Tag: open

SAS Institute Financials 2011

SAS Institute has release it’s financials for 2011 at http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/2011financials.html,

Revenue surged across all solution and industry categories. Software to detect fraud saw a triple-digit jump. Revenue from on-demand solutions grew almost 50 percent. Growth from analytics and information management solutions were double digit, as were gains from customer intelligence, retail, risk and supply chain solutions

AJAY- and as a private company it is quite nice that they are willing to share so much information every year.

The graphics are nice ( and the colors much better than in 2010) , but pie-charts- seriously dude there is no way to compare how much SAS revenue is shifting across geographies or even across industries. So my two cents is – lose the pie charts, and stick to line graphs please for the share of revenue by country /industry.

In 2011, SAS grew staff 9.2 percent and reinvested 24 percent of revenue into research and development

AJAY- So that means 654 million dollars spent in Research and Development.  I wonder if SAS has considered investing in much smaller startups (than it’s traditional strategy of doing all research in-house and completely acquiring a smaller company)

Even a small investment of say 5-10 million USD in open source , or even Phd level research projects could greatly increase the ROI on that.

That means

Analyzing a private company’s financials are much more fun than a public company, and I remember the words of my finance professor ( “dig , dig”) to compare 2011 results with 2010 results.

http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/2010financials.html

The percentage invested in R and D is exactly the same (24%) and the percentages of revenue earned from each geography is exactly the same . So even though revenue growth increased from 5.2 % to 9% in 2011, both the geographic spread of revenues and share  R&D costs remained EXACTLY the same.

The Americas accounted for 46 percent of total revenue; Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) 42 percent; and Asia Pacific 12 percent.

Overall, I think SAS remains a 35% market share (despite all that noise from IBM, SAS clones, open source) because they are good at providing solutions customized for industries (instead of just software products), the market for analytics is not saturated (it seems to be growing faster than 12% or is it) , and its ability to attract and retain the best analytical talent (which in a non -American tradition for a software company means no stock options, job security, and great benefits- SAS remains almost Japanese in HR practices).

In 2010, SAS grew staff by 2.4 percent, in 2011 SAS grew staff by 9 percent.

But I liked the directional statement made here-and I think that design interfaces, algorithmic and computational efficiencies should increase analytical time, time to think on business and reduce data management time further!

“What would you do with the extra time if your code ran in two minutes instead of five hours?” Goodnight challenged.

PMML Augustus

Here is a new-old system in open source for

for building and scoring statistical models designed to work with data sets that are too large to fit into memory.

http://code.google.com/p/augustus/

Augustus is an open source software toolkit for building and scoring statistical models. It is written in Python and its
most distinctive features are:
• Ability to be used on sets of big data; these are data sets that exceed either memory capacity or disk capacity, so
that existing solutions like R or SAS cannot be used. Augustus is also perfectly capable of handling problems
that can fit on one computer.
• PMML compliance and the ability to both:
– produce models with PMML-compliant formats (saved with extension .pmml).
– consume models from files with the PMML format.
Augustus has been tested and deployed on serveral operating systems. It is intended for developers who work in the
financial or insurance industry, information technology, or in the science and research communities.
Usage
Augustus produces and consumes Baseline, Cluster, Tree, and Ruleset models. Currently, it uses an event-based
approach to building Tree, Cluster and Ruleset models that is non-standard.

New to PMML ?

Read on http://code.google.com/p/augustus/wiki/PMML

The Predictive Model Markup Language or PMML is a vendor driven XML markup language for specifying statistical and data mining models. In other words, it is an XML language so that Continue reading “PMML Augustus”

Using Opera Unite to defeat SOPA?

Lets assume that the big bad world of American electoral politics forces some kind of modified SOPA to be passed, and the big American companies have to abide by that law (just as they do share data  for National Security under Patriot Act but quitely).

I belive Opera Unite is the way forward to sharing content on the Internet.

From-

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-unite-developer-primer-revisited/

Opera Unite features a Web server running inside the Opera browser, which allows you to do some amazing things. At the touch of a button, you can share images, documents, video, music, games, collaborative applications and all manner of other things with your friends and colleagues

I can share music, and files , and the web server is actually my own laptop. try beating 2 billion new web servers that sprout!! File system sharing is totally secure- you can create private, public, or password protected files, a messaging system that can be used for drop messages (called fridge), a secure messaging system and your own web server is ready to start at a click. the open web may just use opera instead of chromium, and US regulation would be solely to blame. even URL blocking is of limited appeal thanks to software like MafiaWire Extension

Throw in Ad block, embedded bit torrent sharing and some more  Tor level encryption within the browser and sorry Senator, but the internet belongs to the planet not to your lobbyist.

see-http://dev.opera.com/web

Revolution Webinar Series #Rstats

Revolution Analytics Webinar-

 

Featured Webinar
David Champagne REGISTER NOW
Presenter David Champagne
CTO, Revolution Analytics
Date Tuesday, December 20th
Time 11:00AM – 11:30AM Pacific 
Click here for the webinar time in your local time zone

Big Data Starts with R

Traditional IT infrastructure is simply unable to meet

the demands of the new “Big Data Analytics” landscape.   Many enterprises are turning to the “R” statistical programming language and Hadoop (both open source projects) as a potential solution. This webinar will introduce the statistical capabilities of R within the Hadoop ecosystem.  We’ll cover:

  • An introduction to new packages developed by Revolution Analytics to facilitate interaction with the data stores HDFS and HBase so that they can be leveraged from the R environment
  • An overview of how to write Map Reduce jobs in R using Hadoop
  • Special considerations that need to be made when working with R and Hadoop.

We’ll also provide additional resources that are available to people interested in integrating R and Hadoop.

 

Upcoming Webinars
Wed, Dec 14th
11:00AM – 11:30AM PT		 Revolution R Enterprise – 100% R and MoreR users already know why the R language is the lingua franca of statisticians today: because it’s the most powerful statistical language in the world. Revolution Analytics builds on the power of open source R, and adds performance, productivity and integration features to create Revolution R Enterprise. In this webinar, author and blogger David Smith will introduce the additional capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise.
 Archived Webinars-
Revolution Webinar: New Features in Revolution R Enterprise 5.0 (including RevoScaleR) to Support Scalable Data AnalysisRevolution R Enterprise 5.0 is Revolution Analytics’ scalable analytics platform.  At its core is Revolution Analytics’ enhanced Distribution of R, the world’s most widely-used project for statistical computing.  In this webinar, Dr. Ranney will discuss new features and show examples of the new functionality, which extend the platform’s usability, integration and scalability

 

Software as a Religion ( SaaR)

The decline of organized religion and debate about such matters in the Western Hemisphere has been co-related to the increase in debates and arguments (again mostly) in the Western Hemisphere on software. Be it the PC vs Mac, the Microsofties vs Open Sourcers, the not so evil Google versus fans of Facebook, considerable activity is now being done by human beings in terms of social interaction on the merit’s and demerit’s of each software bundle. Perhaps for the first time in human history these interactions are being captured digitally on medium (that is hopefully longer lasting than papyrus).

Will this lead to newer branches of psychologists, sociologists (Goodwin’s law is too simplistic but an effort)

Even software as a religion is plausible, all they need is another college drop-put whizkid  to find a way to make it effective.

Religion as a software has of course been around for several millennium.

Also see http://goo.gl/smISa

Webinar: Using R within Oracle #rstats

Webinar: Using R within Oracle — Nov 30, noon EST

==========================================
Oracle now supports the R open source statistical programming language. Come to this webinar to learn more about using R within an Oracle environment.

— URL for TechCast: https://stbeehive.oracle.com/bconf/confDetails?confID=334B:3BF0:owch:38893C00F42F38A1E0404498C8A6612B0004075AECF7&guest=true&confKey=608880
— Web Conference ID: 303397
— Web Conference Key: 608880
— Dialup:             1-866-682-4770      , ID 5548204, passcode 1234

After a steady rise in the past few years, in 2010 the open source data mining software R overtook other tools to become the tool used by more data miners (43%) than any other (http://www.rexeranalytics.com/Data-Miner-Survey-Results-2010.html).

Several analytic tool vendors have added R-integration to their software. However, Oracle is the largest company to throw their weight behind R. On October 3, Oracle unveiled their integration of R: Oracle R Enterprise (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/features-oracle-r-enterprise-498732.html) as part of their Oracle Big Data Appliance announcement (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/512001).

Oracle R Enterprise allows users to perform statistical analysis with advanced visualization on data stored in Oracle Database. Oracle R Enterprise enables scalable R solutions, while facilitating production deployment of R scripts and Hadoop based solutions, as well as integration of R results with Oracle BI Publisher and OBIEE dashboards.

This TechCast introduces the various Oracle R Enterprise components and features, along with R script demonstrations that interface with Oracle Database.

TechCast presenter: Mark Hornick, Senior Manager, Oracle Advanced Analytics Development.
This TechCast is part of the ongoing TechCasts series coordinated by Oracle BIWA: The BI, Warehousing and Analytics SIG (http://www.oracleBIWA.org).

Secure Browsing from Mobile and PC ( Tor ,PeerNet, WasteAgain)

While Tor remains the tool of choice with pseudo-techie hacker wannabes , there is enough juice and smoke and mirrors on the market to confuse your average Joe.

For a secure browsing experience on Mobile – do NOT use either Apple or Windows OS

Use Android  and this app called Orbot in particular

Installing Tor with a QR code

Orbot is easy to install by simply scanning the following QR code with your Android Barcode scanner.

Android QR code

Installing Tor from the Android Market

Orbot is available in the Android Market.

ENTER PEERNET

If you have a Dell PC, well just use PeerNet to configure and set up your own network around the neighbourhood. This is particularly applicable if you are in country that is both repressive and not so technologically advanced. Wont work in China or USA.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/network/p70008/EN/vista_7/peernet.htm

What is a peer network?

A peer network is a network in which one computer can connect directly to another computer. This capability is accomplished by enabling access point (AP) functionality on one of the computers. Other computers can then connect to this computer in the same way that they would connect to a physical AP. If Internet Connection Sharing is enabled on the computer that has the AP functionality, computers that connect to that computer have Internet connectivity as well.

A basic peer network, which requires no networking knowledge or experience to set up, should meet the needs of most home users and small businesses. By default, a basic peer network is configured with the strongest available security (see How do I set up a basic peer network?).

For users who are familiar with wireless networking technology, advanced configuration features are available to do the following:

• Change security settings (see How do I configure my peer network?)
• Choose which method (push button or PIN) computers with Wi-Fi Protected Setup™ capability can join your peer network (see How do I allow peer devices to join my peer network using Wi-Fi Protected Setup technology?)
• Change the DHCP Server IP address (see How do I configure my peer network?).
• Change the channel on which to operate your peer network (see How do I configure my peer network?)

 If you are really really in a need for secure browsing (like you are maybe a big hot shot in the tech world), I suggest go over to VMWare

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

create a seperate Linux (Ubuntu for ease) virtual disc, then download the Tor Browser Bundle from

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en for surfing and a Peernet (above) or  a prepaid one time use disposable mobile pre-paid wireless card. It is also quite easy to delete your virtual disc in times of emergencies (but it is best to use encryption even when in Ubuntu https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedHome)

IRC chat is less secure than you think it is thanks to BOT  Trawlers- so I am hoping someone in the open source community updates Waste Again for encrypted chats http://wasteagain.sourceforge.net/

What is “WASTE again”?

“WASTE again” enables you to create a decentralized and secure private mesh network using an unsecure network, such as the internet. Once the public encryption keys are exchanged, sending messages, creating groupchats and transferring files is easy and secure.

Creating a mesh

To create a mesh you need at least two computers with “WASTE again” installed. During installation, a unique pair of public and private keys for each computer is being generated. Before the first connection can be established, you need to exchange these public keys. These keys enable “WASTE again” to authenticate every connection to other “WASTE again” clients.

After exchanging the keys, you simply type in the computers IP address to connect to. If that computer is located behind a firewall or a NAT-router, you have to create a portmap first to enable incoming connections.

At least one computer in your mesh has to be able to accept incoming connections, making it a “public node”. If no direct connection between two firewalled computers can be made, “WASTE again” automatically routes your traffic through one or more of the available public nodes.

Every new node simply has to exchange keys with one of the connected nodes and then connect to it. All the other nodes will exchange their keys automatically over the mesh.