Stories by Dan Tynan

Big data is reshaping business IT. Thanks to cheap storage, massive processing power, and tools like Hadoop, organizations are now able to mine terabytes of information and derive useful business intelligence from it. But the data revolution is also creating a new breed of hybrid business-IT jobs, ones that blend business knowledge and powerful IT tools to the benefit of tech-savvy line-of-business professionals -- and the possible detriment of IT pros oblivious to the big data trend.

Are you a jargon junkie? Got an insatiable appetite for information? Do you rule over your company's systems with an iron fist, unwilling to yield control until someone pries the keyboard from your cold, dead hands?

They couldn't put it off any longer. The ERP system for the <a href="http://my.epri.com/portal/server.pt?">Electric Power Research Institute</a> (EPRI) had reached the end of its useful life.

Too many projects, too little time: That's the sad lament of many IT professionals who must constantly balance the needs of the enterprise against the desires of business users - all while keeping a close eye on the newest technologies coming at them from every direction.

IT superheroes can't fly - at least, not without an airplane. They don't possess X-ray vision or super strength. They won't be found wearing capes or spandex (at work). But the geeks who save the day time and time again for enterprises around the globe exhibit some extraordinary powers.

In a perfect world, your network would suffer no downtime and be locked down tight. You'd be in perfect compliance with all government regulations, and your users would all be self-supporting. The cloud would take care of nearly all your infrastructure needs, and there wouldn't be a single device accessing the network you didn't first approve of and control.

You think your job is bad? You ain't seen nothing until you've had to pick moldy food and cockroaches out of a dead PC or been asked to find out what your coworkers have been up to online when they were supposedly working. You definitely haven't earned your IT creds until you've stood in two feet of water holding a plugged-in server while trying not to get electrocuted, found yourself inside a sniper's crosshairs while you're attempting to install a communications link, or had to worry about bombs going off while you're futzing with network protocols.

Call it a slowdown, a downturn, or the dreaded &quot;R&quot; word, worries about the state of the US economy have increased across virtually all sectors save one: Technology.

From on-demand video services that were overly demanding, to underwhelming operating-system updates, 2007 was full of disappointments. We surveyed the landscape and polled some old friends to come up with the 15 products, companies, and industries that left the most sour taste in our mouths. From last to first, here's our list of the year's biggest losers. Read 'em and weep.

Mike Blake didn't start out as a geek.