IT General

Natural language is a wonder. Like the best poetry, everyday speech often expresses overlapping meanings in tightly wrapped verbal packages.

At the most fundamental level, the linguistic mechanisms for coding, decoding, and distinguishing these packed meanings are built into our brains. But they're also calibrated on the fly by the cultures in which we live. This mental processing spans the range from conscious to unconscious, with most of us barely aware of all the verbal vibrations we're putting out and absorbing as we move through the day.

In today's threatscape, antivirus software provides little piece of mind, and antimalware scanners on the whole are horrifically inaccurate, especially with exploits less than 24 hours old. Despite modern heuristics, virtualized environments, system monitoring, and network traffic detection, hackers still reach us on a regular basis. 

Nginx Plus, the commercial edition of the open source Web server that's elbowed out Apache HTTPD on many top-traffic sites, unveiled its fourth major version today.

Having a ton of data at your disposal isn't much good if you can't make sense of it, so users of big data analytics systems like Hadoop are also making use of data visualization tools.

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The giants are back. The classic tech companies that make computers, hard drives, and productivity software are soaring on Wall Street.

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Hey, it must be hard to be the only person on the planet who doesn't understand big data.

Actually, that's far from true: You're in good company. While Gartner finds that 64 percent of enterprises are investing in big data, a similar chunk (60 percent) don't have a clue as to what to do with their data.

The real problem isn't one of technology, but of process. The key to succeeding with big data, as in all serious IT investments, is iteration. It's not about Hadoop, NoSQL, Splunk, or any particular vendor or technology. It's about iteration.

Kraft Foods, a forward-thinking giant when it comes to consumer taste, was anything but when it came to IT. Simply put, the company was mired in the old-school culture of rigid centralized information technology. Not anymore.

Kraft was one of the first major enterprises to recognize the value that consumer devices could produce for business — and it recognized that value early. Kraft began deploying the iPhone back in 2008, well before smartphones had become must-carry devices.

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Developers must address the serious issue of software-based threats, which leave users vulnerable to intruders, particularly governments, XML co-founder Tim Bray said Wednesday.

IT staffing firms and employment researchers released a flurry of data as the first half of the year came to a close. The bottom line? The second half of 2014 is looking good for job-hunting IT pros, particularly if they possess coveted skills. IT employment numbers are rising, employers are forging ahead with hiring plans, and CIOs are confident about hiring budgets. Here come the numbers.

Facebook, within a few weeks, plans to release an open source library intended to help developers build native Apple iOS apps with smooth, responsive user interfaces.

It's all fun and games until you bring down the data center with a stray brush of the hand or flick of the finger Dek:  It's all fun and games until you bring down the data center with a stray brush of the hand or flick of the finger External Source:  infoworld.com Redirect Unpublished Slideshow to:  http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/159408

Apache Hive is a tool built on top of Hadoop for analyzing large, unstructured data sets using a SQL-like syntax, thus making Hadoop accessible to legions of existing BI and corporate analytics researchers. Developed by Facebook engineers and contributed to the Apache Foundation as an open source project, Hive is now at the forefront of big data analysis in commercial environments. 

For the last several years, Microsoft has sponsored a series of technology events for enterprises, each focused on a different part of the Microsoft technology stack.

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