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FreeBSD 8.1 released
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:
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Google's VP8 video codec (and ffmpeg)
Now that the hype is over, let's talk the real deal. How good is Google's VP8 video codec? Since "multiple independent implementations help a standard mature quicker and become more useful to its users", me and others (David for the decoder core and PPC optimizations, Jason for x86 optimizations) decided that we…
You can’t beat a good compiler…. right?
It is extremely well worn conventional wisdom that for your “average” programmer, it’s pretty much impossible to beat a good optimizing compiler at writing fast code. For those who skip the “understanding” part, and jump straight into the “application” part, this rule of thumb tends to be grossly misunderstood, and…
Slides and notes from my three hour Redis tutorial
These slides and notes were originally written to accompany a three hour Redis tutorial I gave at the NoSQL Europe conference on the 22nd of April 2010.
NoSQL vs. RDBMS: Let the flames begin
I’ve been getting solidly flamed recently, as have my former coworkers at Digg, my friends at Twitter, etc. about our adoption and promotion of various NoSQL storage systems. It seems that some DBAs are very, very upset that us internet kids are considering abandoning SQL’s ship. I’m not here to throw out a bunch of…
Unix recovery legend
It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday, 1st October, 15:15 BST, to be precise, when Peter, an office-mate of mine, leaned away from his terminal and said to me, " Mario, I'm having a little trouble sending mail. " Knowing that msg was capable of confusing even the most capable of people, I sauntered over to his…
Return-Oriented Programming without Returns (on the x86)
We show that on the x86 it is possible to mount a return-oriented programming attack without using any return instructions. Our new attack instead makes use of certain instruction sequences that behave like a return; we show that these sequences occur with sufficient frequency in large Linux libraries to allow…