Lets keep this theme going:

Seriously,
Is it time someone started fucking with these people?
http://gigaom.com/cloud/garantiadata-and-the-lure-of-infinite-scalability

<BOOMING VOICE>
!!INFINITE SCALABILITY!!!
</BOOMING VOICE>

Who knew all we needed to add was compression.

So here's the pitch: We added the highly complex feature of "compression" to an open source project. Because of that: INFINITE SCALABILITY -> Profit!

I know, I will create my own database!

Quick everyone install Memsql!

http://dom.as/2012/06/26/memsql-rage/

I'm so sick of this crap. It takes 5 to 10 years (or much more) to build a good, reliable, feature complete, and performant database.

Please stop wasting our time. I don't know if you realize it or not, but when you release these worthless, data eating, performance killing, hype bombs, you actually have a negative effect on peoples lives. Some sucker engineer somewhere is going to install this thing, and if they are lucky it's only going to eat 6 months of their life.

Hadooop!

Yet another reason I think Hadoop and Map Reduce is a bit of a fad.

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/163083/hotcbp12%20final.pdf

This paper makes the point that most workloads would fit in memory on a small cluster, but we go through hoops to stream data on/off disks and end up with these convoluted programming idioms (like cascading). Our largest dataset is 33GB as lzo. Even at 330GB, we could fit this in memory on our cluster. If all processing was in memory, we would be orders of magnitude faster.

How much?

I've digitized my fair share of vinyl, so I know it's a bit of a pain. Not difficult, just monotonous. So on a lark, I was curious what it would cost to have someone else digitize all my vinyl for fun.
http://www.offtherecord-online.com/

This one was my favorite:
http://www.reclaimmedia.com/

I entered 500 records and got back a quote of only $5000. What a deal!

Seriously though, a while ago I read an article about a way to digitize vinyl by taking a picture.. I wish that had worked out..

The best science video _EVER_

http://vimeo.com/40271657

So great.