I’m looking at another crop of press releases and marveling at the ever-expanding market for products that fall under the ubiquitous heading of Big Data. Big Data is everywhere. (Or is it Big Data are everywhere – to reprise that classic quandary?) Gigantic file storage appliances from vendors like Oracle and HP and software tools like Apache Hadoop continually add new building blocks to the data infrastructure. And the goal of all this? Apart from more conventional uses for scientific modeling and analysis, one of the reasons for this huge interest in accumulating data is a phenomenon known as data mining, which Wikipedia defines as a process that “attempts to discover patterns in large data sets.”

Security and the Open Cloud were featured at the most recent LinuxCon event.

With Free Software, some ingenuity, and a lot of drive, a friend brings knowledge, technology, and hope to a “disadvantaged” corner of his world.

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.

A human observer can register clusters in a two-dimensional set of points at a glance. Artificial intelligence has a harder time getting it done; however, the relatively simple k-means method delivers usable results.

Klaus Knopper is the creator of Knoppix and co-founder of LinuxTag expo. He currently works as a teacher, programmer, and consultant. If you have a configuration problem, or if you just want to learn more about how Linux works, send your questions to: klaus@linux-magazine.com

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.

Land of the fries, home of the beer? Belgium has more to offer than that! In 2001 the LBW went to Bouillon, and this year the geeks returned to the small country in Western Europe – specifically to Diksmuide in West Flanders.