As part of the seminar I’m in on Large Scale Data Analysis, I gave a talk on the continuing battle in the MapReduce world between DeWitt and Stonebraker on the side of parallel databases versus Dean and Ghemawat on the side of MapReduce. For those of you not interested in reading these long articles, it basically boils down to this: DeWitt and Stonebraker originally claimed that MapReduce allowed for fast data movement but was slow for actual computation, so you should use parallel databases instead (they suggested Vertica and “DBMS-X”, a mystery database).
I have heard very often that the critical event of the 20th century was World War I, and to find out the consequences of that, I read Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. And while that does an excellent job of describing the aftermath of World War I, I found myself wanting more with respect to how the Russian tsars fell. So when I saw Rasputin’s face staring me down at the local Borders, I knew I had to pick it up and see what was really going on and the role the enigmatic Rasputin played in it.
A while ago I did a screencast on the basic features of AppScale, but the quality was just not what I was looking for. So when the opportunity to do a new screencast came up, I bought ScreenFlow (which I should have done from the start) and with it, slapped together a way better screencast! Enjoy!
