Lifehacker - Best of the Best: Hive Five Winners, January through March 2009 - Best of
http://lifehacker.com/5194859/best-of-the-best-hive-five-winners-january-through-march-2009

Our Hive Five asks readers to identify five of the best tools for any job, then vote for the absolute best. Here's a look back at the winners—the best of the best—from each week. Includes DVR applications, movie cataloging tool using barcode scanning, linux and mindmapping software.

Our Hive Five asks readers to identify five of the best tools for any job, then vote for the absolute best. Here's a look back at the winners—the best of the best—from each week. Every week we pose a question to you, the computer saavy readers of Lifehacker. Tirelessly we search for the next "Which is best?" question and through the hive mind we distill down your thousands of nominations into a list of the top five candidates. You vote on the best of the best and we return the next week to declare a champion. The following list showcases the winners in each of the categories we covered in the first quarter of 2009. If a particular category catches your eye and you'd like to see the other contenders, click on the name of the category to to jump to the original Hive Five post, clicking on the name of the winner will take you directly to the web site for the software. Best DVR Application: Windows Media Center For many, Windows Media Center is the product Microsoft got just right. It's

Just wanted to add that even though there is a single point of failure the reliability due to software bugs has not been an issue and the dfs Namenode has been very stable. The Jobtracker crashes that we have seen are due to errant jobs - job isolation is not yet that great in hadoop and a bad query from a user can bring down the tracker (though the recovery time for the tracker is literally a few minutes). There is some good work happening in the community though to address those issues.

I few weeks ago, I posted about a conversation I had with Jeff Hammerbacher of Cloudera, in which he discussed a Hadoop-based effort at Facebook he previously directed. Subsequently, Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sarma of Facebook contacted me to expand upon and in a couple of instances correct what Jeff had said. They also filled me in on Hive, a data-manipulation add-on to Hadoop that they developed and subsequently open-sourced.