Category: Internet

Amazon Ec2 goes Red Hat

message from Amazing Amazon’s cloud team- this will also help for #rstats users given that revolution Analytics full versions on RHEL.

—————————————————-

on-demand instances of Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for as little as $0.145 per instance hour. The offering combines the cost-effectiveness, scalability and flexibility of running in Amazon EC2 with the proven reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Highlights of the offering include:

  • Support is included through subscription to AWS Premium Support with back-line support by Red Hat
  • Ongoing maintenance, including security patches and bug fixes, via update repositories available in all Amazon EC2 regions
  • Amazon EC2 running RHEL currently supports RHEL 5.5, RHEL 5.6, RHEL 6.0 and RHEL 6.1 in both 32 bit and 64 bit formats, and is available in all Regions.
  • Customers who already own Red Hat licenses will continue to be able to use those licenses at no additional charge.
  • Like all services offered by AWS, Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a low-cost, pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees.

For more information, please visit the Amazon EC2 Red Hat Enterprise Linux page.

which is

Amazon EC2 Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a dependable platform to deploy a broad range of applications. By running RHEL on EC2, you can leverage the cost effectiveness, scalability and flexibility of Amazon EC2, the proven reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and AWS premium support with back-line support from Red Hat.. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on EC2 is available in versions 5.5, 5.6, 6.0, and 6.1, both in 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides seamless integration with existing Amazon EC2 features including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon CloudWatch, Elastic-Load Balancing, and Elastic IPs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances are available in multiple Availability Zones in all Regions.

Sign Up

Pricing

Pay only for what you use with no long-term commitments and no minimum fee.

On-Demand Instances

On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments.

Region:US – N. VirginiaUS – N. CaliforniaEU – IrelandAPAC – SingaporeAPAC – Tokyo
Standard Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Small (Default) $0.145 per hour
Large $0.40 per hour
Extra Large $0.74 per hour
Micro Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Micro $0.08 per hour
High-Memory Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Extra Large $0.56 per hour
Double Extra Large $1.06 per hour
Quadruple Extra Large $2.10 per hour
High-CPU Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Medium $0.23 per hour
Extra Large $0.78 per hour
Cluster Compute Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Quadruple Extra Large $1.70 per hour
Cluster GPU Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Quadruple Extra Large $2.20 per hour

Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance type. Partial instance-hours consumed are billed as full hours.

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and

Available Instance Types

Standard Instances

Instances of this family are well suited for most applications.

Small Instance – default*

1.7 GB memory
1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
160 GB instance storage
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
API name: m1.small

Large Instance

7.5 GB memory
4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m1.large

Extra Large Instance

15 GB memory
8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
1,690 GB instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m1.xlarge

Micro Instances

Instances of this family provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that consume significant compute cycles periodically.

Micro Instance

613 MB memory
Up to 2 EC2 Compute Units (for short periodic bursts)
EBS storage only
32-bit or 64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Low
API name: t1.micro

High-Memory Instances

Instances of this family offer large memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications.

High-Memory Extra Large Instance

17.1 GB of memory
6.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
420 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
API name: m2.xlarge

High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance

34.2 GB of memory
13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m2.2xlarge

High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance

68.4 GB of memory
26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m2.4xlarge

High-CPU Instances

Instances of this family have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications.

High-CPU Medium Instance

1.7 GB of memory
5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
350 GB of instance storage
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
API name: c1.medium

High-CPU Extra Large Instance

7 GB of memory
20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: c1.xlarge

Cluster Compute Instances

Instances of this family provide proportionally high CPU resources with increased network performance and are well suited for High Performance Compute (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications. Learn more about use of this instance type for HPC applications.

Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large Instance

23 GB of memory
33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core “Nehalem” architecture)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
API name: cc1.4xlarge

Cluster GPU Instances

Instances of this family provide general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) with proportionally high CPU and increased network performance for applications benefitting from highly parallelized processing, including HPC, rendering and media processing applications. While Cluster Compute Instances provide the ability to create clusters of instances connected by a low latency, high throughput network, Cluster GPU Instances provide an additional option for applications that can benefit from the efficiency gains of the parallel computing power of GPUs over what can be achieved with traditional processors. Learn more about use of this instance type for HPC applications.

Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large Instance

22 GB of memory
33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core “Nehalem” architecture)
2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
API name: cg1.4xlarge

 

Getting Started

To get started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2, perform the following steps:

  • Open and log into the AWS Management Console
  • Click on Launch Instance from the EC2 Dashboard
  • Select the Red Hat Enterprise Linux AMI from the QuickStart tab
  • Specify additional details of your instance and click Launch
  • Additional details can be found on each AMI’s Catalog Entry page

The AWS Management Console is an easy tool to start and manage your instances. If you are looking for more details on launching an instance, a quick video tutorial on how to use Amazon EC2 with the AWS Management Console can be found here .
A full list of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AMIs can be found in the AWS AMI Catalog.

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Support

All customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on EC2 will receive access to repository updates from Red Hat. Moreover, AWS Premium support customers can contact AWS to get access to a support structure from both Amazon and Red Hat.

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Resources

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About Red Hat

Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide.

 

also from Revolution Analytics- in case you want to #rstats in the cloud and thus kill all that talk of RAM dependency, slow R than other softwares (just increase the RAM above in the instances to keep it simple)

,or Revolution not being open enough

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/downloads/gpl-sources.php

GPL SOURCES

Revolution Analytics uses an Open-Core Licensing model. We provide open- source R bundled with proprietary modules from Revolution Analytics that provide additional functionality for our users. Open-source R is distributed under the GNU Public License (version 2), and we make our software available under a commercial license.

Revolution Analytics respects the importance of open source licenses and has contributed code to the open source R project and will continue to do so. We have carefully reviewed our compliance with GPLv2 and have worked with Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper, the outside General Legal Counsel of the Open Source Initiative, to ensure that we fully comply with the obligations of the GPLv2.

For our Revolution R distribution, we may make some minor modifications to the R sources (the ChangeLog file lists all changes made). You can download these modified sources of open-source R under the terms of the GPLv2, using either the links below or those in the email sent to you when you download a specific version of Revolution R.

Download GPL Sources

Product Version Platform Modified R Sources
Revolution R Community 3.2 Windows R 2.10.1
Revolution R Community 3.2 MacOS R 2.10.1
Revolution R Enterprise 3.1.1 RHEL R 2.9.2
Revolution R Enterprise 4.0 Windows R 2.11.1
Revolution R Enterprise 4.0.1 RHEL R 2.11.1
Revolution R Enterprise 4.1.0 Windows R 2.11.1
Revolution R Enterprise 4.2 Windows R 2.11.1
Revolution R Enterprise 4.2 RHEL R 2.11.1
Revolution R Enterprise 4.3 Windows & RHEL R 2.12.2

 

 

 

Branchout- a Facebook app for LinkedIn

Heres an awesome app on Facebook for linking and downloading your LI contacts.

Its called Branchout- and is very user friendly interface (critical for social software)

 

 

http://www.viddler.com/player/32a679db/

Calling #Rstats lovers and bloggers – to work together on “The R Programming wikibook”

so you think u like R, huh. Well it is time to pay it forward.

Message from a dear R blogger, Tal G from Tel Aviv (creator of R-bloggers.com and SAS-X.com)

———————————————————————————————————-
Calling R lovers and bloggers – to work together on “The R Programming wikibook”
Posted: 20 Jun 2011 07:05 AM PDT

This post is a call for both R community members and R-bloggers, to come and help make The R Programming wikibook be amazing:

Dear R community member – please consider giving a visit to The R Programming wikibook. If you wish to contribute your knowledge and editing skills to the project, then you could learn how to write in wiki-markup here, and how to edit a wikibook here (you can even use R syntax highlighting in the wikibook). You could take information into the site from the (soon to be) growing list of available R resources for harvesting.

Dear R blogger, you can help The R Programming wikibook by doing the following:

Write to your readers about the project and invite them to join.
Add your blog’s R content as an available resource for other editors to use for the wikibook. Here is how to do that:
First, make a clear indication on your blog that your content is licensed under cc-by-sa copyrights (*see what it means at the end of the post). You can do this by adding it to the footer of your blog, or by writing a post that clearly states that this is the case (what a great opportunity to write to your readers about the project…).
Next, go and add a link, to where all of your R content is located on your site, to the resource page (also with a link to the license post, if you wrote one). For example, since I write about other things besides R, I would give a link to my R category page, and will also give a link to this post. If you do not know how to add it to the wiki, just e-mail me about it (tal.galili@gmail.com).
If you are an R blogger, besides living up to the spirit of the R community, you will benefit from joining this project in that every time someone will use your content on the wikibook, they will add your post as a resource. In the long run, this is likely to help visitors of the site get to know about you and strengthen your site’s SEO ranking. Which reminds me, if you write about this, I always appreciate a link back to my blog

* Having a cc-by-sa copyrights means that you will agree that anyone may copy, distribute, display, and make derivative works based on your content, only if they give the author (you) the credits in the manner specified by you. And also that the user may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work.

———-

Three more points:

1) This post is a result of being contacted by Paul (a.k.a: PAC2), asking if I could help promote “The R Programming wikibook” among R-bloggers and their readers. Paul has made many contributions to the book so far. So thank you Paul for both reaching out and helping all of us with your work on this free open source project.

2) I should also mention that the R wiki exists and is open for contribution. And naturally, every thing that will help the R wikibook will help the R wiki as well.

3) Copyright notice: I hereby release all of the writing material content that is categoriesed in the R category page, under the cc-by-sa copyrights (date: 20.06.2011). Now it’s your turn!

———-

List of R bloggers who have joined: (This list will get updated as this “group writing” project will progress)

R-statistics blog (that’s Tal…)
Decisionstats.com (That’s me)
……………………………………………………………………………….
3) Copyright notice: I hereby release all of the writing material content of this website, under the cc-by-sa copyrights (date: 21.06.2011). Now it’s your turn!

https://decisionstats.com/privacy-3/

Content Licensing-
This website has all content licensed under
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
You are free:
to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix — to adapt the work

Tools for Hackers:Beginners

How to disguise your IP Address from your most wonderful glorious leaders-

From

 

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

Tor Browser Bundle

The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.

The Tor Browser Bundle lets you use Tor on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser, and is self-contained. The Tor IM Browser Bundleadditionally allows instant messaging and chat over Tor. If you would prefer to use your existing web browser, install Tor permanently, or if you don’t use Windows, see the other ways to download Tor.

Freedom House has produced a video on how to find and use the Tor Browser Bundle. If you don’t see a video below, view it at Youtube . Know of a better video or one translated into your language? Let us know!

 

 

 

and if you now want to see or check your own website for a Denial of Service attack , download this

http://sourceforge.net/projects/loic/

This is the software for which 32 Turkish teenagers got arrested for bringing down their govt websites. Do NOT USE it for ILLEGAL purposes,

because 1) it is hosted on a western website that due to Patriot Act would tracking downloads as well as most likely be inserting some logging code into your computer (especially if you are still on Windows)

2) Turkey being a NATO member got rather immediate notice of this – which makes it very likely that this tool is compromised in the Western Hemisphere. You can probably use this in Eastern Hemisphere country excluding Israel, Turkey, China, India ,Korea or Japan because these countries do have sophisticated hackers working for the government as well.

3) This is just a beginners tool to understand how flooding a website with requests work.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/loic/files/

Basically download, unzip the file

Enter URL and click Lock on to know IP address.

use HTTP Method. Make say 1000 threads.

Then press the IMMA CHARGING MY LAZER big button.

Note the Failed Tab tells you how good or bad this method is.

Note – it wont work on my blogs hosted on wordpress.com- but then those blogs had a root level breach some time back. It did work on both my blogspot and my tumblr blogs, and it completely shattered my son’s self hosted wordpress blog (see below)

 

 

Where to complain for internet crime?

So did you get tricked or hacked, or phished or someone broke into your system.

What to do?

Ic3 posterhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/doc_player.swf?doc=ic3-poster-110614000132-phpapp01&stripped_title=ic3-poster-8299880&userName=0hr1

//

From

https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=190735

Impersonation

If you believe someone has created a Gmail address in an attempt to impersonate your identity, you may wish to file a report with the Internet Crime Complaint Center (www.ic3.gov), a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center.

In addition, we recommend contacting your state’s Office of Consumer Protection.

Gmail is unable to participate in mediations involving third parties regarding impersonation. To read the Gmail Terms of Use, please visit: http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/terms_of_use.html.

 

AND

 

http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx

Welcome to IC3

The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is a partnership between theFederal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA).

IC3’s mission is to serve as a vehicle to receive, develop, and refer criminal complaints regarding the rapidly expanding arena of cyber crime. The IC3 gives the victims of cyber crime a convenient and easy-to-use reporting mechanism that alerts authorities of suspected criminal or civil violations. For law enforcement and regulatory agencies at the federal, state, local and international level, IC3 provides a central referral mechanism for complaints involving Internet related crimes. read more >>

Filing a Complaint with IC3

IC3 accepts online Internet crime complaints from either the person who believes they were defrauded or from a third party to the complainant. We can best process your complaint if we receive accurate and complete information from you. Therefore, we request that you provide the following information when filing a complaint:

  • Your name
  • Your mailing address
  • Your telephone number
  • The name, address, telephone number, and Web address, if available, of the individual or organization you believe defrauded you.
  • Specific details on how, why, and when you believe you were defrauded.
  • Any other relevant information you believe is necessary to support your complaint.

File a Complaint Now>>

 

Why open source companies dont dance?

I have been pondering on this seemingly logical paradox for some time now-

1) Why are open source solutions considered technically better but not customer friendly.

2) Why do startups and app creators in social media or mobile get much more press coverage than

profitable startups in enterprise software.

3) How does tech journalism differ in covering open source projects in enterprise versus retail software.

4) What are the hidden rules of the game of enterprise software.

Some observations-

1) Open source companies often focus much more on technical community management and crowd sourcing code. Traditional software companies focus much more on managing the marketing community of customers and influencers. Accordingly the balance of power is skewed in favor of techies and R and D in open source companies, and in favor of marketing and analyst relations in traditional software companies.

Traditional companies also spend much more on hiring top notch press release/public relationship agencies, while open source companies are both financially and sometimes ideologically opposed to older methods of marketing software. The reverse of this is you are much more likely to see Videos and Tutorials by an open source company than a traditional company. You can compare the websites of Cloudera, DataStax, Hadapt ,Appistry and Mapr and contrast that with Teradata or Oracle (which has a much bigger and much more different marketing strategy.

Social media for marketing is also more efficiently utilized by smaller companies (open source) while bigger companies continue to pay influential analysts for expensive white papers that help present the brand.

Lack of budgets is a major factor that limits access to influential marketing for open source companies particularly in enterprise software.

2 and 3) Retail software is priced at 2-100$ and sells by volume. Accordingly technology coverage of these software is based on volume.

Enterprise software is much more expensively priced and has much more discreet volume or sales points. Accordingly the technology coverage of enterprise software is more discreet, in terms of a white paper coming every quarter, a webinar every month and a press release every week. Retail software is covered non stop , but these journalists typically do not charge for “briefings”.

Journalists covering retail software generally earn money by ads or hosting conferences. So they have an interest in covering new stuff or interesting disruptive stuff. Journalists or analysts covering enterprise software generally earn money by white papers, webinars, attending than hosting conferences, writing books. They thus have a much stronger economic incentive to cover existing landscape and technologies than smaller startups.

4) What are the hidden rules of the game of enterprise software.

  • It is mostly a white man’s world. this can be proved by statistical demographic analysis
  • There is incestuous intermingling between influencers, marketers, and PR people. This can be proved by simple social network analysis of who talks to who and how much. A simple time series between sponsorship and analysts coverage also will prove this (I am working on quantifying this ).
  • There are much larger switching costs to enterprise software than retail software. This leads to legacy shoddy software getting much chances than would have been allowed in an efficient marketplace.
  • Enterprise software is a less efficient marketplace than retail software in all definitions of the term “efficient markets”
  • Cloud computing, and SaaS and Open source threatens to disrupt the jobs and careers of a large number of people. In the long term, they will create many more jobs, but in the short term, people used to comfortable living of enterprise software (making,selling,or writing) will actively and passively resist these changes to the  paradigms in the current software status quo.
  • Open source companies dont dance and dont play ball. They prefer to hire 4 more college grads than commission 2 more white papers.

and the following with slight changes from a comment I made on a fellow blog-

  • While the paradigm on how to create new software has evolved from primarily silo-driven R and D departments to a broader collaborative effort, the biggest drawback is software marketing has not evolved.
  • If you want your own version of the open source community editions to be more popular, some standardization is necessary for the corporate decision makers, and we need better marketing paradigms.
  • While code creation is crowdsourced, solution implementation cannot be crowdsourced. Customers want solutions to a problem not code.
  • Just as open source as a production and licensing paradigm threatens to disrupt enterprise software, it will lead to newer ways to marketing software given the hostility of existing status quo.

 

 

Why open source companies dont dance?

A social network diagram
Image via Wikipedia

I have been pondering on this seemingly logical paradox for some time now-

1) Why are open source solutions considered technically better but not customer friendly.

2) Why do startups and app creators in social media or mobile get much more press coverage than

profitable startups in enterprise software.

3) How does tech journalism differ in covering open source projects in enterprise versus retail software.

4) What are the hidden rules of the game of enterprise software.

Some observations-

1) Open source companies often focus much more on technical community management and crowd sourcing code. Traditional software companies focus much more on managing the marketing community of customers and influencers. Accordingly the balance of power is skewed in favor of techies and R and D in open source companies, and in favor of marketing and analyst relations in traditional software companies.

Traditional companies also spend much more on hiring top notch press release/public relationship agencies, while open source companies are both financially and sometimes ideologically opposed to older methods of marketing software. The reverse of this is you are much more likely to see Videos and Tutorials by an open source company than a traditional company. You can compare the websites of Cloudera, DataStax, Hadapt ,Appistry and Mapr and contrast that with Teradata or Oracle (which has a much bigger and much more different marketing strategy.

Social media for marketing is also more efficiently utilized by smaller companies (open source) while bigger companies continue to pay influential analysts for expensive white papers that help present the brand.

Lack of budgets is a major factor that limits access to influential marketing for open source companies particularly in enterprise software.

2 and 3) Retail software is priced at 2-100$ and sells by volume. Accordingly technology coverage of these software is based on volume.

Enterprise software is much more expensively priced and has much more discreet volume or sales points. Accordingly the technology coverage of enterprise software is more discreet, in terms of a white paper coming every quarter, a webinar every month and a press release every week. Retail software is covered non stop , but these journalists typically do not charge for “briefings”.

Journalists covering retail software generally earn money by ads or hosting conferences. So they have an interest in covering new stuff or interesting disruptive stuff. Journalists or analysts covering enterprise software generally earn money by white papers, webinars, attending than hosting conferences, writing books. They thus have a much stronger economic incentive to cover existing landscape and technologies than smaller startups.

4) What are the hidden rules of the game of enterprise software.

  • It is mostly a white man’s world. this can be proved by statistical demographic analysis
  • There is incestuous intermingling between influencers, marketers, and PR people. This can be proved by simple social network analysis of who talks to who and how much. A simple time series between sponsorship and analysts coverage also will prove this (I am working on quantifying this ).
  • There are much larger switching costs to enterprise software than retail software. This leads to legacy shoddy software getting much chances than would have been allowed in an efficient marketplace.
  • Enterprise software is a less efficient marketplace than retail software in all definitions of the term “efficient markets”
  • Cloud computing, and SaaS and Open source threatens to disrupt the jobs and careers of a large number of people. In the long term, they will create many more jobs, but in the short term, people used to comfortable living of enterprise software (making,selling,or writing) will actively and passively resist these changes to the  paradigms in the current software status quo.
  • Open source companies dont dance and dont play ball. They prefer to hire 4 more college grads than commission 2 more white papers.

and the following with slight changes from a comment I made on a fellow blog-

  • While the paradigm on how to create new software has evolved from primarily silo-driven R and D departments to a broader collaborative effort, the biggest drawback is software marketing has not evolved.
  • If you want your own version of the open source community editions to be more popular, some standardization is necessary for the corporate decision makers, and we need better marketing paradigms.
  • While code creation is crowdsourced, solution implementation cannot be crowdsourced. Customers want solutions to a problem not code.
  • Just as open source as a production and licensing paradigm threatens to disrupt enterprise software, it will lead to newer ways to marketing software given the hostility of existing status quo.