Earning Points. Starwood's Preferred Guest program is fairly straightforward: the more nights you spend at participating hotels, the faster you'll earn a free night.
As seen in the EXECUTING phase, the map will write (using Mapper.Context.write()) its output into a circular in-memory buffer (MapTask.MapOutputBuffer). The size of this buffer is fixed and determined by the configuration parameter mapreduce.task.io.sort.mb (default: 100MB).
1 The .vmx file is typically located in the directory where you created the virtual machine.  In Windows XP and Server 2003, the default location for the file is: C:\Documents and Settings\your_user_name\My Documents\Virtual Machines\virtual_machine_name.vmx.