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Showing posts from August 4, 2007

The "me too" phenomenon and Identity theft

A very interesting article from Muhammad Saleem on the "me too" phenomenon. My problem with this phenomenon is that this might make stealing identity easier than before. In this new web 2.0 world, if I need your passwords or mother's maiden name, all I have to do is build an interesting application which you would like to try out at least once. Once I have your password or other key information (which most likely be the same across all your applications), I can shut the side down and do other interesting things. I'm an open advocate of OpenID which attacks some of the issues, but its no silver bullet. More from Muhammad's blog.. "Everyday a new company announces a 'new' product which is nothing more than the old product with slight modifications or a few small additional features. This mentality is not only bad for users but also for marketers and even the startups. A prime example of this phenomenon can be witnessed by comparing Dodgeball , Twitte

Hadoop and HBase

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This may not be a surprise for a lot of people but it was for me. Even though I have been using lucene and nutch for some time, I didn't really know enough about Hadoop and HBase until recently. Hadoop Scalable: Hadoop can reliably store and process petabytes. Economical: It distributes the data and processing across clusters of commonly available computers. These clusters can number into the thousands of nodes. Efficient: By distributing the data, Hadoop can process it in parallel on the nodes where the data is located. This makes it extremely rapid. Reliable: Hadoop automatically maintains multiple copies of data and automatically redeploys computing tasks based on failures. Hadoop implements MapReduce , using the Hadoop Distributed File System ( HDFS ) (see figure below.) MapReduce divides applications into many small blocks of work. HDFS creates multiple replicas of data blocks for reliability, placing them on compute nodes around the cluster. MapReduce can then pro