Agreed, but that's the peril of living in a world where everything is tightly-coupled and highly-integrated. People forget that you can mix-n-match, they look no further than using one system for everything. NoSQL does indeed have a purpose, and just like an F1 car, it is in a class of its own when used for that purpose. But I'd no more use Memcache as a substitute for NetCDF or Ingres than I would use an F1 car to go off-road sight-seeing.

The "old old boss" would be the CDF/NetCDF/HDF family of self-describing distributed storage solutions. They predate XML by a long way and are - I believe - the first true self-describing method of storing, indexing and searching data.

For the most part, they support network interconnections between instances, so you can have your virtual storage distributed over as many physical systems as you like. The users will never see the difference except in terms of speed. This gives you all the benefit of NoSQL's distributed model (which XML lacks) but with several decades more development in the database design.

But wait! There's more! If you order in the next gazillion years, you get OpENDAP absolutely free! (Which it is anyway.) OpENDAP will translate between any two data formats, so if one site wants to view the data as, say, a conventional database, another wants to look at it as a collection of spreadsheets and a third is expecting XML data, you'd have OpENDAP translate between client form and central repository form.

I have no objections to Mongo or Memcache, they're very powerful and are very useful, but we're still ultimately talking about technology everyone else has had since 1985, thanks be to NASA, and many NoSQL technologies are really just network-aware versions of the DBM/NDBM/BDB/GDBM/QDBM family which have existed since Unix began.

NoSQL definitely has a place - I would not want to try serving cached web data from HDF5 - and it's an important place. But that's just as true for Hierarchical Databases, Star Databases (aka "Data Warehouses"), "genuine" (ie: actually complies with Codd's rules) relational databases (SQL isn't truly relational in the Codd model, merely a subset), and so on.

It's time we got away from one-size-fits-all ideas, which violates the Unix ethos anyway, and get back to using best solutions for specific problems rather than passable solutions that fail at everything. These are all wonderful, highly specialized solutions to highly specific problem types. Treating them as such will always produce a better answer than force-fitting solutions into not-quite-failing with problems they aren't designed for.

I was thinking the same thing.

"I'll take Takei for the tip."

Wait, let me rephrase that....

Here you go. As if banning everything the authoritarians DON'T want you to eat isn't fundamentally the same as forcing you to eat specific things.

I'm a little late responding, but aspartame breaks down in a warm environment into other substances, one of them being formaldehyde. That's the only one I'm really concerned about at the moment; I'm actually not totally buying into the other claim that artificial sweeteners actually make you fatter by messing with your metabolism.

Not just higher-power, but optical. There's other, more powerful, space telescopes being built* but none are in the visible or near-visible spectrum.

*Admittedly, the Congresscritters want them cancelled, but they are for now being built. Even if NASA got these two, I'd be worried that Congress would continue being "cent-wise and dollar-foolish", with the result of them either never being launched or being sold to the Russians. Where they might well be converted back into spy satellites.

The mirrors are the difficult part. Hubble was damaged at birth due to defective mirror production, the corrective lens helped but any thickening of a lens will reduce the light that gets through to some extent. The Newtonian reflector didn't use a front lens at all - which would be great in space where you've not got to worry about atmosphere and corrosion (although micrometeorites are a pain).

Once the Enterprise is built, though, we can just fly to the stars. Well, once someone invents the warp drive.

Still playing the race card, eh?

I guess there are now 102 uses for a dead cat.

Online Social Media Networks Inflate Their Numbers by 5000%.

When only 2% of the registered accounts are active, it's not hard to see that the right 1% can make a big change.