hardware

Graphics card for OpenGL shader development

I need some hardware for high bandwidth video processing using GLSL. Could anyone recommend me the best GPU for the job? My requirements (most to least important): fits into laptop good fragment shaders support (high instruction limit etc) pixel buffer object extension quality opengl windows driver low price :) ...

Accessing hardware from within Internet Explorer

Is it possible to access hardware devices (web-cams, magnetic card readers, etc.) from within Internet explorer? If yes, what technologies are used? And are there any .Net examples. In my case, I need to access a magnetic card reader that would be attached to the client computer. The web-app would need to be able to access the reader ...

Why is float division slow?

What are the steps in the algorithm to do floating point division? Why is the result slower than say, multiplication? Is it done the same way we do division by hand? By repeatedly dividing by the divisor, subtracting the result to obtain a remainder, aligning the number again and continuing till the remainder is less than a particular ...

Multi-headed display system

What tools, APIs, libraries are out there that I could use to create a system capable of rendering hi-res 3D scenes in real time in a display made of 4, 8, 9, 16, etc screens/projectors? For a setup with 8 projectors I should go for clustered solutions or should I stay with a single node featuring 4 dual headed video cards? Does someone ...

Does anyone know how to map Microsoft's Instant Viewer mouse function to a keyboard?

After reading Jeff's review of Microsoft's Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I decided to get one. It comes with this really nice Instant Viewer feature that it assigns to the middle button of your mouse. Not wanting to lose my middle button "open in new tab" function. I wanted to assign it to the keyboard. I'v looked at task manager when...

LAMP setup on elderly hardware?

My former roommate agreed to host my web site for a while on his server while I got situated at my new apartment with my wife (also new). He is looking to move soon and wants to retire his web server, so I need to build a server for my own use. I investigated setting up a virtual box on the Mac Mini that I use for development, but I ca...

What's the probability that X *consecutive* bits in an array of N bits is set to 1?

I'm trying to code a simple, sufficiently accurate filter for validating a piece of hardware in an RTL simulation. We're simulating the randomness inherent in a chip's flip-flops, by randomly initializing all the flip-flops in the design to either 0 or 1. This corresponds to the chip's flip-flops getting some random value during power-...

What's inside an ideal developer workstation?

My office is in dire need of new workstations. They've come to me as the "kid who plays games" so I'm pretty in touch with whats new and hot, but not necessarily whats ideal for workstation class systems. We are on a budget so we can't be throwing money at everything (especially in these economic times) but we're running into long delay...

Unable to map serial port when using virtual PC 2007 SP1

I'm writing an application that communicates with the serial port to control a device. The development environment is on a virtualized Windows 2003 R2 machine hosted on a Windows Vista machine. When I try to map the COM ports through virtual PC so they can be use in the virtual machine, I get the following error right after the machine...

Hardware Sizing - Thumb Rules

In many Enterprise System architectures, it becomes imperative to size the hardware according to concurrency & workload requirements. Mostly product vendors will provide their own hardware sizing sheets wherein you just plug in the metrics and it will throw out details of number of servers, RAM required and so on. What I'd like to know ...

How can I use a usb keyboard/mouse combo with a ps2 KVM?

I purchased a wireless Logitech Wave mouse/keyboard combo and want to use it with my old PS2 KVM. I've seen a few converters out there that might work, but the problem is they connect one USB-> one PS2. I need something that will split one USB into two PS2 (keyboard and mouse), as that's what the KVM expects to have plugged in. Help! ...

Hardware Assisted Garbage Collection

I was thinking on ways that functional languages could be more tied directly to their hardware and was wondering about any hardware implementations of garbage collection. This would speed things up significantly as the hardware itself would implicitly handle all collection, rather than the runtime of some environment. Is this what LISP...

What would be the best option, performance wise, between 1 10k rpm disk and 2 7k rpm disks in striped raid

I'm thinking of improving the performance of my development machine, and the next step is the IO subsystem, namely, the hard disks. Assuming consumer grade disks (which removes SCSI and SAS drives) and a reasonable bill (which removes the option of two or more 10k RPM disks), the two options I'm faced are: getting 1 VelociRaptor or equ...

Computer without moving parts, is it possible? What language should it use?

I'm thinking of building a computer without moving parts. Because when they find it, in about 200 years. It will just work. Is it possible? =) What language should that computer use? I hope my grand grand grand son will turn it on. And start to program. (I don't know how I will solve the display part.) ...

Microsoft Intellimouse Scroll Wheel Not Working with Netbeans 6.5 on Vista

I would appreciate any help with this problem, I have spent hours trying to diagnose it myself to no avail and haven't received a single response when posting it to the Netbeans user list and the bugs list. Netbeans is an excellent IDE, and I have loved it since switching over from Eclipse a few months back. I do Java on Unix and Win32...

Internet Explorer Active X Hardware Access

This is quick question, We have a client that wants an active X embedded in a webpage that can have access ( read / write ) to a COM port. With initial tests we are able to list the ports but get an access denied when trying to read or write to them. Is there anyway to bypass this or is it a built in feature of Internet Explorer? The...

What's the difference between a flash drive and an SSD?

Functionally, what's the difference between a USB flash drive and an SSD (aside from their interfaces, because duh)? Lots of nice gooey hardware discussion is totally welcome. ...

Fault (radiation) tolerant soft core?

Hi everybody, I've a question... is there a certification or something that decides if a soft core is fault tolerant or not? and another question...I've seen that LEON3-FT is radiation tolerant only implementd on RTAX Actel FPGA. Is it right? Excuse me but I'm confusing about it becuase somebody speaks about LEON3-FT (fault tolerant) ...

Is RAID 1 portable between different RAID controllers?

I recently had a motherboard die, and used the on board RAID controller to do RAID 1 with two hard drives. I'm wondering if I can take one of the drives and access it normally, in a non-RAID setup. EDIT: It was an Intel D975XBX2 if that helps. ...

Triple Screen Setup (3 same size vs large center)

I'm splurging for my personal system that I've wanted a while so in choices between these for programming and other uses.... (home) 28 in main center monitor (HDMI) with 2 surrounding 19in widescreen 3 seperate 19 or 21 in monitors, no large one in the center, all equal size. What would be ideal? 28 in is huge, seems like might be a ...