New job opportunities are emerging for IT professionals in the field of "big data," the term used to describe how corporations gather vast amounts of real-time data about their customers and analyze that data to drive decision making and increase profitability.

IT professionals are scrambling to get trained and certified in what's expected to be the hottest new high-tech skill for 2012: Hadoop.

Developers moving to the upcoming paid version of Google Translate need to follow the documentation so their implementation of the package doesn't lead them to paying for someone else's use of the platform.

I haven't talked about programming languages for a while so here goes: We start this week with the free, open source (MIT License) Lua language.

Can you program a network of multivendor switches and routers, all running different operating systems, command line interfaces and configuration routines, to work in concert when it comes to managing flows?

It's relatively simple to get up and running with Clojure - the latest Lisp dialect. We show you how.

Microsoft and Google are fighting yet another public relations battle, this time over the HTML5 video standards to be used in the next generation of Web browsers.

Some early programmer names are familiar to even the most novice of software developers. You may never have seen a line of code written by Bill Gates, or written any application in BASIC (much less for the Altair). But you know Gates' name, and the names of a few others.

Several weeks ago, Lynn Greiner's article on the state of the scripting universe was slashdotted. Several people raised their eyebrows at the (to them) obvious omissions, since the article only covered PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl and JavaScript. As I wrote at the time, Lynn chose those languages because hers was a follow-up to an article from three years back. Plus, most IT managers are familiar with at least one of those well-known scripting languages, even if they haven't personally written a line of code in one of them.

The software development department might envision a marvelous solution to the company's IT or business need, but the technology goal can't be achieved unless the Big Boss commits to the new strategy. How do you get there-and ensure that the user need really is filled? The key, say three former CIOs, is accurate business process requirements, a common language for the business and IT to communicate, and executive steering.