Durability is not generally designed into current smartphones. Intentionally. Think about the volume of sales, and how they would decrease, if devices didn't break within about 2-3 years. In fact, durability nearly sank RIM - as most people were comparing new iPhones with the original bold - released at the same time as the original iPhone.

2-3 years is an eon in mobile right now. If devices don't die, people don't upgrade.

Except for a few problems:

Hadoop tops out around 4000-6000 nodes, then you run into serious scalability issues in the jobtracker and HDFS scalability. Granted, with HDFS federation and YARN these should improve, but today you can't build this wider than a few racks without spending a good chunk of time doing some significant hadoop engineering.

Second, disk. Where's the disk? Hadoop needs disk. Hadoop likes disk. Disk likes hadoop. Hadoop likes lots and lots of disk. Nice, you've built a 6 watt SoC. Now just put six 10 watt 1TB drives beside it and I'll be happy. Oh, and make sure the disk controller can do spindle speed on all six.

Nope. This exact thing has happened before - except it was Nike, not Apple:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blnike.htm

In my case, I didn't even talk about the major advantages like the complex analysis. 100 billion row joins don't sell execs. I did it purely based on the cost vs. enterprise grade storage. That got it in the door - and then I was selling the platform to developers. Showing a dev team a little pig script written on the spot, then sending it out on a production cluster and watching it use 800 cores and 8TB of memory, processing a few dozen TB of data while we're sitting in a room, and the devs got on board. Now I've got new dev groups wanting onto the platform regularly - and the execs keep hearing about how this hadoop thing is a critical part of their app/service/report. It sells itself, after a point.

I'm biased, as my entire job is building those systems so many people refer to as "big data" - but the marketing is terrible. The technology itself is quite good, and makes a huge amount of sense. The problem is, companies traditionally used to doing data stuff for large corporations (ie, EMC, Oracle) are pissing themselves. This destroys their entire business model - so they're flooding the market with crap trying to avoid losing absolute boatloads of money and accounts to these technologies.

Talk about big data with those companies all you like, and they won't mention the actual reason hadoop and the like are a big deal:
1- It's all open source. Don't wanna pay? Self support.
2- It's all designed to run on the cheapest commodity hardware you can find. Why buy appliances with huge markups?

This has companies used to huge margins on appliances and software shitting themselves. They tried FUD with single point of failure stuff, and now that that's solved, they're stuffing infiniband into custom rack designs and saying how much better it is. Meanwhile you can buy 4x the gear for that same price.

Is it a buzzword? Yup. Is it saturated with marketing? Yup. Is it a stupid idea? Hell no.

You misunderstand. I'm impatient. Now that I'm actually capable of running a reasonable distance, I get annoyed walking because I could be getting there faster!

I actually had the opposite reaction. I'm 31, and I constantly fight the urge to run everywhere. I remember all through school, even into early highschool, I'd run everywhere I wanted to go.

Then it was uncool to run. Then inappropriate. Then unprofessional. A year ago, effectively 15 years after I stopped running everywhere, I started running for exercise. I'm getting back into shape. And I'm finding it annoying that I can't just run all the time - I'll get sweaty or smelly, and that's just socially unacceptable.

I'm pretty sure we're all meant to run a LOT more than we do - and we've forced ourselves to stop due to social pressure.

Actually, that's exactly what he should have done. If you're ever presented paperwork, and presented a choice at which point you must choose right there and then, sign it. It's compelled/under duress.

Several of my former employers had a policy on termination where you must sign an agreement stating you won't sue for anything (wrongful dismissal, etc) in order to get a generous severance package. But, you have to make that agreement there, in the room, before they walk you out of the building. I ran this past a few lawyers, and they all said the exact same thing: if you're under duress, sign it right away. Agreements that are signed under duress are void.

Or you want to hear from other people about what they're working on. Believe it or not, the more technical "trade shows" are quite useful in that regard.

Yes, because apple is the only company that does high-dpi displays.

(Actually, that's unfortunately pretty true right now, but I hope to start seeing better displays out of the hardware makers soon.)

They already do. Just try to contribute to Hamas. See how well that goes over.

Show me a license that's not "my way or the highway". In fact, show me any legal contract that's "my way or... you know, do whatever you want."

Blah... Built in South Africa, not South America.

It's not incorrect. ASKAP is referred to as a "pathfinder" project - an initial proof of concept that will eventually be rolled into the full SKA array -- most of which will be in South America.

The SKA organization only came into existence formally last year. The ASKAP project was in progress long before that. SKA is in the "pre-construction" phase now, and won't even start building telescopes themselves until 2016.

Seriously? He made two comments on twitter, of which he's an active user, and the media picked it up. I don't quite see how that's trolling for attention.

You, on the other hand, seem to be doing quite well at it.