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.”

• AMD/OpenJDK/Oracle explore use of GPUs
• Smartphone security
• ASF Airavata
• Slackware 14 release
• Shuttleworth funds Inktank/Ceph
• New Apache toplevel project
• Zentyal 3.0 small business server reveals major release
• Keccak wins NIST
• SHA-3 competition

Microformats add generally accepted tags, such as social network connections or geodetic coordinates, to HTML pages. Automated scripts collect them and help represent the data in graphically appealing ways – for example, geodata for vacation destinations.

Patent law is a very imperfect tool for establishing moral culpability. Whether you favor patents or not, it is important to face the fact that patent law is a construct of the business world. Patents protect opportunities for patent holders and restrict opportunities for others – all for some supposedly greater purpose, we are told, but in any case, none of this ever has the clarity that will allow you to point your finger at a violator as you would at someone who stole your car. So I don’t have a lot of faith in patents, but I still have a feeling you’ll do better in life if you come up with your own solutions.

Mission, vision, and value statements can help define small businesses, corporations, and movements – including FOSS.

Android's market share climbs to 64.1%– up 20.7 percentage points from 2011.

• Red Hat Addresses Secure Boot
• FSF Addresses Secure Boot
• Android 4.1 Jelly Bean

Why do companies pay a “Micro$oft Tax” for putting the Microsoft operating system in each and every desktop computer and laptop? This practice is a time-honored tradition called “bundling.”