In a webinar today previewing Spotfire 5 (scheduled for release this November), TIBCO announced that it will include TERR: The Tibco Enterprise Runtime for R. TERR is a closed-source reimplementation of the R language engine, and not based on the GPL-licensed R project from the R Foundation. Here's the relevant slide ... [Read more...]

The Maker Movement has led to the production of open-source 3-D printers and other manufacturing machines that allow hobbyists to design, create and produce real-world objects affordably. Now R user Ian Walker, in a post at the Psychological Statistics blog, shows how to use the R language to transform 3-D ... [Read more...]

For the past 18 months, it seems like all I’ve heard about in the digital marketing industry is “big data”, and with that, mentions of using Hadoop and R to solve these sorts of problems.  Why are these tools the … Continue reading →Learning R has really made me appreciate SAS ... [Read more...]

If I would like to adjust a shape file I normally used the way over an excel file or a text file to get a table and to join this with an existing shape file. Due to the sp and rgdal packages in R you can manipulate shapefiles directly in ... [Read more...]

The Revolution blog links to an O'Reilly  interview with two CIO's from the Consumer Protection Bureau. The gist of the interview is "Open Source is Great, we are using it for everything; R and Big Data are the next hot thing, et cetera".  I ... [Read more...]

There's an interesting discussion thread on LinkedIn going on now on the relative benefits of R versus SAS in the commercial sector. Oleg Okun kicks off the discussion with this question: Did anyone have to justify to a prospect/customer why R is better than SAS? What arguments did you ... [Read more...]

This post is contributed by Revolution Analytics CEO Norman Nie, and cross-posted from the Future of Open Source Forum. A lot of attention has been focused recently on Big Data, and rightly so: Big Data is a Big Deal. (See this LinuxInsider article, Big Data, Big Open Source Tools, for ... [Read more...]

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There are a number of good open source projects for statistics and data mining, for example the software WEKA developed at the University of Waikato. The description on their website states that: Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. The algorithms can either be applied ... [Read more...]

Following up on the story from last week, where SAS CEO Jim Goodnight said he "hadn't noticed" competition from open-source alternatives, open-source BI vendor Pentaho's "Chief Geek" James Dixon responds: What this means is that SAS has moved from the Igorance phase to the Ridicule phase of battling open source, ... [Read more...]

New Housedata release of 49,914 summary filings from 7897 candidates for the US House 2002-2010. [Read more...]

This post can be summed up by one two sentences: “We can’t buy love.” “Starting to pay for love could make it disappear” while at the same time “We need money to live and love”. These two conflicting forces, with relation to open source, are the topic of this ... [Read more...]

The audio files of the full talk by Richard Stallman are attached to the end of this post. —————– Videos of all the invited talks of the useR! 2010 conference can be viewed on the R User Group blog —————– Last week I had the honor of attending the talk given by Richard ... [Read more...]

I’d like to announce a new project by Offensive Politics called House Data, launching today. House Data is a large-scale extract of FEC Form 3 Summary of receipts of disbursements (pdf warning) of every US House campaign from mid-2001 onward. The traditional source for campaign finance summaries is the Candidate ... [Read more...]

The results of the 2010 Future of Open Source survey were presented at last week's Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, and here are they are in slide format: While I was at the presentation I captured a few additional tidbits from the presentation that weren't in the slides. The ... [Read more...]

Over a month ago, David Smith published a call for people to participate in the “Future of Open Source” Survey. 550 people (and me) took the survey, and today I got an e-mail with the news that the 2010 survey results are analysed and where published in the “Future.Of.Open.Source ... [Read more...]

Our FEC report file library FECHell has been updated to 0.1.9. The release includes a half dozen bug fixes and the following new features: Speed improvements – Schedule and field names names are matched by compiled regular expressions instead of brute-force string matching, resulting in a ~25% speed increase for large files. DEF ... [Read more...]

Tim O'Reilly's keynote talk at OSBC this evening was thought-provoking to say the least. The title of the talk was "The Real Open Source Opportunity", and the surprise for me was that he wasn't talking about Open Source software. Tim's insight, and it's a profound one, is that the next ... [Read more...]

Our good friends at North Bridge Venture Partners have just opened the 2010 Future of Open Source Survey, an annual look at the state of open source technology and business models, the driving factors in rising adoption of open source products and how the market for open-source software is evolving. Anyone ... [Read more...]

This tutorial covers profiling of Linux servers using open-source tools such as "iostat", "oprofile" and "blktrace". Both processor-bound and I/O-bound cases are covered, and the emphasis is on tools that provide visual displays of relevant metrics. Li... [Read more...]