I am about to get a new PC from work, and it will include the option to have either Vista Business as the OS, or a downgrade to XP Pro. Aside from a tiny bit of testing, I have never used Vista, but overall I have heard many more bad reports than good regarding Vista. I don't think that hardware will be an issue (Intel Core Duo T9300, 4G...
Microsoft says that Visual Studio 2008 can be installed on any version of Vista (excluding started edition). But I am not sure, if Home Editions cause not problems with debugging, virtual machines, IIS, MS SQL 2008 and all other tools which developers use or with some old tools like Visual Basic 6.0. Seems that Vista Business would be ...
On these questions: Which Vista edition is best for a developer machine? Vista or XP for Dev Machine People are recommending 64 bit, can you explain why? Is it just so you can have more then 3Gb of addressable RAM that 32 bit gives you? And how does Visual Studio benefit from all this extra RAM? I went from 64 bit XP back to 32 bit...
Hi, This is a low-level systems question. I need to mix 32 bit and 16 bit code because I'm trying to return to real-mode from protected mode. As a bit of background information, my code is doing this just after GRUB boots so I don't have any pesky operating system to tell me what I can and can't do. Anyway, I use [BITS 32] and [BITS 1...
I'd like to gain better knowledge of operating system internals. Process management, memory management, and stuff like that. I was thinking of learning by getting to know either linux or BSD kernel. Which one kernel is better for learning purposes? What's the best place to start? Can you recommend any good books? ...
Virtual memory from a computer size perspective is [a way to make the program] think it has a large range of contiguous addresses; but in reality the parts it is currently using are scattered around RAM, and the inactive parts are saved in a disk file. (Wikipedia) I would interpret VM Size in the Windows Task manager as...
I am attempting to choose a Linux, Unix, and/or BSD distribution for development purposes. I want to be able to do things like write shell scripts, develop C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, etc. apps in a *nix environment, and see things from a different perspective. I'm planning on using a Virtual Machine to do all of this. My first stop was ...
X Windows has special processes called Window Managers that manage the layout of windows and decorations like their title bar, control buttons etc. Such processes use an X Windows API to detect events related to windows sizes and positions. Are there any consistent ways for writing such processes for Microsoft Windows or Mac OS/X? I kn...
One thing I've always wanted to do is develop my very own operating system (not necessarily fancy like Linux or Windows, but better than a simple boot loader which I've already done). I'm having a hard time finding resources/guides that take you past writing a simple "Hello World" OS. I know lots of people will probably recommend I l...
I am writing a c program in linux. Commands like execv() require a path in the form of a c string. Is there a command that will return the current path in the form of a c style string? ...
Had an interesting discussion with some colleagues about the best scheduling strategies for realtime tasks, but not everyone had a good understanding of the common or useful scheduling strategies. For your answer, please choose one strategy and go over it in some detail, rather than giving a little info on several strategies. If you ha...
Jeff covered this a while back on his blog in terms of 32 bit Vista. Does the same 32 bit 4 GB memory cap that applies in 32 bit Vista apply to 32 bit Ubuntu? Are there any 32 bit operating systems that have creatively solved this problem? ...
I have a Samurize config that shows a CPU usage graph similar to Task manager. How do I also display the name of the process with the current highest CPU usage percentage? I would like this to be updated, at most, once per second. Samurize can call a command line tool and display it's output on screen, so this could also be an opt...
Let's say, in a perfect world where everything is possible. What features would you like to have in your operating system, IDE, Compiler or computer in general. of course everybody wants reduced boot times and super faaaaaast processors, anything else? I personally really would like to have human language recognition. the question may ...
I have a piece of server-ish software written in Java to run on Windows and OS X. (It is not running on a server, but just a normal user's PC - something like a torrent client.) I would like the software to signal to the OS to keep the machine awake (prevent it from going into sleep mode) while it is active. Of course I don't expect the...
Which OS do you prefer to program on? Client or Server There is a school of though that if you are doing (mostly) web programming (or other server based code), you should use a server OS for your dev machine, since that's closer to the environment where your app will be running. Update: I should add, this is really directed to the Wind...
I am currently in an operating systems class and my teacher spent half of the class period talking about PIDs. She mentioned, as many know, that processes know their parent's ID. My question is this: Does a process's PCB know its child's ID? If so, what is the way to go about it obtaining it? ...
Is there any difference between binary semaphore and mutex or they are essentialy same? ...
How to decide whether to use threads or create seprate process altogether in your application to achieve parallelism. ...
Does Java impose any extra restrictions of its own. Windows (upto Vista) does not allow names to include \ / < > ? * : I know HOW to validate names (a regular expression). I need to validate filenames entered by users. My application does not need to run on any other platform, though, of course, I would prefer to be platform indepen...