Top Tech Stories

There's no need for a portable phone charger to be boring -- here are 11 chargers for your smartphone (or tablet) that are both useful and creative Dek:  There's no need for a portable phone charger to be boring -- here are 11 chargers for your smartphone (or tablet) that are both useful and creative External Source:  computerworld.com Redirect Unpublished Slideshow to:  http://www.computerworld.com/slideshow/156087

If Oracle's licensing terms never struck you as invidious before, you might soon change your mind.

With all of the rumors, fakes, and howling inaccuracies floating around, it's time to step back, take a deep breath, and look at what we really know about forthcoming versions of Windows.

With all of the rumors, fakes, and howling inaccuracies floating around, it's time to step back, take a deep breath, and look at what we really know about forthcoming versions of Windows.

You love your broadband provider, don't you? Right down to the Netflix slowdowns and inscrutable surcharges. You'd never, ever consider switching to faster, cheaper public broadband run by your local municipality.

The new gold rush is mobile health apps, both to track medical conditions and fitness.

Android mobile devices, while not typically thought of as places where development work gets done, can offer surprisingly useful apps to help developers get the job done Dek:  Android mobile devices, while not typically thought of as places where development work gets done, can offer surprisingly useful apps to help developers get the job done External Source:  cio.com Redirect Unpublished Slideshow to:  http://www.cio.com/slideshow/159906

Good news for Microsoft: "Strong sales of cloud products to businesses helped lift Microsoft's revenue by 18 percent last quarter, though its profits declined," reports Reuters. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a call with financial analysts that commercial cloud revenue grew almost 150 percent year over year to $4.4 billion annually, driven primarily by sales of Office 365, the Azure IaaS and PaaS products, and Dynamics CRM Online.

Help is on the horizon for mobile developers dealing with the nuances of the numerous Android OS ver

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.

Look for these cool capabilities in the OS X 10.10 Yosemite public beta Dek:  Look for these cool capabilities in the OS X 10.10 Yosemite public beta External Source:  infoworld.com Redirect Unpublished Slideshow to:  http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/160041

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

Credit: iStockphoto

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.

Credit: iStockphoto

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.