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Windows NT Kernel Contributor Explains Why Performance is Behind Other OS
I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous...
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Linux on an 8-bit micro
Dmitry.GR: A successful experiment in running real Linux on an 8-bit AVR.
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Multiprocess Firefox
Since this January, David Anderson and I have been working on making Firefox use multiple processes. Tom Schuster (evilpie on IRC) joined us as an intern this summer, and Felipe Gomes, Mark Hammond…
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How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one
Today, pretty much everyone has a CPU, a DSP and a GPU, buried somewhere in their PC, phone, car, etc. Most don't know or care that they bought any of these, but they did.
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Booting to Rust
A couple nights ago I was looking over the UEFI spec, and I realized it shouldn't be too hard to write UEFI applications in Rust. It turns out, you can, and her…
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ARM64 and You
Ever since the iPhone 5S was announced a couple of weeks ago , the world of tech journalism has been filled with massive quantities of misinformation . Unfortunately, good information takes time, and the world of tech journalism is more about speed than accuracy. Today, as suggested by a variety of readers, I'm going…
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Debugging a Live Saturn V
Writing and photos by Brennan Moore
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Fish shell 2.0
fish 2.0 is now released! fish is a fully-equipped command line shell (like bash or zsh) that is smart and user-friendly. fish supports powerful features like syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, and tab completions that just work, with nothing to learn or configure.
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Communicating Sequential Processes
With the arrival of core.async , ClojureScript provides a powerful advantage over other popular compile to JavaScript languages like CoffeeScript , Dart , and TypeScript . These languages fail to address the single largest source of incidental complexity for any sizeable client side application - concurrency. In my…
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Call me maybe: Cassandra
Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…
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After 5 days, my OS doesn't crash when I press a key
Day 37: After 5 days, my OS doesn't crash when I press a key
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A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility
I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 ...
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How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)
C is, today, a unique programming language. Surprisingly few people can really program in C and yet many of us have quite strong opinions about it. Buffer overflows, stack smashing, integer overflows — C has many well publicised flaws, and these terms are often bandied about confidently, even by those unfamiliar with…
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When Haskell Is Not faster than C
This article is in response to an earlier one comparing Haskell and C, which made the claim that Haskell beats out C when it comes to speed. On a Hacker News thread I made the bold claim that the C code is rife with problems and that it is tempting to fix it.
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Rewriting a large production system in Go
My team at Google is wrapping up an effort to rewrite a large production system (almost) entirely in Go . I say "almost" because one compon...
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Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet
There’s no doubt that cloud computing is the future of IT infrastructure. Its scalability, ease of access and capacity for analysing vast amounts of data has made it integral to how businesses, organizations, and end-users use the internet.
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Why Registers Are Fast and RAM Is Slow
In the previous article on ARM64 , I mentioned that one advantage of the new architecture is the fact that it has twice as many registers, allowing code load data from RAM less often, which is much slower. Reader Daniel Hooper asks the natural question: just why is RAM so much slower than registers?
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How I Got a 2x Speedup With One Line of Code
If you had asked me whether or not it was possible to get a 2x speedup for my LazySorted project by adding a single line of code, I would have told you "No way, substantial speedups can really only come from algorithm changes." But surprisingly, I was able to do so by adding a single line using the __builtin_prefetch…
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Some Notes About Time
This is a trade-off: you can't represent a leap second, and your time is guaranteed to go backwards. On the other hand, every day has exactly 86,400 seconds, and you don't need a table of all previous and future leap seconds in order to format Unix time as human-preferred hours-minutes-seconds.
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ZeroMQ instead of HTTP, for internal services
A post by August Lilleaas, published July 22, 2013.
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Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?
As I was exiting Oxford Railway Station, I glanced at this screen showing the bus departure times. Notice anything odd about it? sigh Yet again someone has shoehorned Microsoft Windows into a product it is completely unsuitable for. Why does a screen which displays a fairly basic set of information need to be running…
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