25120822
submission
rsk writes:
Amazon Web Services's Elastic Load Balancer is a dynamic load-balancer managed by Amazon. Load balancers regularly swapped around with each other which can lead to surprising results; like getting millions of requests meant for a different AWS customer. Using ELBs can result in AWS unintentionally introducing a man-in-the-middle (attack) into your application environment. Most AWS users do not realize this can happen and have not secured against it.
18743574
submission
rsk writes:
A review of the $1200 Makerbot Thing-o-Matic 3D printer. After a 16-hour self-assembly and a few weeks of use a blown PSU was replaced with a higher powered PSU via a mod to the Thing-o-Matic. Video of the Thing-o-Matic printing out little solar panel mounts from Google Sketch-up included in the review. Final thoughts suggest that the Thing-o-Matic is not a great gift for non-engineers: You need a decent understanding of robotics, hardware, software, electronics and mechanics, need a little hand dexterity and a ton of patience.
17959186
submission
rsk writes:
The first time I came across fake reviews on Amazon, it was hilarious. Using Amazon's Window Shop app I came across a great category, "Peculiar Products", and was more than happy to look through it. Almost every one of the products I found on the list (Uranium Ore, 1 Gallon of Milk, Parent Child Test, Fresh Whole Rabbit) were fake with thousands of reviews on them. As a shopper, I wasn't aware of how easy it was to apparently fake product reviews and it bothers me. When I'm shopping, the first (and a lot of times only) place I visit is Amazon to read the reviews if I'm in the market for something. I don't expect the reviews to be the word of God, but I do assume a certain level of legitimacy for most of them. While this won't effect my use of Amazon (especially not at this time of the year) I would like to bubble this up to Amazon's attention so some time is spent on improving the quality of the reviews.
14644090
submission
rsk writes:
Paul Tyma, the man behind Mailinator, has put together an excellent performance analysis comparing old-school (java.io.*) synchronous programming to Java's (java.nio.*) asynchronous programming showing a consistent 25% performance deficiency with the asynchronous code. As it turns out, old-style blocking I/O with modern threading libraries like Linux NPTL and multi-core machines gives you idle-thread and non-contending thread management for an extremely low cost; less than it takes to switch-and-restore connection state constantly with a selector approach.
14378902
submission
rsk writes:
Internet Explorer 6, 7 and to some extent 8 have been the bane of every CSS-loving web developer for years. With the spreading adoption of CSS3's fancier rendering effects like rounded edges, drop shadows and linear gradients, the frustration of needing to deal with IE compatibility is growing. 327 Creative's Jason Johnston has created the CSS3 Pie library to address this. CSS3 Pie adds support for CSS3's most popular rendering techniques to Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 by way of the IE-only CSS property "behavior". CSS3 Pie is open sourced under the Apache 2 license and can be accessed from it's github repository.
8612002
submission
rsk writes:
One of the most popular questions on the Google Nexus One support forums is the 'Spotty 3G?' thread with almost 700 posts of users complaining about their 3G signal coverage fluctuating up down and between EDGE/3G with the phone just sitting on the desk or compared to other 3G devices on the T-Mobile network that don't offer the same unpredictable behavior. One workaround that seems to fix the issue is forcing the phone into "3G" or "WCDMA Only" mode. This is a bit of a downer given that T-Mobile just finished their 3G upgrade to 7.2Mbps. Official word from Google is "We are investigating this issue...".
