That sounded a lot more like over the top rhetoric as opposed to useful information.

> Don't use Hadoop MapReduce until you have a solid reason why xargs won't solve your problem

Really? How do these two even compare?

These compare because map reduce says "take this set and split it up" -- all of which can be done through tools which already exist.

Hadoop Map Reduce may make it more approachable for java programmers, but distributed work happened long before it was around.

> Hadoop Map Reduce may make it more approachable for java programmers, but distributed work happened long before it was around

There is no argument here. I will even venture that map reduce is overhyped as a technique. (Though I am not sure how approachable map-reduce is to 'java programmers'. I have seen a lot of people get confused with problems that require multi-staged map reduce)

Maybe I am just being dense. But somehow it still feels like the comparison between map-reduce and xargs make sense only in the very abstract sense (i.e. They might be components of a divide and conquer algorithmic approach and can thus be compared despite the difference in types of problems that they solve and the very different scales they operate on)