Generally, I'd say you are right. You don't have the certainty you're not being cheated.

However, my personal experience is that I substantially netted positive over a year-long online poker career. I don't have any explanation for it, really, but I can't imagine they'd let more than a few players get away with any real amount of money, and I certainly don't think I'm the one that won the lottery of being "allowed" to win to attract other players.

If they do adjust the win rates at an infinitesimal rate to allow their house players to win, then they were doing it both transparently and subtly enough that it was still a profitable venture for me to be online playing a solid game. You could potentially liken it to doing business in a lawless part of the world - some times, you're going to get hijacked, but on the whole it's still making money for you.

Now, for all the guys that *I* took money from, yeah, that was certainly a mistake on their part, but it's not like every player can be a winner, can they?

There are still plenty of places where it's important to get that extra 10% runtime. It's just that writing your average web app or silly desktop application simply aren't those places anymore.

Personally, I like this development - you don't have to bother so much with stuff you need to "just work" so that you can spend time optimizing and improving where it counts. My admin UI is "slow", but the libraries and business logic I'm using in my Hadoop applications are hella optimized.

If you are more interested in working on the latter kind of problem, maybe it's time you try to find a different job. (Incidentally, Rapleaf is hiring engineers.)

This article is really confused. Powerset, before it was acquired by Microsoft, started work on HBase, which is a BigTable-like storage system that runs on Hadoop. Both HBase and Hadoop are Apache projects that are out in the open basically in no relation to Microsoft.

Microsoft has allowed two of the primary HBase developers, who work at Powerset, to continue their open-source work on HBase, which is definitely cool. But to say that Microsoft is releasing this is just flat out wrong.

(Full disclosure: I am a non-Microsoft-employed HBase committer.)

Facebook has already done the initial work on Thrift, and lots of people are contributing. It's also already in the Apache Incubator on its was to becoming a full Apache project. So, why would I want to use Cisco's solution over Thrift?