After a year from announcing partnership and starting the collaboration project, Microsoft (SQL Server) and Hortonworks (Hadoop) have finally announced the result of this integration: Microsoft HDInsight Server and HDInsight Azure Service.

So what is HDInsight? well, it is essentially Microsoft’s Hadoop-based distribution which is built on top of the Hortonworks Data Platform. So if you download Microsoft HDInsight Server for a local installation of the Hadoop distribution, then you will end up with a local cluster with your own Hadoop Hive able to run Hadoop jobs, as well as benefit from the already released Hadoop integration points with SharePoint and EXCEL. This is just so powerful!

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I’ve always wanted to get into hardware as a hobby, when I was back in university one of our group projects was building a Lego Mindstorm mine detection robot, it was a lot of fun working with other people on this project and building out a fully functional robot with an AI capable of navigating a simple test environment, and performing tasks.

That was a while ago though, and between work and consultancy its been difficult finding time to cultivate this interest. Although recently I started reading up on the Raspberry Pi project, how can you connect it up with Bread Boards, Arduino modules and even how to turn it into a full blown Media Center controlled using the XBMC app on your IPhone or Android Smartphone. This I had to try.

Below I go through my experience of how I installed Raspbmc on my Raspberry Pi and configured XBMC media center and the Edimax wifi dongle to stream movies from my desktop PC, as well as control the XBMC media center through the IPhone app.

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Mobile BI is clearly on our door-steps, with many organizations starting to integrate a level of Mobile Business Intelligence into their reporting and analytics road-maps, although the uptake has not been as strong as one might expect, this is mainly because of the following reasons:

• The landscape of the Mobile BI reporting suites is still very new with only a few names out there that offer such solutions
• Integrating a level of Mobile BI into your report offering could mean an increased level of complexity in terms of data preparation.
• Due to a low number of providers, Mobile BI tends to be more expensive than what one might expect, which could increase the risks of a project revolving around such a system, causing managers to be deterred away from taking the first step, even if that steps allows for a competitive edge.

But this is all about to change, Mobile BI is becoming as easy as installing an App on your Tablet.
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In collaboration with IE9, Atari has released 8 classic games that have been ported into HTML5, these games can be played without any advertisement on  your Internet Explorer (9) browser, or with adverts on any other browser that support HTML5.

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