Category: Analytics

SAS Institute continues to lose training revenue as WPS clones use “language of SAS” loophole

Apparently, in Asia companies have been able to offer and advertise SAS Training , by inserting the language of SAS cleverly, hiding the disclaimers in the website map maze, an reassuring students that they can get jobs even in bonafide SAS Institute licenses client locations by defacto learning “the SAS language” without paying for the expensive SAS licensing.

This marks a double blow for the Institute , as one one hand WPS licensing erodes its margin by competitive discounting. On the other hand the lucrative SAS Language Training (and publishing) market is decimated in emerging market economies by SAS language clones.

I write this in dismay as I was one of the original authors of this article which was even referred to in the WPS judgement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_language ( the edit history is even more fascinating if you want to see it!!)

Students, if you wanna learn SAS or language of SAS – do refer to this.

http://support.sas.com/training/

apologizes

Anything else is a legal grey area compounded by the curious  shyness of SAS legal to defend a 40 year old venerated analytics brand, by ceding ground through out the world and across domains

A simple analysis of Web logs in SAS Online Doc would prove how this is exploited even by sellers of SAS language clone software.

As the difference in SAS and WPS pricing is compounded on server licenses, companies in Asia have found the best thing to do is get a WPS server license and in fact offer it for training (or analysis) like a time shared cloud solution to multiple customers at the same time

It is an interesting thing to watch- because SAS Institute remains one of the lost holdouts on the West Coast to the Stanford mafia.

unrelated picture – a famous Bollywood movie

Jewel Thief mp3 songs

 

A Good Old Presentation on Big Data in R using ff package #rstats and #bigdata

Well I guess we all grow old, but this presentation from 2010  is still awesome on using Big Data from R

Planet Python #python #analytics

Planet Python is an excellent site for people keeping an eye on Python http://planet.python.org/ – you can grab the Feedburner RSS feed here http://feeds.feedburner.com/python/PMUk

With almost 300 plus feeds flowing in, this is the Pythonic version of R Bloggers (with hat tip to R bloggers founder, Tal G for pointing me to this site). Note I have written before on FOAS   and it’s Pythonic counterpart NumFocus – those are basically foundations  for encouraging language development and usage while Planet Python and R bloggers are blog aggregators

The Planet Python site has no ads, and is actually supported by the Python Official Website. It also has an OPML feed in case you want to replicate it easily –http://planet.python.org/opml.xml

However the lack of ads is a dual edged sword as it hurts startups, corporates and trainers in the Python ecosystem. Also there seems no easy way to get the newsletter in a daily email.

Do you blog on, write on or read Python- here is Planet Pythonpy

 

  • For bloggers- To request addition or removal:
    e-mail planet at python.org (note, responses can take up to a few days)

rPython – R Interface to Python

a nice package rPython. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rPython/index.html This package permits calls to Python from R
Not to be confused with Restricted Python (RPython at http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/coding-guide.html#id1)

statcompute's avatarYet Another Blog in Statistical Computing

View original post

Google Crisis Map and India’s Cyclone -a great application of GIS /Spatial Data

Google Crisis Map is a good example of how technology can be used for the good of making people live, even though it originally was derived from other applications.

http://google.org/crisismap/2013-phailin

Screenshot from 2013-10-12 18:22:55

Mandatory Screenshot

–Screenshot from 2013-10-12 17:23:01Boingo Mobile’s Hotspot locator is a great example of a way of making GIS make money without being evil.

 

 

Google releases new R package for Big Data #rstats

From the Google Open Source Blog–

HistogramTools is a new R package I have released that uses RProtoBuf to read in a compact protocol buffer representation of binned data and includes a number of helpful functions for manipulating, plotting, and measuring the statistical information loss due to the binning. In addition to protocol buffers, it also supports importing aggregate performance data directly from DTrace output.

AND
We rely on several open source tools to make our work easier. The most common tool we use for statistical analysis of the performance, availability, and resource needs of our internal systems is the R programming language.

Nice job!

Screenshot from 2013-10-10 21:28:17
With  Revolution Analytics being supported and funded by Microsoft and Intel and RStudio being founded by an ex-Microsoftie, I think Google does need to step up their R game though. They take and take from the open source community yet barely fund the minimum back to projects like FOAS or R-Core (http://www.r-project.org/foundation/memberlist.html)
Come on Google – share more  stuff with open source R than you do with the NSA!!!
1)  https://decisionstats.com/2009/05/29/interview-david-smith-revolution-computing/

Ajay- What are the major alliances that REvolution has in the industry.

David- We have a number of industry partners. Microsoft and Intel, in particular, provide financial and technical support allowing us to really strengthen and optimize R on Windows, a platform that has been somewhat underserved by the open-source community.

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Allaire
After the sale of his company, Allaire became frustrated at the difficulty of keeping track of research he was doing using Google. To address this problem, he co-founded Onfolio in 2004 with Adam Berrey, former Allaire co-founder and VP of Marketing at Macromedia.
On March 8, 2006, Onfolio was acquired by Microsoft where many of the features of the original product are being incorporated into the Windows Live Toolbar.On August 13, 2006, Microsoft released the public beta of a new desktop blogging client called Windows Live Writer that was created by Allaire's team at Microsoft.