I'm trying to figure out the best lower-budget home office development hardware setup. My laptop is aging. My latest idea is that I would like a very powerful desktop paired with a less-powerful laptop. The idea being that the desktop would do the heavy lifting while the laptop would allow me to work untethered (but within range of the ...
There is a strong case out there for companies who are experiencing scaling problems with their current architecture to simply spend $$$ on cutting edge hardware to achieve the performance and scale they require. In most cases I have experienced and read about, the business case for software re-architecture never stacks up against the b...
I've always wanted to have a better understanding of what is happening at the hardware level. As a practical level, anything after compile equals 'magic' and I'd like to remedy that. I'd like to investigate building circuits and then moving up to assembly programming on basic chip sets, both for my own sake and also for my son's, as som...
What methods to you use to determine what kind of hardware you need for a server? I often find its very hard to predict what kind of hardware you will need for a web based application with a database. Do you have any good methods or recommendations on how to best pick hardware to use? ...
We are working with some new Cutting Tools that can have it's hardware parameters altered through the serial port instead of just a control panel. When the hardware parameters are altered the hardware will take a few seconds to reconfigure itself and then signal that it is ready to be used. Our setup before this involved the operator ...
Hey! A friend of mine gave me a motherboard which already had a p4 on it and also gave me a psu. The problem is he gave me the motherboard in a box that is not of that motherboard. The box is of the board PM8PM-V. I found the manual for this board and the layout of this board has nothing to do with the layout of the board I have here. ...
For HP 2133 Mini: 1.2 Ghz CPU 1 GB RAM Windows XP 5400 RPM HDD I'm planning to install Visual Studio 2005 (assuming it's faster than 2008). I've seen http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8440/visual-studio-optimizations question so I'll take those into the account. But do you think Visual Studio 2005 is going to work in an acceptable ...
I've written a script to backup my server's HD every night. At the end of the script, I sync, wait a couple of minutes, sync and then I issue sg_start --stop to stop the device. The idea is to extend the lifetime of the device by switching the HD off after ten minutes of incremental backup (desktop disks will survive several thousand on/...
I want to get the size and free space of a phone's memory card via USB connection from a PC. I use PC suite connection. This isn't a mobile application; it's a desktop application. All I do is to open a connection between the application and the mobile, then copy the required files to a certain folder in the MMC. Now I need to get t...
Given that: SSD’s are now [high end] mainstream Two+ cores are not hard to come across 24+ Inch monitors are plentiful Dual Video Outputs are the norm. 64-Bit OS’s complement very cheap memory Can I ask two questions to hardware enthused developers [not the gamers!] What high-end hardware item could you not develop without - [what ...
Will a MacBook Air have enough horsepower for occasional development in Ruby? Objective C? Cocoa? Are there any other major limitations with doing this? Notes: I hook it up to a large Monitor. I would be hoping to use standard mainstream Mac IDEs. I know a MacBook or Pro would be more appropriate but they are simply not as cool. This...
I am trying to put a requirement together for a new environment to consist of TeamCity running of Sql Server, a couple of build agents (for now) and an SVN repository. There are 6 developers and there will be 5 active solutions partaking in the CI process for now which will obviously grow over time. None of the solutions take >10 minut...
I've been getting a high end dell xps laptop or desktop every 12-16 months for the last 8 years. I'm really satisfied with the actual hardware and price, but I'm getting very annoyed by their warranty calls and their offshore support. I'm seeing interesting things about high end apples, but I can't stand the elitist attitude and comp...
This is a complex question, please consider carefully before answering. Consider this situation. Two threads (a reader and a writer) access a single global int. Is this safe? Normally, I would respond without thought, yes! However, it seems to me that Herb Sutter doesn't think so. In his articles on effective concurrency he discuss...
In the ears of working in multiple teams, I've met multiple infrastructure managers that instituted a policy of weekly server reboots. As a developer, I was always against the policy - it seems that this is a hack to work around software bugs and hardware instabilities, instead of correcting them. What are the people's opinions, positiv...
I'm looking to build a media PC attached to the big screen (65"), primarily for Boxee, playing movies, music, and photos, and for occasional web serving / email. Having it act as a DVR for over-the-air HDTV would be a big plus as well. I'm pretty tempted by the Atom based MSI Wind PC as used in this hackintosh. Seems a nice little PC, a...
After using Windows for some time, any computer can begin to suffer from "Slow Computer Syndrome", or "winrot", so I am interested to hear what you are doing to prevent this. I am not looking for these answers: Reinstalling Windows Upgrading the hardware I am, however, looking for your experience on what steps you can recommend that...
What is the best strategy in the hardware configuration of a SQL server machine? To my knowledge you set it up the following: RAID 1 (2 disks) --> OS + SQL Server installation RAID 1 (2 disks) --> SQL Server Logs RAID 5 (4 disks) --> SQL Server databases What have you experienced? Is there a better way to do it? ...
Hi, I'm working on an application that's due to launch soon and could do with some advice on how to go about choosing servers of the appropriate configuration so everything performs well. The app is .NET 3.5, using SQL express edition for the DB. We currently have one low spec server being used as a staging environment for testing, it'...
How many monitors improve programming speed? Do you have any experience with programming using 1,2,3,4... monitors? Which configurations increase work speed and are worth trying out? Is it worth using 90 degrees rotated screens? ...