Not everything big data is limited to the latest twitter or facebook.

Just to give a one example of many possible, think of any processing that involves millions of records daily, and you need to process them, aggregate, analyze, dice and slice across various attributes on daily/monthly/quarterly/yearly frequency. This could be a financial firm, a retail chain, or anything where a lot of transactions happen daily. And you might be surprised that it's not just large corporations or governments.

Also, when there are permutations and combinations, input size increases dramatically.

But the biggest benefit it offers is to be able to do all this at very low cost - and that's the key factor of it's rise and popularity. Sure, big corporations were able to do a lot of such heavy task because they could buy hardwares worth millions of $$. But big data (hadoop) suddenly makes small players equipped with the same tools as big players and that is game-changing.

I am not defending big data just because it's cool, but because for a small company like ours, we can now think of doing things that were beyond our reach because of heavy cost of adding more storage and more processing power. It's very easy to understand the importance If you are into data warehouse / data analytics industry. On the other hand, if you are just creating few web apps, you may find it hard to understand the big deal.

Not really. Hadoop as a platform can be used for very heavyduty ETL as well as analytics needs. What you are confused is some of the tools within the framework (like Hive, Impala etc) that _also_ helps in lightweight ad-hoc analysis.

Also, HBase specifically addresses a need of a proper database - though not of a relational type.

Fanboi butthurt much??

Apple fanboi?

Who wants a stylus? Yuk! - Steve Jobs, 2007

Doing something stupid doesn't. Doing something stupid, not apologizong for it, failing to fix it in a timely manner and then blaming the stupidity on other people's code - when kernel policy clearly state it's YOUR responsibility - is much closer to the free ticket, wouldn't you say?

Stuxnet infected plenty of computers that were not on the internet.

Steve, go back to your grave, NOW!

If that's what you are doing, then you should be fired right away you stupid fucking idiot. Go and check what's available in the market first before you display basic understanding of what a company infrastructure should look like you rich asshole.

4 confidence rooms, all laptops connect wirelessly over Intel widi. No proprietary connectors and no wires.

Now go suck Steve rich Jobs' dick. Just because you are incompetent doesn't mean everyone else is too.

well, looking at the latest mac ads, if you are able to do anything at all on your mac on your own, you are a power user.

To me, Apple is one specific company which fucked him over. Of course, if you ignore that part, it's not about any specific company.

Sorry, at Apple already has patent on screwing customers. Google can't do it.