news
Education and Standards in the News
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Education
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DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ Bourne and his shell at NYCBUG this Wednesday – DragonFly BSD Digest
Reminder: NYCBUG‘s next event is in two days. It’s “The Design of Unix Shell” with Stephen Bourne. You should go; it’s a chance to talk directly with the author of foundational software.
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Standards/Consortia
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Matt Birchler ☛ Encrypted RCS is going wide, starting today
Seriously though, this is great to see start rolling out, and it will impact most folks here in the US since it works with Google Messages. Samsung recently announced that they were discontinuing their messaging app, and Samsung phones will now default to Google's app as well.
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Kirill A Korinsky ☛ Hellishly Slow Level 13 DEFLATE Compression
DEFLATE remains worth optimising because its decoders are already everywhere: HTTP content encoding, ZIP archives, PNG internals, software distribution, backup tools, and embedded formats still use the same LZ77 plus Huffman design. The decoder contract is fixed, but the encoder still chooses matches, block boundaries, and Huffman tables; better choices improve size without changing compatibility.
The baseline is libdeflate level 12, one of the strongest practical DEFLATE encoders. The level 13 implementation was contributed upstream as pull request.
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