value of the whole expression. Continuous versus logical types are still checked within an expression.

Support for reading and writing longer strings

Insightful Miner 7.0 now supports reading and writing longer strings for a variety of data types. These improvements include the following:

Data Type

Import character string length (max)*

Export character string length (max)

ASCII

32K

32K

Oracle-Direct

 

3999 (varchar2)

2000 (nchar)

1000 (nvarchar2)

< 4000 (varchar2)

>= 4000 (CLOB)

Oracle via ODBC*

1999 (char)

2000 (nchar)

1000 (nvarchar2)

<= 255 (char)

> 255 (long)

Excel

32K

32K

Access 2000

32K Memo field

32K Memo field

SQL Server 2000-Direct

 

4096 (TXT)

255 (varchar -DRIVER ISSUE)

255 (nvarchar)

255 (char)

255 (nchar)

< 8000 (varchar)

>= 8000 (text)

 

SQL Server 2000 - ODBC

7999 (TXT)

7999 (varchar)

3999 (nvarchar)

7999 (char)

3999 (nchar)

<= 255 (varchar)

> 255 (text)

 


*Note the following issues for writing long strings:

Oracle-Direct: If you have two or more columns of long strings, either with strings over 1,333 characters, Insightful Miner writes empty rows to the database.

Oracle via ODBC: If you have two or more columns of long strings, either with strings over 255 characters, Insightful Miner writes empty rows to the database.

SQL Server 2000 Direct: If you export data with strings over 255 characters, the string is truncated. The longer the string, the greater the truncation. For example, for strings of length 3999, they are truncated and inserted into the database as 159-character strings. For strings of length 7999, they are truncated and inserted into the database as 63-character strings.

DB2:  Previously, Insightful Miner created fixed-length strings when exporting data to a DB2 database; however, this design did not allow for long strings to be exported. Now, when you export data to a DB2 database, Insightful Miner creates the columns as varchar, rather than CHAR, to accommodate up to 32,672 characters in a string.

SAS file import enhancements

Insightful Miner now supports importing and reading 64-bit SAS files and compressed SAS files.

Dramatically improved Sort, and Shuffle speed

Insightful Miner has improved the performance for the Join, Sort and Shuffle operations. This enhancement also improves the performance of other nodes (for example, Aggregate) that also perform sorts.

Easier image color specification

In Insightful Miner 7.0, you can use the Edit Graph Colors dialog to set the color value for two ends of a range of image color cells. Select the first cell, hold down the mouse button, and drag the cursor over the last cell to highlight a range of cells. Click Blend Selected Range to interpolate all selected cells between the RGB values of the first cell and the last cell.

Data Viewer improvements

The following enhancements have been made to the Data Viewer:

Tab Order: The Data Viewer now displays the Data View tab first, followed by the variable type tabs.

Text Alignment option. Using the Options menu in the Data Viewer, you can set the option to align text (strings) to either the left or right margin of a cell.

Change to default user directory location (Microsoft® Windows®)

In Insightful Miner 7.0, the Insightful Miner user directory default location now matches the user’s default home directory, as indicated by the operating system. On Windows, this is a location such as "C:\Documents and Settings\user\iminer_work_7_0".

Running available nodes

Previously, when you clicked Run, Insightful Miner would run available nodes; that is, those marked with "yellow" status at the beginning of the run. Although some nodes may have updated to yellow status during the run (as a consequence of running nodes earlier in the chain), it was necessary to click Run again to run the nodes whose status was updated. Now, clicking Run once runs all available nodes, including those that update from red to yellow status during the run.

Support for accessing min/max values for date columns in the S-PLUS Script

In the S-PLUS Script node, IM$in1.column.max, min, mean, stdev values are reported for all columns, not just continuous columns. Under some situations, the IM list passed to the script in an S-PLUS Script node contains elements IM$in1.column.max, IM$in1.column.min, IM$in1.column.mean, IM$in1.column.stdev. Each of these elements is a numeric vector with the min, max, etc. statistics for each of the node input columns. Previously, these vectors would contain NA values for any columns that were not continuous columns. In Insightful Miner 7.0, this is changed so that these values are reported for all types of columns. The interpretation of these numbers depends on the type of column:

Continuous columns: As before, these numbers report the min, max, etc. of the non-NA column values.

Categorical columns: These numbers report the min, max, etc. of the integers used to encode the categorical values. Usually, this is not useful.

Date columns: These numbers report the min, max, etc. of the non-NA date values, represented as floating-point values giving the Julian days plus the fraction within this day. These numbers can be converted to timeDate objects using the timeDate function. For example, if the first column is a date column, the earliest date in this column could be retrieved with timeDate(julian=IM$in1.column.min[1]).

String columns: These numbers report the min, max, etc of the lengths (in bytes) of the non-NA strings in the column. For example, if a string column contained the four values {NA, "a", "ab", "abcd"}, the in1.column.min value would be 1, and in1.column.max value would be 4. The maximum value is always less than or equal to the string width of the entire column.

Improvements to running and stopping an S-PLUS command in the UI

Previously, when you ran an S-PLUS command, the GUI would not allow changes until the command completed (including not allowing you to stop running the command by clicking Stop. Now, running an S-PLUS command no longer freezes the GUI, freeing the Stop button for canceling S-PLUS command line operations and displaying messages in the status bar. Interactive S-PLUS commands (such as History) are also available.

S-PLUS Script node handles more output data types

Previously, the S-PLUS Script node would have problems if the script output objects were named vectors, matrices, or vectors. These are all now output correctly.

If the output data could not be converted to normal column types (double, string, factor, or timeDate), Insightful Miner now displays a warning.

Updated JRE

The Java Runtime Environment has been updated to version 1.4.2

Bug Fixes

For a list of fixed bugs, see the file FIXEDBUG.TXT, located in your base installation directory.

Supported Platforms and System Requirements

Insightful Miner is supported on the following:

Windows

Windows 2000

Windows XP Professional

Windows Server 2003

The minimum recommended system configuration is Pentium III with 512MB of RAM. You must have at least 300MB of free disk space for the typical installation (and, if not installing on your C:\, an additional 50MB free disk space on drive C:\ is required for the installation process).

Solaris

32-bit version for Solaris 8 or 9

You need 340MB of disk space to install either version. For more information on installation and requirements, consult INSTALL.TXT, located in your base installation directory.

Known Issues

Licensing

You must have a C or D drive to successfully run the License Wizard and launch the Insightful Miner 7 application. If you do not have a C or D drive, the hostid shown in the licensing wizard is incorrect, although the wizard completes successfully. When you attempt to launch Insightful Miner, the system fails, giving the following error:

"Invalid Host - The hostid of this system does not match the hostid in the license file".

To correct this error, you must contact Insightful technical support at support@insightful.com (or shelp@insightful.com in Europe) and a new license file will be generated and sent to you.


Windows Display Settings

If possible, set the Display Colors in the Windows Control Panel to use True Color (32 bit).

If the Display Colors are set to High Color (16 bit), the dithering of colors gives overly light images when printing.

If the Display Colors are set to 16 color, the application fails to start properly.

Globalization

Insightful Miner 7.0 is developed and extensively tested on the US English version of Windows. It is not tested on other localized versions of Windows.

Our experience suggests that the application installs and runs properly on European Windows versions (such as French, German, and Spanish) that use only 8-bit ASCII characters.

Internally, characters are represented using an extended character set. However, the read and write functionality only supports 8-bit characters rather than a full Unicode character set.

Insightful Miner is unlikely to work completely on Asian versions of Windows that utilize multi-byte characters extensively. The Read Text File and Write Text File components provide a Text Encoding option that can be set to UTF-8 to indicate that the text file contains multi-byte characters in the UTF-8 format.  The other Read and Write nodes typically do not handle multi-byte characters.

Multiple Tabs Visible on Startup

On Solaris, the first time you start Insightful Miner, you will see two S-PLUS tabs and two Insightful tabs. This problem occurs only the first time you start Insightful Miner.

Interrupt Requests

The computational engine checks for an interrupt request whenever a computational node is ready to process a new block of data. If a computation takes a long time to perform, the node may not check for the interrupt very quickly. In this case you can stop the computation by saving the worksheet and exiting the application. Note that it is possible to save a worksheet while the network is running, so you can exit without losing worksheet changes.

Memory Usage

Insightful Miner cannot always predict the amount of memory needed for an operation. If the operation requires more memory than is available, Insightful Miner attempts to detect this and generate a descriptive error message. In some cases, the operation fails without an error message.

To increase the amount of memory Insightful Miner attempts to access, use the -Xmx argument when you start Insightful Miner. This argument instructs the Java virtual machine used to support the GUI that it should attempt to access the specified amount of RAM for the heap.

On Solaris, define the JAVA_OPTIONS environment variable before starting Insightful Miner. For example:

   setenv JAVA_OPTIONS -Xmx1024m
   IMiner

(You could create a startup script to set the variable.)

On Microsoft Windows, start Insightful Miner from a DOS window, setting the variable. For example:

c:\Program Files\Insightful\Insightful Miner 7.0\IMiner.exe -Xmx1024m

(where c:\Program Files\Insightful\Insightful Miner 7.0\ is your installation directory.)

Alternatively, in Windows, you can change your program shortcut value:

"C:\Program Files\Insightful\Insightful Miner 7.0\IMiner.exe" -Xmx1024m

(where c:\Program Files\Insightful\Insightful Miner 7.0\ is your installation directory.)

The above examples specify 1024MB of RAM for the heap. If the value you specify is too large, the application fails to start.

Reading and Writing Data

If the wrong delimiter is specified when reading a text file, the preview may see the whole row or whole file as a single item and may take a long time to compute.

The status of a read file or read database node does not change when the file is changed external to the program. To re-read the file, invalidate the node.

The read and write database components stop processing when accessing data from a Windows 2000 machine using the Oracle ODBC driver version 8.1.5. The problem is fixed when the Oracle ODBC driver is upgraded to version 8.1.5.7.

All Write database nodes convert table names to upper case. The read database nodes match table names without regard to upper or lower case, so a table named "Table23" can be read by specifying a table name of "Table23", or "table23", or "TABLE23".  Some databases such as Sybase can contain two distinct tables whose names just differ by case.  In this situation, it is possible to retrieve the different tables by using an explicit SQL statement, such as "select * from Table23" or "select * from TABLE23".  To prevent accidentally creating two such tables, all of the write database nodes convert the specified table name to upper case.


Charts

When a large number of charts are being viewed, sometimes there is a lag associated with the chart scrolling that allows the charts to fall out of alignment with the headings.

When you create Trellis graph using the option All Rows for plot types bar chart, dot plot, pie chart, level plot, contour plot, and wireframe, the conditioning columns are treated as categoricals by the underlying plotting function. The strip labels contain the category label specifying the range of each bin as text, rather than specifying the column names, with the width of the bar in the strip specifying the bin range.

Tree Models

When fitting a single tree with a large Maximum Rows value, you might need to reduce the value in Stop Splitting Complexity When Complexity Changes to grow a tree.

File Selection Dialog

The dialog is not able to traverse Windows shortcuts pointing to other directories. If an item does not appear as a folder in the left-hand pane in Windows Explorer, it does not appear as a folder in the file selection dialog.

Files and directories might not be deleted from this dialog.

Font Warning at Startup (Solaris only)

This is a problem intrinsic to running Java on remote X-servers. When the display of the Java application is exported to a remote X-server (like X-Win32), the application asks the X-server to use the same set of fonts that it uses natively. The X-server is a completely different machine which may or may not have all of the fonts.

There are many ways to work around this problem, but adding fonts is the best workaround for X-Win32 (one of the more commonly used remote X-servers):

1. In your Windows tray, right-click the X-Win32 icon and select XConfig.

2. Select the session you want to edit.

3. Select the Font tab, and highlight the line that contains

...\lib\Fonts\75dpi

4. Select the Edit Alias File tab, and edit the file (in Notepad or any text editor) and add the following the lines:

monotype-arial-regular-r-normal--*-140-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1

b&h-lucida-medium-r-normal-sans-14-140-75-75-p-81-iso8859-1

5. Close all open X-Win32 sessions and reset X-Win32 (from the context menu).

Similar solutions exist for Linux and Cygwin users, but this is a problem mainly with Windows users with X-Win32.

Solaris HTML Viewer

You must have access to Netscape for HTML viewers to run in the Solaris version of Insightful Miner.

Installing Insightful Miner 7.0

Installation instructions are available in the INSTALL.txt file accompanying these Release Notes. Different versions of this file are available for Windows and Solaris.

Running Insightful Miner 7.0

Windows

After installing Insightful Miner, the Insightful Miner 7.0 program group appears as an option under Programs when you click the Start button. This program group contains the following options:

Insightful Miner 7.0 Help opens the help system.

Insightful Miner 7.0 launches the Insightful Miner application.

Insightful Miner Release Notes opens the release notes (this document).

Wizard for License Manager launches the Insightful License Fulfillment wizard which generates and installs license keys.

To start Insightful Miner in Windows:

1.   From the Start menu, choose Programs.

2.   Choose the Insightful Miner 7.0 program group.

3.   Choose Insightful Miner 7.0.

By default, the installation program places a shortcut to Insightful Miner on your desktop. If you kept this option during installation, you can simply double-click the shortcut icon to launch Insightful Miner.

Solaris

During installation, a shortcut to the IMiner shell script is placed in a location determined by the system administrator. If this script is installed in a commonly available location in the user’s path, it is directly available by typing IMiner at the Solaris prompt. This script is also available at the top level of the Insightful Miner installation directory.

X-Windows

On Solaris, the X-Windows system is used to display graphical user interfaces. Insightful Miner requires an X-server to be running on the machine displaying the user interface.

Setting the Display

To use Insightful Miner on Solaris, you must be able to connect to your local X window server. Thus, you must have the environmental variable DISPLAY set and the X window server on your local machine must allow Insightful Miner to create windows on your machine; see the Solaris programs xauth or xhost. Typically, if you can run xclock on your machine, then Insightful Miner should also be able to access the X server.

To set your display from a C-like shell (csh, tcsh, etc.), use the setenv command:

    % setenv DISPLAY <display_name>

where <display_name> is the name of your local machine. From the Bourne- and Korn-like shells (including sh, ksh, bash, etc.), use the following commands:

    % DISPLAY=<display_name>;export DISPLAY

You do not need to do this if your DISPLAY variable is set already; check the output from echo $DISPLAY to be sure.

Headless Display for Batch Operation

When running Insightful Miner as a batch process, the intent is often to do background processing on a machine that does not have the DISPLAY set. One approach to handling this situation is to run Xvfb on the machine running Insightful Miner. This starts a "virtual frame buffer" that can be used as a headless display.

Some relevant links are:

http://www.itworld.com/AppDev/1461/UIR000330xvfb/

http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/solaris_graphics.html#4

Start Xvfb and set the display as follows:

      % /usr/X11R6/bin/Xvfb :1 -screen 0 800x600x24 &
      % setenv DISPLAY :1.0

Source code is available from:

http://www.x.org/

Using Insightful Miner for Solaris from a Windows Desktop

Solaris versions of Insightful Miner may be accessed remotely from a Windows desktop using X-server software.  Insightful Miner has been testing with the following products:

Exceed (Hummingbird)

Reflection X (WRQ)

X-Win32 (StarNet)

Cygwin (Redhat Cygwin)

The graphical user interface (GUI) performance of Insightful Miner depends upon the X-server software. The performance of the underlying Insightful Miner engine is not affected.

The following notes describe configurations that have been found to produce the best results. 

Exceed

Version 8.0.0 of Exceed was tested, and no significant performance problems were observed.  When launching Insightful Miner from an xterm, the xterm pops in front of the Insightful Miner application when it first displays, and the Insightful Miner application must be clicked with the mouse to recover desktop focus.  Fonts were smaller than on other X-servers.  Exceed seemed to have the best response time of any of the X-servers.

Reflection X

Version 10.0 of Reflection X was tested, and no performance problems were observed.

X-Win32

When using some versions of X-Win32 to start-up X-applications on your desktop, we have found that the "multiple windows" setting causes some latency in GUI response and some defects in displaying GUI elements.  We recommend running in "single window" mode.

If you are connecting with XDMCP, then running in "single window" mode should present you with a default window manager from which you may run Insightful Miner.

If you are connecting with rsh or rexec in "single window" mode, the application may be displayed in a "raw" X-session that lacks a window manager.  We recommend that you start the Solaris default window manager (/usr/dt/bin/dtwm) using either the X-Win32 "Command" option, or from an xterm on the Solaris host.  Once the window manager has been launched, the Insightful Miner application should run and display successfully.

Cygwin

The open-source Cygwin product - currently sponsored by Redhat - provides a UNIX-like environment that runs on top of a Windows operating system.  It includes a port of XFree86 that provides X-server capabilities.  The X-server utility is /usr/X11R6/bin/XWin.exe, and it is usually invoked from a start-up script in the same directory, named startxwin.sh.

By default, Cygwin installs with the twm window manager, and the startxwin.sh script uses twm as the window manager when launching XWin.  While this works fairly well, we have found that the WindowMaker (wmaker.exe) window manager to be much better in working with Insightful Miner applications.  To use the WindowMaker window manager under Cygwin, make sure that the wmaker package is included when installing Cygwin, and then, following the installation, you must modify the startxwin.sh script to call wmaker instead of twm.

Cygwin also offers the FVWM-2 window manager, but that does not work as well as WindowMaker in displaying the Insightful Miner application.

Recently Cygwin introduced a "multiple window" option for XWin.  This appears to have significant defects at the present time.  We recommend that you avoid using this option.

Getting Help in Insightful Miner

On Windows, the help system in Insightful Miner uses Microsoft’s current help standard, HTML Help. On Solaris, the help system uses JavaHelp.

To obtain help on a particular component in this release, click Help in the Properties dialog for the component. Alternatively, you can right-click on a node in your worksheet and choose Help from the context-sensitive menu. To view the table of contents, index, or search pages for the help system, use the options under the Help menu in the Insightful Miner graphical user interface.

You can access online PDF versions of the Getting Started Guide and the User's Guide. In the Insightful Miner main menu, go to Help and select the appropriate manual from the drop-down list.

Contact Information for Feedback

Please feel free to contact us with suggestions and questions regarding possible bugs in this release.  Bug reports can be sent to the following email address:

bugs@insightful.com

We are very interested in receiving your comments and suggestions for improving Insightful Miner.

General information about this release of Insightful Miner is available at:

    http://www.insightful.com/products/iminer/default.asp

The list of Insightful Miner Frequently Asked Questions is available from:

     http://www.insightful.com/insightful_faq/search.asp