How will memristors change everything?

A non-random sample of my tech friends shows that not many have heard of memristors (though I do suspect vote tampering). I'd read a little about memristors in 2008 when the initial hubbub about the existence of memristors was raised. I, however,  immediately filed them into that comforting conceptual bucket of potentially revolutionary technologies I didn't have to worry about because like most wondertech, nothing would ever come of it. Wrong. After watching Finding the Missing Memristor by R. Stanley Williams I've had to change my mind. Memristors have gone from "maybe never" to holy cow this could happen soon and it could change everything.

Let's assume for the sake of dreaming memristors do prove out. How will we design systems when we have access to a new material that is two orders of magnitude more efficient from a power perspective than traditional transistor technologies, contains multiple petabits (1 petabit = 128TB) of persistent storage, and can be reconfigured to be either memory or CPU in a package as small as a sugar cube (in a stacked configuration)?

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Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop

Many people in the Apache Hadoop community have asked Yahoo! to publish the version of Apache Hadoop they test and deploy across their large Hadoop clusters. As a service to the Hadoop community, Yahoo is releasing the Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop -- a source code distribution that is based entirely on code found in the Apache Hadoop project.

This source distribution includes code patches that they have added to improve the stability and performance of their clusters. In all cases, these patches have already been contributed back to Apache, but they may not yet be available in an Apache release of Hadoop.

Read more and get the Hadoop distribution from Yahoo