Hi Everyone, This has been troubling me for a few years, and was recently exacerbated by the introduction of Windows Vista (driver requirements & UAC restrictions being major factors). There are many different flavours of Windows Vista (compared here), and there are also the alternative options (running Windows Server as a workstation...
Minor version numbers notwithstanding, what OS do you use for your own development machine? Are you forced to use a virtual appliance or server to run any programs that you need? Do you know of any surveys related to this question? ...
I'm using the following code to try to read the results of a df command in Linux using popen. #include <iostream> // file and std I/O functions int main(int argc, char** argv) { FILE* fp; char * buffer; long bufSize; size_t ret_code; fp = popen("df", "r"); if(fp == NULL) { // head off errors reading the results...
Other than for app launch shortcuts, which should only be provided by the O/S, what are the legitimate uses of things like Windows keyboard hooks? It seems to me that we only have problems with things like key loggers because operating systems provide hooks to do things that should not be permitted by anyone under any condition except t...
I recently posted a question about Azure... is it really an OS? I understand the technical details, and I got a lot of fuzzy answers... I really want to know... what do you think is the difference between an OS and a Framework? Just for reference, Azure will be built on top of Hyper-V servers and the virtual machines will be running va...
On Linux, the "top" command shows a detailed but high level overview of your memory usage, showing: Total Memory, Used Memory, Free Memory, Buffer Usage, Cache Usage, Swap size and Swap Usage. My question is, what commands are available to show these memory usage figures in a clear and simple way? Bonus points if they're present in the...
Whenever I list the contents of a directory with a function like readdir, the returned file names also include "." and "..". I have the suspicion that these are just normal links in the file system and therefore indistinguishable from actual files, but I always have to filter them out because they are not actual objects in the directory ...
1a)Are MS Word and MS PowerPoint different processes or threads of a single process? b)How does a spell checker routine (common to both, word and PowerPoint) used? I mean is the code copied 2 times for each of the processes in the main memory, if they are different processes if they are threads. The question is not specific to Windo...
Now I'm sure we're all well aware of the relative merits of Linux vs Windows Desktop. However I've heard much less about the world of embedded development. I'm mainly interested in solutions for industry and am therefore uninterested about the IPhone or Android and more interested in these two OSes. What are the relative trade-offs betw...
I'm trying to get a grasp of what the software mobile world is made of. What are the operating systems or application layers used by Mobile devices nowadays? Not only PDAs/SmartPhones, bu also regular phones. ...
My Java application is saving stuff in 'user.home' but on windows this does not seem to be the correct path to save application information (as a friend told me). An other option is using the preferences api but it's not possible to set up the hsqldb location using the preferences api. Also, I want all files to be available in the same f...
How can I list all the local users configured on a windows machine (Win2000+) using java. I would prefer doing this with ought using any java 2 com bridges, or any other third party library if possible. Preferable some native method to Java. ...
It seems to me that the most common overly ambitious project that programmers (esp. Comp. Sci. grads) try to tackle is building your own operating system. (Trying to create your own programming language + compiler is probably even more common but not nearly as ambitious.) For those (like myself) foolish enough to try: aside from the she...
My computer often produces a "ding" sound, and I can't associate it with anything. Is it possible to programmatically determine the source of the beeps? For example can I hook the sound driver? If so, can you point out some examples or references? ...
I'm trying to get information like OS version, hard disk space, disk space available, and installed RAM on a Linux system in C++. I know I can use system() to run different Linux commands and capture their output (which is what I'm currently doing) but I was wondering if there's a better way? Is there something in the C++ standard libr...
In my Mac OS X Activity monitor it lists each "process" id for each application. It links several processes to a single thread, for instance iTunes and Finder are currently both listed under thread 7. The way I learned about threads and processes would lead me to think that this should be the other way around. I learned that a process ha...
I was reading a review of the new Intel Atom 330, where they noted that Task Manager shows 4 cores - two physical cores, plus two more simulated by Hyperthreading. Suppose you have a program with two threads. Suppose also that these are the only threads doing any work on the PC, everything else is idle. What is the probability that the ...
Opinions: I want to disallow direct invocation of certain scripts, that have functionality accessible from a menu, via Web at the OS level (linux). I was hoping to call a authorize.pl script that checks the session validity, checks user privileges etc. Then it will redirect to the target script. Does this get around permissions? ...
How does operating system know what filesystem a partition is using? In other words, how are FAT16/32, NTFS, ext2/3 etc. distinguished from each other? ...
Which programming language(s) were used to code Windows Vista? ...