Amazon drops prices of Linux AMIs by ~20%

Amazon cloud gets more exciting. We are still waiting for the Oracle and Google public clouds (compute) to open up out of beta! See their (rather cluttered) blog

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/10/new-ec2-second-generation-standard-instances-and-price-reductions-1.html

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Today, we are excited to announce a new generation of the original Amazon EC2 instance family. Second generation Standard instances (M3 instances) provide customers with the same balanced set of CPU and memory resources as first generation Standard instances (M1 instances) while providing customers with 50% more computational capability/core.

M3 instances are currently available in two instance types; extra-large (m3.xlarge) and double extra-large (m3.2xlarge). Examples of applications that can benefit from the additional CPU horsepower of these new instances include media encoding, batch processing, web servers, caching fleets, and many others. Currently, M3 instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region starting at a Linux On-Demand price of $0.58/hr for extra-large instances. Customers can also purchase M3 instances as Reserved Instances or as Spot instances. We will introduce M3 instances in additional regions in the coming months.

To learn more about Amazon EC2 instance types and to find out which instance type might be useful for you, please visit the Amazon EC2 Instance type page.

Pricing Change for M1 Standard Instances
Along with the introduction of the M3 Standard instance family, we are announcing a reduction in Linux On-Demand pricing for M1 Standard instances in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) Regions by almost 19%. The new pricing is effective from November 1 and is described in the following table

Instance Type Previous Price New Price
m1.small $0.080 $0.065
m1.medium $0.160 $0.130
m1.large $0.320 $0.260
m1.xlarge $0.640 $0.520

You can find out more about pricing for all Amazon EC2 instances by visiting the Amazon EC2 pricing page.

 

R Studio and Training

I really like the design, course structure and Hadley Wickham (in no particular order) as part of R Studio’ training suite which may be new, but is much better and open. Again I think Oracle’s training is awesome for online features , but some body needs to step up and create a credible R certification here. More power to R 😉

Check it out-

http://www.rstudio.com/training/

 

 

 

 

 

Revolution Analytics and Pricing Analytics

Cost of 1 day of Revolution Analytics Training at http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/services/training/

 

1. Intro to R

Price:  Commercial: SGD$500.00
Academic:SGD$350.00

1 Singapore dollar = 0.8197 US dollars

10% Early Bird Discount Deadline: November 13, 2012 @ 12:00PM Pacific Time
Discount code: earlybird

2. (aptly titled Minimalistic Sufficient R…you think the ricing would be minimalistic.. but)

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/services/training/public/minimalist-sufficient-r.php

Price: 

$750

$100 Early Bird Discount Deadline: November 16, 2012 @ 12:00PM Pacific Time
Discount code: earlybird

3.

Advanced R (Italian)

Price:  Commercial: €680.00
Academic: €480.00

1 euro = 1.2975 US dollars

4.

Big Data AnalyticS with RevoScaleR

Price:  $500 with 2 month Revolution R Enterprise workstation evaluation.

$700 with 1 year subscription of Revolution R enterprise workstation ($1500 value)

10% Early Bird Discount Deadline: October 30, 2012 @ 12:00PM Pacific Time
Discount code: early

5.

Revolution R Time Series Training

Price:  Commercial: S$1,200.00
Academic:S$750.00

10% Early Bird Discount Deadline: October 30, 2012 @ 12:00PM Pacific Time
Discount code: earlybird

so training costs differently different strokes for different folks I guess,

BUT me hearties.

Cost of 1 year of Revolution Enterprise= $1000

Thats a flat rate, so the Linux and Windows costs the same and so does the 32-bit and 64-bit

(see http://buy.revolutionanalytics.com/ )

( My comment- either Revo should give away the license for free to enterprises, rationalize training costs, seriously how can 2 days of training cost like a 1 year of license and the software is definitely quite good., or create a paid Amazon Ec 2 AMI for enterprises to rent the Revolution Analytics software (like SAP Hana ), or even on Windows Azure if they insist on hugging Microsoft, though I am clearly seeing various flavors of Linux beating Windows Server to a pulp in the Big Data market, though I am probably more optimistic on the Windows 8 on Surface but because of hardware not software/ Azure alternative to Amazon given Google’s delayed offering- I dont even know many many instance of Windows related HPC or HPA,  (/end_of_rant)

Annual Subscription
Includes software license and technical support		 Price Quantity Total
Revolution R Enterprise Single-User Workstation (64-bit Windows) $1,000.00 $0.00
Revolution R Enterprise Single-User Workstation (32-bit Windows) $1,000.00 $0.00
Revolution R Enterprise Single-User Workstation (64-bit Red Hat 6 Enterprise Linux) $1,000.00 $0.00
Revolution R Enterprise Single-User Workstation (64-bit Red Hat 5 Enterprise Linux) $1,000.00 $0.00

 

Running R through environments in PiCloud

PiCloud had an interesting announcement, they support non-Python things in custom environments, but R is pre-built in a new Base Environment.

http://blog.picloud.com/2012/10/24/new-base-environment-ubuntu-precise/

Enter Ubuntu Precise 12.04

Our latest environment is pre-configured with many of the latest libraries, making it easier than ever to move your computation to the cloud. Here are some of the notable packages:

  • NumPy 1.6.2
  • SciPy 0.11
  • Pandas 0.9.0
  • Scikits Learn 0.8.1
  • OpenCV 2.4.2
  • Java 7
  • R 2.14.1
  • Ruby 1.9.1
  • PHP 5.3.10

. To use Precise, specify the environment of a job as ‘base/precise’. In Python:

1 cloud.call(f, _env='base/precise')

BigML creates a marketplace for Predictive Models

BigML has created a marketplace for selling Datasets and Models. This is a first (?) as the closest market for Predictive Analytics till now was Rapid Miner’s marketplace for extensions (at http://rapidupdate.de:8180/UpdateServer/faces/index.xhtml)

From http://blog.bigml.com/2012/10/25/worlds-first-predictive-marketplace/

SELL YOUR DATA

You can make your Dataset public. Mind you: the Datasets we are talking about are BigML’s fancy histograms. This means that other BigML users can look at your Dataset details and create new models based on this Dataset. But they can not see individual records or columns or use it beyond the statistical summaries of the Dataset. Your Source will remain private, so there is no possibility of anyone accessing the raw data.

SELL YOUR MODEL

Now, once you have created a great model, you can share it with the rest of the world. For free or at any price you set.Predictions are paid for in BigML Prediction Credits. The minimum price is ‘Free’ and the maximum price indicated is 100 credits.

White Box Models

Clicking on the white open lock will open up your model to the rest of the world. Anyone can now buy your model, explore it, use it to make predictions

Black Box Models

If you choose the black box setting (the black open lock icon), other BigML users will NOT be able to view or clone your model, but they will be able to use it to make predictions.

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DOWNLOAD YOUR MODEL

BigML.com have added downloads to our models. Simply choose the format you want and you can copy/paste the code or text. There is a range of formats that they offer currently: JSON PML, PMML, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, Java, the rules of the decision tree in plain text and a Summary overview of your model. Around the corner are MS Excel downloads and R (of course!).

PUBLICIZE YOUR MODEL

There’s also an ’embed’ function, so now you can embed the little poster of your model in your blog post or website, so it is easy to share it in your own environment.

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It is nice to see Models and Data getting the APPY treatment and hopefully, it will encourage other vendors Iike Google Prediction API etc to further spend thought and effort to reward data mining individuals directly without going through corporate intermediaries while ensuring intellectual property safeguards .

An R package market for enterprises? for Python libraries? JMP addins? A market for SAS Macros- who knows what the future shall hold. But overall, this is a very positive step by the BigML.com team. The App marketplace has helped revolutionize mobile and desktop computing and hopefully it will do the same for Business Analytics.

 

httR by Hadley #rstats

The awesome Hadley Wickham has just released the next version of httr package. Prof Hadley is currently on leave from Rice Univ and working with the tremendous geeks at R Studio . New things in the httr package-

 

http://blog.rstudio.org/2012/10/14/httr-0-2/

httr, a package designed to make it easy to work with web APIs. Httr is a wrapper around RCurl, and provides:

  • functions for the most important http verbs: GET, HEAD, PATCH, PUT, DELETE and POST.
  • support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0. Use oauth1.0_token and oauth2.0_token to get user tokens, and sign_oauth1.0 and sign_oauth2.0to sign requests. The demos directory has six demos of using OAuth: three for 1.0 (linkedin, twitter and vimeo) and three for 2.0 (facebook, github, google).

I especially like the OAuth functionality as I occasionaly got flummoxed with existing R OAuth packages , and this should hopefully lead to awesome new social media analytics posts by the larger R blogger community. Also given the fact that unauthenticated API requests to Twitter are greatly expanded by OAuth authenticated requests- (see https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting )

  • Unauthenticated calls are permitted 150 requests per hour. Unauthenticated calls are measured against the public facing IP of the server or device making the request.
  • OAuth calls are permitted 350 requests per hour and are measured against the oauth_token used in the request.

 

some creative use cases should see an incredible amount of cross social media analysis (not just one social media channel ) at a time.

R for Social Media Analytics ? Watch this space.. 😉

 

 

Related articles

 

Statsoft is offering free software in Greece, Portugal, Spain

Statsoft is offering free software to companies in Greece, Spain & Portugal-the software is available FREE to all businesses in the 3 countries.  It’s not just to NGOs & governmental groups.

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StatSoft, Inc.  {Headquarters office Tulsa, OK, with 30 Global offices around the world]  is providing FREE SOFTWARE to GREECE,  PORTUGAL, and SPAIN as an economic assistance to these countries of Continental Europe to assist them in getting back into “more normal economic positions”…

If you’d like to comment on this you can on the following  YAHOO FINANCE page:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/statsoft-aid-struggling-european-economies-100023370.html;_ylt=A2KJjakoL39QN0IAMHPQtDMD

 

Alternatively, here is the dto Aid Struggling European Economies with Free Enterprise Analytics Software press release linked to the StatSoft page.