So I got the email from Revolution R. Version 5.0 is ready for download, and unlike half hearted attempts by many software companies they make it easy for the academics and researchers to get their free copy. Free as in speech and free as in beer.
Some thoughts-
1) R ‘s memory problem is now an issue of marketing and branding. Revolution Analytics has definitely bridged this gap technically beautifully and I quote from their documentation-
The primary advantage 64-bit architectures bring to R is an increase in the amount of memory available to a given R process.The first benefit of that increase is an increase in the size of data objects you can create. For example, on most 32-bit versions of R, the largest data object you can create is roughly 3GB; attempts to create 4GB objects result in errors with the message “cannot allocate vector of length xxxx.”On 64-bit versions of R, you can generally create larger data objects, up to R’s current hard limit of 231 1 elements in a vector (about 2 billion elements). The functions memory.size and memory.limit help you manage the memory used byWindows versions of R.In 64-bit Revolution R Enterprise, R sets the memory limit by default to the amount of physical RAM minus half a gigabyte, so that, for example, on a machine with 8GB of RAM, the default memory limit is 7.5GB:
2) The User Interface is best shown as below or at https://docs.google.com/presentation/pub?id=1V_G7r0aBR3I5SktSOenhnhuqkHThne6fMxly_-4i8Ag&start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000
-(but I am still hoping for the GUI ,Revolution Analytics promised us for Christmas)
3) The partnership with Microsoft HPC is quite awesome given Microsoft’s track record in enterprise software penetration
but I am also interested in knowing more about the Oracle version of R and what it will do there.
DECISION STATS 