A recent blog post on the Windows HPC Team Blog reveals that it has now decided to discontinue work on LINQ to HPC, code named 'Dryad'. Dryad was designed to provide a platform for developers to to build applications that can process large amounts of data. Microsoft has now partnered with Hortonworks, which is a Yahoo spinoff that specializes in Hadoop, to help develop software distributions for Windows Server and Windows Azure. A Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Azure Hadoop version is due to be out before the end of this year, while the Windows Server test build of Hadoop is due some time in 2012. Senior program manager, Don Pattee, on the HPC Team Blog has acknowledged that Hadoop has emerged as a great platform for analyzing unstructured data or large volumes of data at low cost.

Some programmers in the blogosphere have recently been blogging about the "Can you crack it" website. It's the strange and dark website that merely poses the question "Can you crack it" at the top of the page. Then there's about 10 lines of code. Below that, there's a timer to the left and then a form for you to put in your answer to the code.

The timer has been running for a few days now. I first saw the timer ticking down saying 18 days left, but now it's only got about 13 days left.

There's one blogger, in particular, who has said that he cracked the code. He's either a genius or is lying. He didn't say what came after though. Apparently, those who crack the code are not allowed to tell.

The curiosity has been eating away at me and many other coders and bloggers who have been trying to figure out the code over the past few days. If you actually figure out the code, you must be a genius!

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The Apache Hadoop is set to become much better and more user-friendly. It is to get various new features.
This news has been very well received by Hadoop users who used to grapple with the high level of technology of the software all the time. This new and improved version will be called Hadoop 0.23 and will have much better features of high availability, installation and data management. The new Hadoop version is set to be released in the second quarter of 2012.
Version 0.23 also has improvements in availability, performance, and scalability as well, this is good for users of social networking sites like Facebook. Also the software in the improved version of Hadoop will be traditional and will help users move files easily. Eric Baldeschwieler, CEO of HortonWorks, said, "A big focus for us is going to be adding tools for monitoring and distributing and management. The goal is to make it easier for organizations to use Hadoop. The problem now is it takes a pretty sophisticated operations staff to install and use it."