Hello! I have some kinda basic question to the boot process of a computer and the part where the bootloader calls the OS. So I know that the BIOS copies the first 512 bytes from a bootable drive into memory and executes the code - so that's the boot block. But how does that small assembler boot bootloader the commands from the OS? Do...
Please forgive my naivette...a very fundamental question: I have a google app engine project that has a cron job that fetches records with date matching the current system date. This cron job triggers at 0:00 (ie, 12:00AM midnight) everyday. The cron job is apparently fetching records corresponding to the previous day. What could be wro...
Vps hosting provides choice of operating system: Cent OS 5 Debian 4.0 Fedora 10 Gentoo Opensuse 10 Ubuntu 8.10 Ubuntu 8.04 Ubuntu 9.04 Which pros and cons for running rails app, software installing, overall feel, etc. do they have, or maybe there are others which are much better to serve rails ...
I have an idea for a new desktop environment that involves a radically different user interface than existing ones, and I want to begin prototyping it. However, I don't want to go through all the trouble of building it from scratch just for the prototype, so I want to build it on top of an existing desktop environment so I can have immed...
What does executable actually contain ? .. Does it contain instructions to processor in the form of Opcode and Operands ? If so why we have different executables for different operating systems ? ...
As I (semi) understand it, all on-screen text in any Windows application is drawn by the same drawtext functionality. It is possible to hook onto this method and view (or even change) every bit of text being drawn to the display. How does OS X put text on the screen? Is there a similar way to hook into this API and view all text being...
When loading programs into memory, what is the difference between load-time dynamic linking and run-time dynamic linking? ...
I'm a student pursuing my post graduate degree. I got some fund to buy books. I want to choose books wisely. I'm interested in internals of things. I'm never satisfied with just knowing how to use something. I also want to know Why? How it works? etc.. I already have: Windows Internals Programing windows - 5th edition Databa...
There is nothing in the way the program uses this data which will cause the program to crash if it reads the old value rather than the new value. It will get the new value at some point. However, I am wondering if reading and writing at the same time from multiple threads can cause problems for the OS? I am yet to see them if it does....
An executable problem like exe does not work on Linux (without wine). When compiling source code compiler produce object code which is specific to a particular cpu architecture. But same application does not work with on an another OS with same CPU. I know code may include instructions to specific to the OS that will prevent executable r...
I have written simple first stage bootloader which displays "Hello world" using interrupt to bios. Now as a next obvious step to write a second stage, but where code for that should exist and how to load it from first stage ? Here is a program for first stage [BITS 16] ;Tells the assembler that its a 16 bit code [ORG 0x7C00] ;Orig...
In my Django application, a user has uploaded a file with a unicode character in the name. When I'm downloading files, I'm calling : os.path.exists(media) to test that the file is there. This, in turn, seems to call st = os.stat(path) Which then blows up with the error : UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'...
I understand Linux ships with a c library, which implements the ISO C functions and system call functions, and that this library is there to be linked against when developing C. However, different c compilers do not necessarily produce linkable code (e.g. one might pad datastructures used in function arguments differently from another). ...
I have a small numerical simulation in C (I had to do it in C to share it with my advisor) but I want to use a "haskell script" like thing to organize the simulation. The program accepts some command line arguments and spits some output I'd like to redirect to a file, so I did something like this: import Control.Monad import System.Pr...
What is the difference between sequential write and random write in case of :- 1)Disk based systems 2)SSD [Flash Device ] based systems When the application writes something and the information/data needs to be modified on the disk then how do we know whether it is a sequential write or a random write.As till this point a write cannot b...
I know the cost of a physical Win32 thread context switch is estimated at between 2-8k cycles. Any estimates on the cost of a process switch? ...
Hi Stackoverflow, What would be the best way in Python to determine whether a directory is writeable for the user executing the script? Since this will likely involve using the os module I should mention I'm running it under a *nix environment. ...
I have been trying to write a simple brute force password cracker in C++ to open an old zip file that I locked a very long time ago. I am trying to call pkunzip from the program. The only way I know to do this is using the system() command. As in system("astring");. The problem is that I need to dump a new password into the string ...
I am writing a program in C++ that launches commands from the DOS operating system using the system() command. So far so good I think. But how can I turn off the screen updating in the console window that pops up so I can't see the thousands of messages that are resulting. Or, alternatively, how can I dump those messages in some oth...
While choosing target platform for my PDA application, I have options of WM5.0 pocket PC and WM5.0 Smartphone. Which one I am supposed to choose if the application will run on HP 6965 iPAQ and Motorola MC35? Many thanks. ...