Hadoop Tutorial in a virtual machine

Cloudera virtual machine can be used to play with Hive and HDFS environment. See here.

Configuring Java and JDK on Snow-Leopard

You can find the best explanations and backward configurations at http://wiki.oneswarm.org/index.php/OS_X_10.6_Snow_Leopard

Who says Java is slow?

"Slowness of Java" proved to be a myth even back in 1996-1997, when Java ORBs kept beating C++ orbs in various RPC benchmarks.

Consider also, that in July 2008, Hadoop won the Terabyte Sort Benchmark: One of Yahoo's Hadoop clusters sorted 1 terabyte of data in 209 seconds. This beat the previous record of 297 seconds in the annual general purpose (Daytona) terabyte sort benchmark.

It was the first time that either a Java or an open source program had ever won.