What's the most exotic, coolest, unique, or interesting machine you've worked on? Most of us work on machines with x86 architectures using some Windows or Linux variant. I'm sure there are those of you out there who are working on or have worked on machines with experimental architecures, or operating systems. Maybe you worked on a ma...
I am trying to find out which Hypervisor will allow me to grant access to specialized PCI cards (such as a telephony card) to a virtual machine. So far I have tried out VMWare ESXi server and it doesn't seem to allow me to do this. I have heard that Microsoft Virtual Server does allow this, but I haven't been able to find any supporting ...
Hi, I have a plain C code for a Image codec.My goal is to develop a efficient C model which will be taken and realized in Hardware using Verilog or some such Hardware description language. What i am trying to find out is: 1.) What modifications need to be done in exisitng C code structures to make it hardware efficient 2.)Do data st...
I have a project where I have to interact with two different devices that supply data via COM over USB. The client is telling me that this can be done easily with HyperTerminal but I am unfamiliar with it. I am coding with .NET 2.0 (but can use 3.5 if necessary). What would be the easiest/quickest way to obtain the data from these hardw...
Hey guys, I'm a Computer Science student and have about a year left to graduate. My current computer is getting a little crummy and I'm looking to build my next system. My question, is there certain things that I should include to help me with my software engineering needs? Such as a quad-core with slower ghz compared to a faster dual...
I'm working with some number crunching code that, by its nature, is floating-point intensive and and just plain slow. It's research code, so it can be tailored to one architecture, and is running on a Core 2 Quad box. My understanding is that, for the Pentium 4/Netburst architecture, Intel severely stripped down the x87 FPU, and adopte...
I am developing a product with heavy 3D graphics computations, to a large extent closest point and range searches. Some hardware optimization would be useful. While I know little about this, my boss (who has no software experience) advocates FPGA (because it can be tailored), while our junior developer advocates GPGPU with CUDA, because ...
I'm looking for a very specific USB device for debugging systems that may use USB but not with a regular computer (proprietary hardware). I want a device that has a USB host controller and two USB device connections. The device to be debugged is connected to the USB host controller and one of the device connections is connected to anothe...
I am having real trouble trying to get decent answers to my questions from VPS and dedicated hosting provider's sales people. I have a fairly simple set of requirements - how do I select a server spec / package and be confident that I have got it about right? Are there metrics to use - number of Http requests per minute for example? are ...
I hope that this is still considered programming-related, although it seems to be a sole hardware question, yet on the other hand it is actually important when doing graphics programming. Essentially, I am trying to get a bit into game development, which naturally also includes graphics (shaders etc.). I know that in my workstation, I w...
I'd like to study the effects my software has on different OS environments. I've determined the best way to analyze the differences involves storing the entire hard drive image as soon as the software is finished executing. What's a painless system (including both the hardware and software) that will allow me to quickly hookup desktop ...
I need some pointers on how to detect unknown hardware using .NET and C++/C#. I'm looking for the technique to use under NET to do this. What I basically want is to identify the PCIID/USBID and so on for all the hardware in the machine. Of course I also need this for the hardware that doesn't yet has a driver installed. I believe this ...
Following on from my earlier question, I have today ordered a 300GB VelociRaptor and 8GB of RAM for my home development rig (ASUS P5N-E with an E6600 chip). I want it to be fast in Visual Studio and flexible as well. I looking at either installing ESXi and then developing in Vista64 running on top of that, or I can install Vista64 wi...
I'm thinking about exploring the idea of having our client software run as a service on a high port and listen for simple http GET requests from 127.0.0.1. The theory is that I would be able to access this service via js from a web page that is served from my site. 1) User installs client software that installs itself as a service and ...
One of the more interesting things I've run into lately is the art and science of laying out chip floorplan and determining packaging for the silicon. I would like to read some materials on the subject for the "Interested Software Guy". Does anyone have any recommendations (Website or book, so long as it is a good quality)? ...
When configuring a database server with mechanical drives, mirroring hard drives or using RAID5 for redundancy in case of drive failure is the norm. Is this redundancy also required when using solid state disks or is the "mechanical" reliability of SSDs (write fatigue not withstanding) such that drive redundancy is unnecessary? This is o...
I want to get into multi core programming (not language specific) and wondered what hardware could be recommended for exploring this field. My aim is to upgrade my existing desktop. ...
I am stuck on this problem which I am studying for an exam tomorrow. (I understand the concept of virtual vs. physical addresses, page frames, address bus, etc.) If you're using 4K pages with 128K of RAM and a 32 bit address bus, how large could a virtual address be? How many regular page frames could you have? EDIT: I believe the ans...
I got interested in hardware programming lately and I was wondering what would be the best choice for me as an electronics amateur. I'm not looking for low-level programming in assembler and creating circuit boards. Rather I would like something with API for high-level languages, preferably C# and pre-made components like USB interface ...
Is it possible (with an adapter, say) to convert a dual-link DVI port on a video card/laptop to two single-link DVI ports, so that two separate monitors can be plugged in and controlled by an operating system? ...