Distributed computing (preferably in "the cloud") is one of the hot topics at the moment. But what is it? And when and why would you want it anyway? And how do you *do* it? Some of the buzzwords we'll traverse - S3, EC2, Hadoop, App Engine, Messaging, Sharding, ... Robert Coup is a developer with sticky fingers - mapping, gis, javascript, python, django, databases, web-ops, open source, open data, and the technical side of a small Auckland startup: Koordinates. Less