Improving the performance by two orders of magnitude probably won't cut energy costs now, but it would allow massive cost and energy savings in the future.

Organizations that would normally be upgrading to a larger, more energy-hungry supercomputer would be much more likely to skip the purchase. If they do upgrade — or if they're buying their first supercomputer — they'll be able to get the performance they wanted with a tiny fraction of the hardware, which also means a tiny fraction of the cost and power consumption.

The 250% increase is in "demand," not sales or market share. That is, how many people planning on buying a phone soon are planning on Android? This statistic is unrelated to market share, and is perfectly valid for both old and new offerings.

From the article, 21% were going for an Android phone, compared to 28% for the iPhone.

Actually, FSS does have specific Google support: it's allowed by default, but counts as "Adult Content" if safe search is off. That's why it's blocked for the submitter, and why adding it as an exception doesn't work.

Can't point you to a comparison article, but one language you should consider is Scala. It compiles to the Java platform, and thus can interact almost transparently with existing Java code and libraries, and uses Erlang's concurrency model. It can do both functional and imperitive, object-oriented tasks. It's statically-typed, but with features I didn't think were possible outside a dynamic language, such as duck-typing (only compile-time checked!)

It's very powerful, but sometimes hard to figure out. Not my ideal language, but the closest I've found.

Official site:
http://www.scala-lang.org/

The busy Java developer's guide to Scala:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/java/libraryview.jsp?search_by=scala+neward

Scala for Java refugees:
http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/roundup-scala-for-java-refugees