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Using Hadoop running YARN to manage large clusters for Big Data analysis may soon become easier with a renamed open source project accepted by the Apache Foundation. The Apache Foundation accepted the open source project Twill, named "Weave" while hosted on Github, after foundation members began vot...

For years, manners have been defined and documented in easy-to-learn rules classed by geography and culture. For example, in some countries it's acceptable to make abundant noises when eating, whereas in others, eating is a matter to be taken with the utmost seriousness and is performed in stony sil...

"Enigma" may be the nickname of the latest release of the Netrunner Linux distro, but there's actually nothing enigmatic about it. In fact, Netrunner 13.06 -- also known as "Netrunner 5" -- delivers one of the most satisfying out-of-the-box desktop experiences I have had in quite some time. I spend ...

If you read my columns regularly, you'll know that I'm a second-screen proponent. For those unfamiliar with the dual-screen concept, it suggests that tablet or phone often accompanies big-screen television watching, resting on the viewer's knee and acting as a two-way, interactive, Internet-connecte...

Big Data and open source software may be the next great unholy alliance in computing's current promised land, but open source is a broken business model that needs a better vehicle for supporting projects such as programming suites that build database applications. So argues Chris Wensel, founder an...

If there's one app that has been synonymous with an innovative, high-quality Twitter experience in the Android environment, it's Joaquim Verges' paid Falcon Pro. One of the killer features in Falcon Pro is its ability to live-stream a Twitter timeline. With a 2-minute synchronize refresh rate, Fal...

The latest release of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distro, version 13.04, or Raring Ringtail, comes with a big yawn factor. I get a growing sense that the company's rejections of users' criticisms of Ubuntu's native Unity desktop portray Canonical as Microsoft in a penguin suit. Regular Ubuntu users of ...

News360, a learning news aggregator for Android, has recently been updated. I decided to take a look. Uniquely, this app uses a thumbs-up button style of interaction in combination with collected statistics to provide stories that are supposed to be customized for you. Unlike aggregators such as Goo...

Mentioning open source to a typical consumer will no doubt result in puzzled looks or a reference to that "free stuff." Even in some business circles, the open source concept may only be synonymous with an alternative computer operating system known as Linux. On the software development side of the ...

We're seeing an entire genre of Twitter clients proliferating within the Android ecosystem -- each app with its own idea about the best way to interact with the monolithic, 500 million-strong social network. OneLouder's Slices Pro for Twitter is the latest client to grab my attention -- not least ...

Falcon Pro (for Twitter) pitches itself as "the ultimate Twitter experience on Android," and while one can usually take these app-store hyperbole laden statements with an idiom-laden statement -- in this case a grain of salt -- there is one thing that I'm looking for in a Twitter client that Falcon ...

With its brand-new, tablet-friendly version, Flipboard takes online news reading to a sybaritic new level -- the bigger screen, along with Flipboard's elegance, surpasses poky smartphone screen real estate, and anything that has come before. Flipboard pulls together social media, news, and website ...

A substantial number of apps available from Google Play had serious flaws in their Secure Sockets Layer implementations and thus were vulnerable to hack attacks, European researchers found. The team downloaded 13,500 popular free apps to study their use of the SSL or Transport Layer Security protoco...

Sandia National Laboratories announced on Tuesday that it has set up a network of 300,000 Android virtual handheld computing devices to study large networks of smartphones. The project, called "MegaDroid," is expected to result in a software tool that will let other cyber-researchers model similar e...

Twitter on Tuesday joined the Linux Foundation. However, the move comes just days after Twitter removed its find-friends feature from blogging service Tumblr. Twitter had earlier done the same to Instagram, and has imposed new restrictions on developers. "These moves are contrary to what Linux stand...

Mention big data and the first thing that might come to mind is Hadoop. The open source software framework has recently enjoyed a great deal of popularity among vendors and enterprise users. However, if it is to really be useful to the enterprise, Hadoop may need to be taken out of open source, argu...

MeeGo, the ill-fated Nokia mobile operating system project that had the plug pulled on it earlier this year, is being revived. JollaMobile, a company consisting of former Nokia executives and techies, has announced that it will release a new MeeGo smartphone later this year. That goal is reachable, ...

I have to confess to being a little unfair on the Shazam Encore app for its first LinuxInsider test. It is supposed to identify songs you're listening to, but I think I may have asked it the impossible. I had downloaded the app just before a planned lunch that included a sojourn to my neighborhood c...

Instagram, the popular photography and social networking app for the iPhone, with a whopping 27 million iOS users, recently became available for Android. Around 5 million Android users reportedly signed up for the app in the first few days of the Android release. Then social network Facebook offered...

Frantic buyers cleaned out the shelves of two UK retailers offering a small $35 Linux computer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The credit-card-sized device, which is named after the foundation, plugs into a TV and a keyboard. It can be used to work on spreadsheets, play games, and do word processi...