I have a serial hardware device that I'd like to share with multiple applications, that may reside on different machines within or spanning multiple networks. A key requirement is that the system must support bi-directional communication, such that clients/serial device can exist behind firewalls and/or on different networks and still t...
What was your first home computer? The one that made you "fall in love" with programming. There are 300+ entries, many (most?) of which are duplicates. As with all Stack Overflow poll type Q&As, please make certain your answer is NOT listed already before adding a new answer - searching doesn't always find it (model naming variation...
I'm currently facing a hardware HD problem. Once of my HDs has semi-died. It works, kind of, data is being read, but every now and then it decides to not respond for a while. Windows hangs for a few seconds, and sometimes I get an event in my event log saying that the device didn't respond fast enough, or something to that effect. Now ...
I haven't been able to find any documentation on hardware access via the iPhone SDK so far. I'd like to be able to send signals via the dock connector to an external hardware device but haven't seen any evidence that this is accessible via the SDK (not interested in possibilities on jailbroken iPhones). Anyone have any pointers to docs ...
I've been in the computer industry for a long time ... and one of the ways I minimize my mid-life crisis is to collect old computers and software! I cut my programming and gaming teeth on these vintage computers. I've managed to acquire some of the following computers: Commodore Pet, Commodore VIC 20, Commodore 64, Atari 800, Compaq...
For someone wanting to learn the rudiments of embedded programming, what are some simple projects they could tackle? We're talking about someone that does know the basics of electronic circuitry (resistors, capacitors, digital ICs, etc...) and can do basic soldering. An electronics hobbyist that is looking to get into embedded programmi...
I am presently running several websites and a mail server from my home network. I have a business DSL account with 8 public IP addresses (1 by itself, and 7 in a block). To handle routing/firewall/gateway, I am presently using RRAS, DNS, & DHCP from Windows 2003 running on a ancient (circa 2001) PC -- which I suspect is going to fail a...
Hello, does any one know how to get the current motherboard, processor or HD temperature statistics? In GNU/Linux, I know I could use something like hddtemp or sensord to get the info, and then parse it... but in Windows: How can I do this? And, Can it be done with with C# or Java or any other hight level programming language? Thanks! ...
I've recently purchased an IBM Thinkpad that came with a fingerprint scanner. That got me thinking: are fingerprint scanners a good way to protect your code i.e. if someone takes your laptop or goes on your laptop while you're away, would they still be able to get in? The question also applies for other biometrics techniques that the ne...
I asked a somewhat related question but I want it to make it more concrete and 'programming' oriented, so here it goes: Does any body know, if there is a .NET, JAVA or any other Framework, library, .jar file or what ever: to access S.M.A.R.T. Statistics? Thanks! ...
In next weeks probably I will have some little FPGA to play with. I have a programmer background (C, C++, Java mostly) and some (very) limited experience in electronics. What are the best tools to know if you want to develop on FPGAs? What are the best languages to study? (what HW description languages?) Have you some examples of lit...
I would like to check which type of RAM my computer uses before I order an upgrade. I'm fairly sure its DDR2 but I would like to double check this. Is there any way to check this in Windows XP without opening the case up and looking? EDIT * The content police seem to have gotten the wrong end of the stick, I was looking for a piece ...
In C# how do you detect is a specific drive is a Hard Drive, Network Drive, CDRom, or floppy? ...
I have a reasonably modern developer desktop (E6600, ASUS PN5-E, 2GB RAM, 350GB SATA2, Vista Ultimate x32), but I'd like to squeeze some more out of it. I am wondering what the best bang-for-bucks hardware upgrade would be. If I limit my budget to £150GBP (~$300USD), what would people say would give me the best performance increase w...
Hi, the new keyboard from Microsoft, Sidewinder x6 can record in game macro. I was woundering if it could be used in Visual Studio (record key in application too)? (This could be very useful to press 1 key instead of Ctrl+M,M to Toggle Outline.) ...
I want to be able to specify the file name stem for the log file in a Specman test. I need to hard-code the main *.elog filename so that I don't get variance between tests and confuse the post-processing scripts. Is there a constraint or command line I can pass into Specman? ...
I want to dabble in the design of hardware and protocols, specifically for wireless mesh networking. Is there a software-based alternative to getting an FPGA setup and writing code for it? Are there any tools well-suited for coding/designing the protocol(s) for such a device? Clarification: I'm looking for free and preferably open sourc...
We have an SQL 2005 database backend for our website, currently about 10GB in size. There are a lot more reads than writes, though I don't have the exact statistics. We're upgrading our database server and I was thinking of getting 4 disks and setting them up in two RAID 1 arrays - one for the data files and the other for the OS and log...
I'm planning to build a USB device that has buttons that some software needs to respond to, and indicators that the software needs to control. I'm new to USB, so I'm looking for any pointers that will get me started. ...
I've got a machine I'm going to be using for development, and it has two 7200 RPM 160 GB SATA HDs in it. The information I've found on the net so far seems to be a bit conflicted about which things (OS, Swap files, Programs, Solution/Source code/Other data) I should be installing on how many partitions on which drives to get the most be...