Hello all, I am a Computer Engineer, fresh off graduation, and I would like to educate myself on a broad range of technological fields and aspects. I am the kind of person who is easily distracted while reading from a screen, and so I would like to ask fellow daniweb members about the best books for computer related topics. I consider my...
It struck me the other day that I know nearly nothing about the hardware I expect my software to run on. I've been a dev for around 5 years but I haven't looked into hardware theory/design since i left University. I don't even build my own machines anymore because, being brutally honest, I'd rather pay the extra few bucks and let the C...
How to know the minimum system requirement for a .NET application? say, what should be the system configuration to run the application? How to provide the minimum system configuration, required to run the aplication? RAM ?, Processor ? and all. Application uses dotNetFramework3.5 and DirectX9 made in C#. Is it all about trial and erro...
I am looking for a hardware, which must run about 256 computationally intensive real-time concurrent tasks in 24 hour mode (one multi-threaded C application). Each task takes about 40-50 MFLOPs, so all tasks require about 10 GFLOPs. CPU-RAM speed is insignificant. All tasks must be managed by a Linux Kernel (32 bit, with SMP). I am look...
Is it possible to turn on/off Scroll Lock light by software instructions like outb or something else? And if the answer is yes, can we restrict the use of these instructions so that they are only allowed in ring-0? ...
Has anyone tried to integrate check scanners with .NET applications? If you have, please help me get them to work. Thank you. ...
Hello, we are thinking about buying and setting up a new PC to use as a nightly build PC. We are planning to install Visual C++ 2005/2008, SVN etc. However we need to compile our app: for 32 and 64 bit on 2 different linux distros so we think we can setup a Windows Xp/7 and use VMWare to run linuxes. But how to build for 32 and 64 ...
Hi everybody, I have a small question: For example I'm using System.IO.File.Copy() method from .NET Framework. This method is a managed wrapper for CopyFile() function from WinAPI. But how CopyFile function works? It is interacts with HDD's firmware or maybe some other operations are performed through Assembler or maybe something other....
In an application which is GPU bound, I am wondering at what point the CPU will wait on the GPU to complete rendering. Is it different between DirectX and OpenGL? Running an example similar to below, obviously the CPU doesn't run away - and looking in task manager, CPU usage (If it were a single core machine) would be below 100%. While...
Hi, What happens to an open file handler on Linux if the pointed file meanwhile gets: Moved away -> Does the file handler stays valid? Deleted -> Does this lead to an EBADF, indicating an invalid file handler? Replaced by a new file -> Does the file handler pointing to this new file? Replace by a hard link to a new file -> Does my fil...
Hi, I am willing to build a prototype of network appliance. This appliance is suppose to transparently manipulate Ethernet packets. It suppose to have two network interface cards having one card connected to the outside leg (i.e. eth0) and the other to the inside leg (i.e. eth1). In a typical network layout as in the attached image, i...
I've two phones, the HTC Magic and since today also the Motorola Milestone. While the Magic works perfectly, I'm not able to access the Milestone via USB (adb devices). Here are my log outputs and settings for both: HTC Magic lsusb: Bus 001 Device 009: ID 0bb4:0c02 High Tech Computer Corp. /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules: SUBS...
I have a library written in C and I have 2 applications written in C++ and C. This library is a communication library, so one of the API calls looks like this: int source_send( source_t* source, const char* data ); In the C app the code does something like this: source_t* source = source_create(); for( int i = 0; i < count; ++i ) ...
Hi I know there are plenty of good software "programmer's" calculator, but I often find myself in places where access to my favorite soft calculator is not possible. Where can I find real (ie: hardware) programmer's calculators? I already did a google but the vast majority of results are of software or calculators that are no longer be...
I am often asked to perform sizing and capacity planning for our clients. When our clients buy our products (basically J2EE web applications), they often ask what hardware they will need to run those products. Our recommendations often result in high-cost hardware acquisitions. So far, the best heuristics I developed is to compare the u...
I need to interface with a symbol ppt88xx's bar code scanner using .NET CF. Any ideas? ...
Two types of problems I want to talk about: 1) Say you wrote a program you want to encrypt for copyright purposes (eg: denying unlicensed user from reading a certain file, or disabling certain features of the program), but most software-based encryption can be broken by hackers (just look at the amount of programs available to HACK prog...
My friend has a company that sells hardware products (like a finger print reader) to customers. In each of their machine, they embed an "encryption chip", which is like a dongle (but embedded into their product, not a usb stick): the software on machine queries certain information from the chip through encryption (both the software and d...
Hi there, My cohorts and I at the Rockbox project have been reading with interest the announcement at the recent CES of the new SDXC standard for Secure Digital storage, but have been left a little mystified as to the technical differences between the SDHC standard and the new SDXC one. As we understand it, there is no technical limita...
Suppose, I wanted to develop stack overflow website. How do I estimate the amount of commodity hardware required to support this website assuming 1 million requests per day. Are there any case studies that explains the performance improvements possible in this situation? I know I/O bottleneck is the major bottleneck in most systems. Wha...