Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

Karmic Koala Ubuntu/Linux 9.2 Preview

I am just about testing the Karmic Koala which is due for launch next week. There is significant amount of Browser Based Operating System in it- it seems like a Cloud OS and Firefox have been integrated. See the following screenshots-

Screenshot-30

Note the ability to send email from the toolbar itself- Also the system speeded up considerably after the upgrade was installed. The striking change was in design and folder structure (it seems that they analyzed the usage data in Canonical to decide what design feature to keep and what not to keep)

Here are more views, and yes the Website http://www.ubuntu.com just went for an upgrade maintenance to cope with next week’s heavy rush or downloading.

Caveat- this is just the beta version but 5 days before launch beta version generally stay faithful to design changes.

Visit http://www.ubuntu.com for a better look- I believe dual boot Windows 7 and Koala are supported that helps you with

trying Ubuntu for fun and Windows for your original work.

IMG_0354

IMG_0356

Portrait of a Lady

Thats a screenshot of Daneese Cooper’s Wikepedia page. Danese was fired without severance by the Intel Capital Series B investors at http://www.reolution-computing.com If this is what you get after a lifetime of working in open Source, maybe I should recommend

people get job with Prof Jim Goodnight, Phd who rarely fires people and has managed to steer his company profitably without an IPO or Series Z funding.

On the other hand I kind of admire ladies trying to work in software companies. They are so few. and look up to people like Daneese to say that yes they can make it big too.

Good bye Daneese. May your big heart rest in piece on your blog  http://danesecooper.blogs.com/.

Screenshot-28

Which software do we use in the office?

Ohri’s Theorem on Decision Management regarding which software do we buy-

1) Assuming no budget constraints

If X be degree of appropriateness of software to a particular use-
where 0 is totally bad and  1 is perfect for use.

Then the probability p of the software be selected = P/ Q where P is total number of users who Know how to Use software (like R) and Q is total number of users who dont know how to use the Software (like Macros or R)

As the number of users begins to increase
P/Q converges to Integral of X dx

Cartoon Citation:

http://www.gapingvoid.com

Karmic Koala versus Windows 7

Windows 7 was launched this week. Karmic Koala ( or Linux Ubuntu 9.10) is being launched next week.

No wonder Microsoft refused to recognize the upgrade revenue in it’s books and is applying conservative accounting for

projecting Windows 7 revenue

( given the Windows Vista failure to launch- 1 failure in about 30 years of successful product launches

Ah Karma

http://www.ubuntu.com/

Ubuntu: For Desktops, Servers, Netbooks and in the cloud

Cloud Computing with Ubuntu

An excellent page on how you can do cloud computing without making Bill Gates richer

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition/cloud/videos

Screenshot-26

Podcasts and videos are better than white papers isnt it 🙂

Lies, True Lies and Statistics

Consider the following data

https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/interview-david-smith-revolution-computing/

Interview of David Smith May 2009

Ajay- Your blog at REVolution Computing is one of the best technical corporate blogs. In particular the monthly round up of new packages, R events and product launches all written in a lucid style. Are there any plans for a REvolution computing community or network as well instead of just the blog.

David- Yes, definitely. We recently hired Danese Cooper as our Open Source Diva to help us in this area. Danese has a wealth of experience building open-source communities, such as for Java at Sun. We’ll be announcing some new community initiatives this summer.

In the meantime, of course, we’ll continue with the Revolutions blog, which has proven to be a great vehicle for getting the word out about R to a community that hasn’t heard about it before. Thanks for the kind words about the blog, by the way — it’s been a lot of fun to write. It will be a continuing part of our community strategy, and I even plan to expand the roster of authors in the future, too. (If you’re an aspiring R blogger, please get in touch!)

And

Danese Cooper’s blog in October 2009

http://danesecooper.blogs.com/

Start the REvolution without me…

Some of you may have become aware of REvolution Computing, a commercial open source company organized around the R Language, when I joined in March of this year.  For the past few months we have been working on a B-Round of funding.  It was an interesting process and I was happy to be working in my first startup company after so many years in very large corporations.

We built a small team to work on “Community Engineering”, by which we meant developing assets both to benefit the R Language community as well as to entice and inform the “Alpha-Geek” community to learn and use R.  We set up an Advisory Board designed to advise REvolution management about decisions relating to REvo and Open Source, and we helped put REvolution R into the Karmic Koala release of Ubuntu.  It was really fun to work in a small, agile team and I felt like I was getting a great education in startups and we were rapidly moving the company forward…Why didn’t I join a startup years ago?

The funding deal closed on Wednesday last week…

Late the next afternoon I received a call from the new COO notifying me that my services would no longer be required at REvolution., effective immediately and with no severance.  Apparently, the company is moving in a different direction.

I was surprised that the new CEO,  wasn’t personally handling this unpleasant task…but I guess that might have been distasteful after the many assurances he gave me and my team last July at OSCON that we were “absolutely critical to the company’s success” and that he would be “making no changes for at least three months after he assumed control”.  Personal courage in difficult situations is rare.

Cloud Computing and GPU ( and some stats softwares)

Statistical Computing on GPU Clouds

While R has shown a lot of promise on running in the GPU environment, I am unaware if other statistical softwares are working to come up with a GPU strategy.

Even though they have a cloud computing strategy, the latest is the customized GPU’s by NVidia for Cloud Computing. This is likely to braing down computational cost of hardware significantly so RAM or Memory Hungry stats softwares that used to run slower on the desktop than other faster softwares could now catch up thanks to the cheaper hardware now available.

R too slow for heavy dataset- get a GPU and Put it on a cloud.

Rent High Performance Hardware by the hour. The High Performance Stats Software would be free.

WPS is though pushing ahead with creating engines for Oracle as well as Teradata while SAS Institute announced a 70 million investment in cloud computing early this year.

WPS is a SAS language syntax software and now run models as well IN SAME EXACT SYNTAX as Base SAS which was created by SAS Institute-

see screenshot from Installation of their WPS 2.4 Version Release

WPS Engines during Setup

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also see an article from the definative guide or website of High Performance Computing HPC Wire or

 Citation

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/NVIDIA-Pitches-GPU-Computing-in-the-Cloud-65217572.html

October 21, 2009 NVIDIA Pitches GPU Computing in the Cloud by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor ——————————————————————————–

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, NVIDIA announced a GPU-powered 3D Web platform. Called the NVIDIA RealityServer, it consists of Tesla GPUs, rendering software and a Web service environment, all integrated into a platform designed to deliver photorealistic image streams via a cloud computing model. The new offering is yet another example of how the company intends to push its high-end GPUs into CPU territory.