Editorial

Mining and Meaning

Article from Issue 145/2012

Author(s): Joe Casad

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.”

We’re all aware that data mining technologies will have a big effect on advertising and retail, but I’m not sure the popular media is giving full attention to the radical change it brings to how we think about information and knowledge.

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF

Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Print Subs

Digisubs

TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS

US / Canada

UK / Australia

Related content

Red Hat to Participate in Data-as-a-Service Initiative

Red Hat Inc. joins a European Union initiative working to create LEADS (Large-scale Elastic Architecture for Data-as-a-Service) for mining and analyzing web data.

more »
Calculating Probability

To tackle mathematical problems with conditional probabilities, math buffs rely on Bayes' formula or discrete distributions, generated by short Perl scripts.

more »
3 Hot Tech Careers for 2011 Grads

more »
Comment

more »
Welcome

"If you build it, they will come…" The line lingers from a well-known baseball-as-religion movie from many innings in my past. No sense in erecting an elegant synopsis of the film (if I try to build that, you will most certainly go), but I will admit that this one mystical line bears repeating.

more »

comments powered by Disqus

Visit Our Shop

Trial Subscription

Digital Subscription

Subscribe

Direct Download

Read full article as PDF:

003-003_Comment.pdf (103.57 kB)

DevOps

Reinvent your network with DevOps tools and techniques:

Opportunities and Risks: Containers for DevOps
Automated Builds Using CentOS 7 and Kickstart
Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana – The ELK stack
Are you ready for DevOps? Try your luck with the beta version of Linux Professional Institute's new DevOps exam.

News

Linux Comes to Windows

Run multiple Linux distributions in Windows 10.
Docker Embraces Kubernetes

Docker , Kubernetes , orchestration

Docker is now offering Kubernetes as an orchestration platform.
Kubernetes 1.8 Announced

The new release comes with two new features for better security.
Final Ubuntu Desktop 17.10 Beta Arrives

Community , Desktop

Ubuntu completes the cycle of life and goes back to letter A and Gnome.
Linus Torvalds Invites Attackers to Join the Kernel Community

He wants attackers to join the community instead of attacking the code.
Oracle Donating Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation

Oracle is recommending a new name for the Java Enterprise Edition platform.
Reddit Closing Doors to Open Source

The peanut gallery of the Internet is closing its open source repository.
Largest Open Source Summit to Date Around the Corner

LinuxCon is now Open Source Summit.
Gnome is Celebrating it’s 20th Birthday

Gnome

More than 33 releases since the first release of Gnome.
SQL Server Comes to RHEL; OpenShift Comes to Azure

Microsoft and Red Hat expand their partnership.