Microsoft was at the 2016 UseR conference, they're presentation 'How Microsoft uses R presentation' was a complete sales pitch.
Was at Strata London. Most of the talks were sales pitches (for Cloudera). It was absolute garbage.
Introducing the free Microsoft R Client
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Re: Introducing the free Microsoft R Client
#22Christ almighty, why not just use SAS at that point. Ross Ihaka was so disappointed by Revolution's value-subtracted offerings that he disowned the entire R project.
Have you a reference for that?
Probably referring to this:
https://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/simply-start-over-...
Re: Introducing the free Microsoft R Client
#23I'm disappointed that Microsoft has targeted R for embracing and extinguishing. We hardly knew ye.
Comments like this predictably derail the discussion without adding anything to it. Please don't do this here.
Re: Introducing the free Microsoft R Client
#24Christ almighty, why not just use SAS at that point. Ross Ihaka was so disappointed by Revolution's value-subtracted offerings that he disowned the entire R project.
Isn't SAS better than R?
I think so, at least for my use, but I'm at a large company and I don't see the licensing costs (nor do they directly come out of my budget). It's not to say R is bad, it just takes (me) longer to do similar work.
Of course, we're also a Teradata shop and being able to run R in-database is awfully tempting - but I doubt we'd save any money at that point (even if its not my budget, still have to justify it), and we'd have a ton of stuff to migrate. And we're not really performance bottlenecked right now.
There's a cost tradeoff there, but R has really been awesome in getting really solid statistical and data manipulation software in the hands of individuals and small businesses for free. For instance, I don't have SAS at home - my basement hacking uses R.
Re: Introducing the free Microsoft R Client
#25Christ almighty, why not just use SAS at that point. Ross Ihaka was so disappointed by Revolution's value-subtracted offerings that he disowned the entire R project.
"OSS is great! Anybody can make a fork and improve the software!"
"Hey guys, it's me, Microsoft. I made a fork and improved the software."
"BURN THE WITCH"
Re: Introducing the free Microsoft R Client
#26Re: Introducing the free Microsoft R Client
#27Christ almighty, why not just use SAS at that point. Ross Ihaka was so disappointed by Revolution's value-subtracted offerings that he disowned the entire R project.
Isn't SAS better than R?
If you like writing COBOL, sure.
Naturally, for anything interesting (eg fitting a lasso penalized GLM) SAS (and others) encourage you to simply call out to R. (I will now wait for someone to amuse me by bringing up the misleadingly named PROC in SAS that does L1 regularization... to linear models.)
I can use either, personally I prefer R. Or Python. Or scala. Or really anything that isn't SAS. I feel dirty after using it.
Re: Introducing the free Microsoft R Client
#28Re: Introducing the free Microsoft R Client
#29Christ almighty, why not just use SAS at that point. Ross Ihaka was so disappointed by Revolution's value-subtracted offerings that he disowned the entire R project.
"OSS is great! Anybody can make a fork and improve the software!" "Hey guys, it's me, Microsoft. I made a fork and improved the software." "BURN THE WITCH"
I think he was under the impression that using the GPL (instead of a BSD license) would avoid commercial forks. Personally I don't care, Gentleman doesn't care, and the Revolution people (some at least) are pretty good guys.
But leading with the above would be shitty click bait }:-)
Re: Introducing the free Microsoft R Client
#30I am no closed to understanding what this is. Everything listed here is already part of Microsoft R Open and the client is just standard RGui: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-r/install-r-clien...
The rx algorithms are not part of MSFT R Open, but they are severely restricted in this, so I kinda fail to see the point of having it. Perhaps someone from the team can chime in and explain the reasoning behind this?
I'm guessing it is primarily aimed at getting people used to the interfaces/differences/quirks of using RevoR scaler functions.
Will it do so? I dunno. I'm a fan of simplification. If it's resource limited I'd argue there more motivation in just sticking with the popular base R implementations and not over complicate things or tie your self to a proprietary product. Sas also offers a kind of "free" version cut down/restrictive, and I don't find I use that much either, because the restrictions (virtual machine, non-EG interface) make me rarely ever want to use it.
Both companies have the challenge of how to keep themselves relevant and reach people to teach their wares in a world where they similarly try to restrict access to their products. Revor has some advantage in this sphere, given the availability and use of regular r,but there are implementation quirks and rough edges around the fact that they're trying to get R to do some things it really wasn't designed to do from the ground up.