farming

The industry's premier Web players--Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook--agree on at least one thing: the future is cloud computing, and Hadoop is the engine to power the cloud.

Cloudera, the company set up to harness the power of Hadoop for the enterprise, on Monday released its first commercial product, the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop.

The Web, and how enterprises use it, will never be the same.

If I sound a little giddy, it's because I am. I think that Cloudera's distribution for Hadoop is one of the biggest things to happen to the enterprise ever because it … Read more

I'm allergic to tomatoes. Also black olives and mushrooms. That means I'm about the worst guy in the world to order a pizza with. But tomatoes are in about everything. Tacos, spaghetti--you name it, it's got tomatoes.

That is why I can't fully get behind these robotic, automated tomato-farming machines being developed by MIT. Clearly, they're Terminators sent from the future to try to kill me. Or Sarah Connor, though I'm not sure what she's allergic to.

I mean where else would something so high-tech come from? The robots are just part of … Read more

Need a little extra computing power, but don't want to pay for it? Sure, we all do.

Altair was probably thinking along the same lines Monday when it announced its Personal PBS. It's a free turnkey application that purportedly leverages multicore CPU technology to transform any desktop computer into a miniature compute farm or cluster system.

In addition, for an (undisclosed as of yet) fee, PBS provides an upgrade option path that lets customers submit jobs from their personal desktop to back-end server systems running PBS Professional.

Altair expects this new product to appeal to the open-source community, … Read more

Polar Bear Farm, working with a reversed engineered SDK, have created two prototype applications that caught my eye. Of course, this coming from someone who thinks hacking involves coughing and jailbreaking involves Folsom prison. But with that said, the New Zealander guys (and they are literally guys) from Polar Bear Farm demoed a search function for iPhones that searches contacts and calendars. Beyond that, and more ambitious are their video recording feature (still in development) and even more ambitious peer to peer poker (with other players) using your iPhone as your hand of cards instead of actual physical cards. While … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--A Stanford research team has concluded that the ocean not far off the Northern California coastline is the most promising spot for an offshore wind farm to generate power.

Specifically, the researchers concluded that the sea off Cape Mendocino, roughly 150 miles northwest of San Francisco, was their top pick. Wind turbines there could supply 5 percent of California's electrical power needs, they projected.

The researchers plan to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference here Thursday.

There are a number of offshore wind farms--one to the west of Denmark springs to mind--but most of … Read more

I know how it is: It gets harder every year to select the perfect present for that eco-friendly farmhand/truck driver in your life. Luckily, Passchal's got you covered this time.

The Virginia-based handbag maker is selling iPod and DVD cases hewn from old truck and tractor tires. The people at Passchal handmake them after picking through discarded inner tubes and soaking them in "an environmentally friendly solution" for three days.

Each case retains the original tire markings for that authentic, nouveaux vintage look. Recycling is so very now, isn't it?

Though $55 is a bit … Read more